So the premiere was last night. Two premieres, actually—the real one, in New York and the "very special" one at the 5th Avenue, where the Hairspray musical hatched and squawked and gorged itself on the blood of local virgins before flying off to Broadway.

A few notes:

• There was an inadvertently hilarious "very special video message" from the musical cast (attending the NYC premiere, of course) to all us "very special" schlubs stuck in Seattle. Their eyes wandered around, searching for the camera, reading awkwardly from the teleprompter, culminating in one of the stars reading (actually having to read), "enjoy the movie, Seattle!" You could smell their itch to get the fuck out of their "very special" video hole and make for the premiere, with its hors d'oevres and champagne. It made me feel a little guilty, like I was some pesky kid brother keeping them from having their fun.

• There was also a kind-of-sad, kind-of-hilarious big-hair contest with little kids, old ladies (go Angie from Issaquah!), drag queens, and one irrepressible gal of size who obviously won the audience applause vote. And when 5th Ave artistic director David Armstrong mistakenly awarded first prize to a drag-queen trio (who were fine, but really—that gal obviously won), the crowd turned ugly, booing and hissing, emboldening the gal of size to force her way between the drag queens and shout "it should be me!" It was tacky. It was brash. And it was perfect since this whole "very special" evening was an homage to the Marquis de Tacky.

• Hm? The movie? It's fine, it goes down easy, except John Travolta. Watching him swim around in his drag fat suit was embarrassing. But greater minds than mine (like David Schmader's) will be reviewing Hairspray in this upcoming issue.

• As for Travolta's Scientologism ("we cure gays!") and the gayness of the movie and alleged "gay boycott"—even though the Marquis de Tacky himself defended Travolta in the New York Times ("If he were homophobic, he’d have had a heart attack on the set”), the movie ties itself in knots to prevent Travolta and husband Christopher Walken from kissing. They peck on the cheek, they slap each other on the ass, they have an extended song and dance about their undying love, but (weirdly, almost ostentatiously) they never kiss.

Which, in a movie with flashers, charged interracial make-out scenes, and a bushel of double entendres, seems odd. Especially when the ostentatious kisslessness involves a Scientologist in drag who doth protest too much:

"There is nothing gay in this movie,” Travolta told the London Times on-line. “I’m not playing a gay man.”

(You are, John. You're playing Harvey Fierstein's interpretation of Divine's character. Meaning you're playing a woman via two gay men. It couldn't be any gayer.)

Anyway: Very Special!

A few months ago, Aqua Art Miami announced it will be doubling its franchise. Now we know the details.

The original Aqua Art Miami, invented two years ago by Seattle gallerists and artists Jaq Chartier and Dirk Park, is still happening at its usual location--the charming Aqua Hotel in South Beach, where the courtyard hot tub gets packed with artists at night.

But in addition to Aqua Art Miami, across the water from it, will be Aqua Wynwood. Aqua has taken a five-year lease on a 28,000-square-foot warehouse just south of the Rubell Collection at 42 N.E. 25th St. In addition to the 44 galleries that will show art at the hotel, the warehouse has booths for about 45 galleries, and the booths range in size from 200 square feet to 850 square feet.

Park says the largest booths, designed to give galleries more room to show their art, are larger than any other spaces in Miami during the December art-fair crush, except for the booths at the mother of them all, Art Basel Miami Beach held at the city's convention center.

Aqua Wynwood provides an upscale option (the price, at 40 dollars per square foot, is much higher than at the hotel) for galleries that don't want to show in the cramped and hot hotel rooms.

Because Aqua has the lease on the warehouse year-round and not just in December, it can control the layout of the booths and their design. The walls will be sheetrock, not temporary. Most galleries will have four walls instead of only three. Dark video spaces are possible. The booths of Aqua Wynwood will be "comparable to a programmable gallery space anywhere," Park says.

A 5,000-square-foot parking lot will be transformed into a courtyard with a bar and cafe. The chief design concept for the whole project? Comfort, Park says.

Aqua Wynwood, which is invitation-only, is half-booked, Park said. "We're not trying to press the sales on this thing," he says. "We want people to look at their options and make a decision."

Originally, he was concerned that the hotel fair would lose its better galleries to Aqua Wynwood, but "the hotel has its advocates," he says. It's also more affordable. "Galleries that we honestly expected to move on over to the booth fair have said, 'Nope, I want one more year at the hotel.'"

Seattle galleries remaining at the hotel are Howard House, Platform Gallery, Roq La Rue, and G. Gibson Gallery.

Moving to Aqua Wynwood are Greg Kucera Gallery, James Harris Gallery, and Lawrimore Project.

Expect announcements in the weeks to come if Aqua Wynwood can score any major galleries, or steal any away from the more established secondary fairs NADA and Pulse.

According to IMDb, Chewbacca speaks in "a combination of several animals, including bears, badgers, walruses, tigers and camels."
Chewbacca frustrates us. He has one foot in the human world and another foot in the animal kingdom. The hairy thing can think, reason, fly a space ship, but it makes noises like a dumb animal. The thinking thing can not express itself. The thoughts in its human mind have no way of becoming words in its animal mouth. What for it starts as an idea ends as a groan, a grunt, a growl. Han Solo can understand these animal sounds, but not as words. He feels what Chewbacca is saying. He feels Chewie's meaning in the way the owner of a dog feels the meaning of his/her dog's bark.

The Nigerian novelist Achebe once described the relationship between the colonizer and the colonial subject as identical to the one that exists between a horse rider and his horse: the horse rider talks to its horse with no expectation of the horse talking back to him. The relationship between Han Solo and Chewbecca is not as severe as the colonial one, but it's certainly not the ideal democratic relationship. Without free speech there can be no real freedom. The one that speaks will always have power over the one that can not speak.

In sum, Chewbacca is the ideal slave. It has the capacity to do human work, and yet lacks the essential democratic tool--language. Without speech it will always be a beast of burden.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In his final interview, given to the French newspaper Le Monde in the spring of 2004, Jacques Derrida spoke of death and writing: "I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: It is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life." He worried that everything he wrote would simply disappear after he was gone.

If only Derrida had experienced the brief life of a blog post.

I blog, I go away, I die: It is impossible to escape this structure in our post-newspaper, post-book age.

True, there's more death in a blog than in a book, but it still has its beauty: Blogging is like writing on running water.

^{White Girl by Rashid Johnson (2007)}

Rashid Johnson's nude at James Harris Gallery this month (review coming up in this week's edition) is called White Girl, which in itself is a pretty terrific art-historical joke.

But she reverses tradition in another way that's so obvious, you can overlook it.

These are the most famous and influential reclining nudes in art history.

^{Sleeping Venus by Giorgione (ca. 1507)}

^{Venus of Urbino by Titian (ca. 1538)}

^{Grand Odalisque by Ingres (1814)}

^{Olympia by Manet (1863)}

^{Blue Reclining Nude by Matisse (ca. 1928)}

Here's the exception at that level of fame, but the mirror device turns her around in your mind anyway:

^{The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez (1647-51)}

Last Thursday, I was invited to take part in a conversation on KUOW about art and politics. The same day, The Art Newspaper reported a story called "Can US museums help win the war on terror?" (thank you, ArtsJournal). It's about a new program from the US State Department (in conjunction with the American Association of Museum) that will fund museums that promote US foreign policy.

Literary critic Terry Eagleton makes this case:

The knighting of Salman Rushdie is the establishment's reward for a man who moved from being a remorseless satirist of the west to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. David Hare caved in to the blandishments of Buckingham Palace some years ago, moving from radical to reformist. Christopher Hitchens, who looked set to become the George Orwell de nos jours, is likely to be remembered as our Evelyn Waugh, having thrown in his lot with Washington's neocons. Martin Amis has written of the need to prevent Muslims travelling and to strip-search people "who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan". Deportation, he considers, may be essential further down the road. The uniqueness of the situation is worth underlining.

One British writer who has not crumbled is Jonathan Raban. His novel Surveillance, which received mixed reviews, continued the fight against control society. In fact, the weak reviews and Raban's strong political position must not be separated.

Jewelery designed by Oumou:

In her we see dialectics at a standstill--the absolute. She is the point at which the future reaches what was lost, Eden. In all technology is this promise of a return: not of Jesus but of Eve.

There has been speculation for weeks whether Annex Theatre was going to break off their partnership with Capitol Hill Arts Center.

Word came down this weekend: They are, and they're moving into the old Northwest Actors Studio space.

So: Annex is in NWAS, People's Republic of Komedy moved to Chop Suey, and Blacklight, the goth dance night, has disappeared in a poof of pancake makeup and bat fur. Or something.

Pure Cirkus was another CHAC partner that left in a huff. (Pure is most famous for hanging themselves from meat hooks.) From the column I linked to at the top of the post:

Other performers who've worked with CHAC, like Stephen Hando of Printers Devil Theatre and Xavier Frost of Pure Cirkus, say, respectively, that communication at CHAC "isn't great" and "sucks."

Weirdly, Pure Cirkus just sent us a press release hyping their new show at CHAC. So they're back. But everybody else is leaving.

It's all very confusing.

Stranger freelancer Michael Atkinson has a new blog, and it, like he, is awesome. True to the boys' school rebellion referenced in the title, it's very rabble-rousey. Come for the erudite film talk, stay for the "imperative beheading of Dick Cheney": zeroforconduct.com.

And in an extra-long On Screen this week: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (hurried and sweaty, but almost saved by the fluffy pink genius of Imelda Staunton--if you haven't seen Vera Drake yet, swing by the video store on your way to the theater)...

.... plus Rescue Dawn (actually, this time, skip the theater altogether--go directly to Scarecrow and pick up Little Dieter Needs to Fly), Joshua (a creepy kid movie done right; for the original, see The Bad Seed), Introducing the Dwights (Brenda Blethyn may not be quite the equal of Imelda Staunton, but she comes damn close; Secrets and Lies is your homework assignment), The Long Goodbye (awesome, naturally; insert your favorite Altman here), Broken English (skip it; for a more interesting take on painful privilege, see Sofia Coppola, or re-live the Parker Posey glory days (I know, I know) with Party Girl), Brooklyn Rules (fuhgeddaboudit; proceed directly to The Sopranos), and Manufactured Landscapes (it's awesome, go! and watch Our Daily Bread, Let It Come Down, and The True Meaning of Pictures).

And in web-only content this week: An interview with the erudite Jennifer Baichwal, director of Manufactured Landscapes; and another with a documentarian-turned-narrative filmmaker, George Ratliff of Joshua.

And finally, Film Shorts claims such delights as L'Iceberg, Black Cat, White Cat, Infra-Man, Walking to Werner, and the retrospective The Films of Barbara Ireland. Find all your movie times needs at Get Out.

From Eric F, the ID of the Kringen:

hannon Kringen is the Goddess Kring, a public access channel feature of the 90s (and maybe still today?)

She's an insane somewhat zaftig hippie who talked about herself while staring into the camera, then took off her clothes and danced. She signed up for every open slot on the channel's schedule, so she was on all the time.

And from Spencer Moody, a detail from the painting of said Goddess:

From Wired: The Etch-A-Sketch went on sale.

Yesterday I spent running from one gallery to another, finding.

12:30 pm.

Francine Seders Gallery: Print Invitational

Group show, 11 artists, prints everywhere.
Surprise find: Anna McKee, an eloquent urban romantic in the tradition of pictorialist photography. Listen to McKee, Bonnie Lebesch, and Emily Gherard talk at the gallery Tuesday night (the 17th) from 6-8 pm.

These are by McKee (I love the filmic nostalgia of the top half of the second one):

And this, by Emily Gherard, is like a goth representation of Lead Pencil Studio's Maryhill Double.

1:30 pm.

OKOK Gallery: Installation underway on Gregory Euclide's I Have Been Remembering: Half Lives & Half Truths

At one point yesterday, there was a full vodka bottle and a hypodermic needle in the gallery's front window. All for art, man. Euclide used the vodka bottle to collect water at Puget Sound, and he was using the needle to inject single bubble-wrap bubbles with that water--and with tap water and puddle water. The bubbles are mounted on the window first in rows, then injected from the top.

OKOK has a great space--about 1,800 square feet--and because of it and thanks to the imagination of its owners, Charlie and Amanda Kitchings, this is the first time that Euclide, a Minneapolis artist, has taken over an entire gallery to make an installation. For it, the painter cut out tiny, one-inch-diameter circles of paper, painted tiny imaginary landscapes on them, and then adhered a bubble-wrap bubble to each one, so they're seen through the bubble. Seven hundred of those tiny paintings are lined up in parallel rows on the walls that run in rivulets onto the floor. So at the opening Saturday night from 6-10 pm, you'll have to watch where you step.

In addition to those, Euclide made an installation that's basically a storm of paper. On one long sheet, he made a painting of a 360-degree view from the gallery's door (sent to him in photographs). As he often does, he washed the painting with water after painting it, so it's mostly an aftereffect of itself. The paper is cut into squares; a pile of them on the floor are backed with stamp adhesive. The artist wants people to take them and attach them all over the city.

Since the show doesn't open until Saturday, there aren't images of it yet, but I'm going to attach the invite image so you get a sense of what the tiny bubble paintings are like. They're for sale individually, and every time one is sold, a marker with the date will go up in its place, so the unspecific little landscapes will be replaced by the chronological facts of their disappearance, changing the installation with time.

Euclide's traditional larger paintings are up, too. Here's a sense of his painting sensibility from an earlier installation:

A detail from that:

The opening Saturday will include a sound component by Son of Rose. And in the future, OKOK is doing some cool stuff, including chefs working with artists on pre-opening night meals. Stay tuned to this gallery (showing five contemporary artists on portraiture in August).

3 pm.

Crawl Space Gallery: Diana Falchuk: Sweet Remains

Diana Falchuck (she of the I Love the USPS mailboxes project) works with what she calls "dead food."

She goes to the grocery store, buys food, and lives with it for months, drying it and experimenting with it to create sculptures that have something in common both with Justin Gibbens's adorable-scientific drawings of affable mutants and Jim Rittimann's gory-gorgeous reanimated insects. (She also makes imaginative drawings that bring to mind Susan Robb, but they're on mylar and hard to reproduce.)

Falchuk is better known for her work postering utility poles and affectionately washing mailboxes, but she has been semi-secretly working with "dead food" for years in her apartment. It's no wonder the sculptures feel so intimate, even loved.

This weekend is your last chance to see the show; it's open noon to 5 Saturday and Sunday.

(lemon, moss, and pink bumps from the bottoms of slippers)

(carrot and pins)

(sewn plum, salt)

4:20 pm.

The Anne Bonny (named after the lady pirate): The Theme is No Theme

Spencer Moody's new store for art, home accoutrements, and dead people's furniture is terrific. (Please don't buy the golden chair before this weekend so I can still pick it up.) Upstairs is the gallery.

The standout in the current group show is a giant pink painting. Before I look at it, I'm drawn to the handwritten note on the pink table on the floor. It says:

Spencer, Here is a paintio painting of Shannon Kringen. It is called "A Skinny Shannon Kringen with an Ice Cream Cone." I can't imagine that anyone will buy it, really I jo just hope she sees it. Price it however you want, if you do sell it, send me enough money for a pizza. Oh, here are some books as well. I made them today, I have terrible allergies & a head cold. Take care, Derek Erdman.

Aww, he just wants her to see it. How sweet and romantic, like when Eddie Argos says he wants a bus full of schoolchildren to sing to Emily Kane--wait, this woman is hideous, all hairy and pig-faced and slack-jawed, wielding a vanilla waffle cone like a club.

Sadly, there's no image available of her. (I took a phone picture of her, but I'm just lame enough that I don't know how to transfer.) You'll just have to go and see her yourself; you really should.

Kringen, what'd you do to this guy?

6 pm.

Quick stop at Platform Gallery, Ross Sawyers

Sawyers makes large-scale photographs of architectural models he builds. (It's a not-uncommon conceit mastered by James Casabere.) Sawyers is fresh out of grad school and still figuring things out, including how to mount his work (this dry board-mounted tactic seems to flatten them). I was drawn to this diptych:

Coming up at Platform: Scott Fife with all new work in September; in October, A Spectral Glimpse, a group show with Platform's first guest curator, the extraordinarily capable Jim O'Donnell.

6:15 pm.

James Harris Gallery: Rashid Johnson: Dark Matters

I'm writing about this one for next week, so I'll be quiet here and just give you this link and this image.

The other day, a friend gave me a copy of The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcom which, I'm ashamed to admit, I hadn't read before. "Read the first sentence," he said, "and tell me you don't want to keep reading."

The first sentence goes like this:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

It gave me a warm, wistful feeling, the exact same feeling I got this first time I read this passage in Didion's introduction to Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

I don't know why, but those sad condemnations give me pleasure, scratch some deep itch—the kind of itch masochists must feel when they think about corporal punishment.

God bless MetaFilter for directing me to this wondrous Comics Journal thread, featuring more unintentionally filthy comic panels than you can shoot coffee out your nose at.

Added bonus: My childhood fave Archie is represented by not one but two knockouts.

It's by popular vote, lady.

This video is all that remains of an enormous impromptu art installation that appeared for four hours last Thursday afternoon in Volunteer Park, then disappeared.

The artist was Susan Robb, and the installation was called Warmth, Giant Black Toobs no. 3 I wrote about it in a column that just came out today.

Last Thursday was quintessential July. I wouldn't have pegged Susan Robb for July, maybe October or April, something slyer, but last Thursday, she made a piece of quintessentially July art. It was hot and light and playful and right out on the lawn near the conservatory at Volunteer Park.

Robb has made her Toobs three times now. The first time was in Tieton, where the garbage-bag material they're made of got shredded in the wild grass. The second time, she took photographs, and sent them out in an email announcing that they'd be going up last week.

In [the photograph], seven big stalks (toobs) like black baseball bats towered over the trees and over the white-dome top of the conservatory. They looked like they were taking themselves unfortunately seriously. Photographs are such liars. The real toobs—a nice gender-crossing word—weren't serious at all. Staked to the ground at one end, they were flopping around in the wind like very conflicted, overly long phalluses. They were topped by knots that made their faces, when they came swinging in your direction, look like the butts of sausages.

Because of the difference between the toobs in photo and the toobs in person, I didn't want to post anything about the toobs on Slog until video was available--which just happened today (perfect timing).

And now that I see the video, I'm struck that the video toobs seem neither like the still photograph of toobs no. 2 from before:

nor like the way they were in person out there on the lawn (light, hot, playful).

In the video, they're much more mysterious, even a little foreboding, and very independent of the artist (which came across almost as strongly in person).

Robb's sense of humor is still there--see the final seconds, when you're stared down by the cyclops of a mischievous toob that breaks away from the bunch--but the lo-fi technology of Youtube and the sound she's added prevent this from being a document.

It's a new work.

I was sorry to read Jeff's earlier savaging of the Tek Jansen comic. Having just read it myself, I wish I could argue, but, well, he sort of nailed it. Allow me to give props, however, to the book's decidedly more good secondary tale Horn Like Me! A Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen Case File written by Seattle's own Jim Massey. Massey, whose Oni series Maintenance just got optioned to Hollywood, is a very, very, very funny man, and I'm not just saying this because he once graciously contributed a cartoon to my review of 300. Ok, maybe it played a part, but his comic book is still awesome.

posted by Jeff Kirby

I was very excited to find in today’s mail that Oni Press had sent us the first issue of Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen comic book. Jansen is a character that Colbert has been talking about on his show for years, the space-hero protagonist of his fake sci-fi book. Now he’s actually put the character in a comic, “the stunning continuation of Stephen Colbert’s critically acclaimed, yet unpublished novel,” which seemed like it could be really funny. Unfortunately, it’s not. Colbert doesn’t write the comic himself, they’re written by John Layman and Tom Peyer (who wrote for the miserably unfunny Simpsons comics). The jokes come off as somebody trying to do an impression of Colbert, but doing it poorly. The character is basically just Zap Brannagan from Futurama with Colbert’s face, treading already thin “purposely-bad-to-be funny” space fantasy plotlines. Just like the Simpsons comics, the jokes don’t survive the jump to a new medium, even though these jokes were just humorous asides to begin with. Which is a bummer, I was hoping it would be hilarious.

Smith

(GASTROPOD) Did I say gastropod? (That's because I love animals that poop on their heads.) I guess I meant gastropub, which is a word I can't bear. Other stupidities you may encounter at Linda Derschang's new establishment: hipsters, yuppies, crowds. One motherfucking amazing word that will lay you out flat: poutine. Smith's poutine—fries, salty gravy, cheese curds just kissed by the frying pan—may or may not be authentic, but I'm getting faint just wanting it. (Smith, 332 15th Ave E, 709-1900. Poutine until 11 pm, 21+.) ANNIE WAGNER

I know I'm arriving late to this party, but last night I finally saw Knocked Up and loveloveloved it. I'm tempted to say I went into it as a Judd Apatow fan, except that my love for his work is primarily restricted to the sublime Freaks & Geeks. I don't care much for what I've seen of Undeclared, and I actively resented The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which was so loose and light and gassy it hardly made a dent on my consciousness.

But from the very beginning—with ODB warbling, "I like it raw!" over the credits and the guys' pothead Olympics—Knocked Up was a total delight. The lady who played Katharine Heigl's sister? Amazing. The lady who played the E! executive? Ditto. The whole thing was packed with more messy and hilarious life than any comedy I've seen in years, and if you haven't seen it yet, go go go.

Added heatwave bonus: Tonight Knocked Up continues its run at the Big Picture, home to booze, air-conditioning, and a movie that will warm your heart with F-words.

Sorry if this is old news, but the site for Miranda July's most excellent book of most excellent short stories is, perhaps unsurprisingly, most excellent.

Willy Vlautin is the lead singer of Portland alt-country faves Richmond Fontaine. I've long been told that I'd like the band but I've never checked them out. Now that I've read his first novel, The Motel Life, I certainly will.

The story is set during a fridgid winter in Reno, Nevada, sometime around now, though there's a sense that the wayward, rootless characters in The Motel Life could come from any place, any time. The story follows Frank Flannigan and his depressed brother Jerry Lee as they figure out what to do with their already crumbling lives after Jerry Lee's involved in a fatal hit and run.

Anybody who's ever done a lot of hard-core traveling--I'm talking hitch-hiking and Greyhound, not airlines or cruise ships--knows of the other side of the American dream. The freeway drifters, the rest stop campers, folks on the run from something or to somewhere--the kinds of people you see and make up stories about because you have to place them somehow, make them less ghostly, more real--these are the people that inhabit this book. Vlautin grew up in Reno and spent plenty of time on the road with his band. He's got the right background, the right experience to understand both the setting and the motivation for these characters.

Read the rest of the review over on Line Out. And go see Vlautin read from The Motel Life at 7 pm tomorrow, July 11 at the University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE.

I could always connect Godzilla to the atomic bombings of two major Japanese cities. But what is at the bottom of The Transformers? What social event, catastrophe can we name as the source of The Transformers? Machines that transform into other machines? What does this speak to? I have not watched the new movie, but I did know about the toys back in the day. And even then, I could not connect this type of transformation to anything but a human love of machine power. Is it possible the transformers are the terminal point of reification? They not only make themselves, they transform themselves?

Bloomberg reports today (thanks for the tip, Eric F) that Ralph Appelbaum Associations, the self-proclaimed "largest interpretive museum design firm in the world" will be adding a major building to Seattle, right across from EMP and the Space Needle. It will be 15,000 square feet and is scheduled to open in 2010.

All right! (I recently took my first tour of the Microsoft campus and was heartbroken that all that money and space resulted in zero architecture.)

But what is being interpreted in this new building, exactly? Appelbaum is best known for his Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where visitors receive tags when they enter, either with the name of a survivor or of a victim.

At the Gates Foundation:

Appelbaum: The first stop will give people a way to open their eyes to the world. That starts with a lot of stories: film and multimedia. It's the emotional part. After that, the plan is to present a series of analytical layers. There's interactive information: maps, resource databases. From that intellectual zone, you go in-depth into case studies, problem-solving activities. You get an understanding of the foundation's methodology.

Hmm. Methodology.

Appelbaum: The way to get people emotionally engaged in information is to build a series of encounters that give them the tools to go to the next level -- very much like the Holocaust Museum. When visitors go through the Holocaust Museum, it's told as a general orientation of how people get "de-citizenized,'' then how they were murdered through a compressed-timed process. Much of the experience is making the case for action. [Laurence] Arnold [of Bloomberg]: Bill Gates has said his galvanizing moment was when he read about diseases eliminated in the U.S. that still kill millions of children in poor countries. Appelbaum: They (Bill and Melinda Gates) describe it as literally opening their eyes to the world. Because they were making journeys to people in the field, they realized there are solutions. Arnold: Most visitor centers are auxiliaries to an historic building or attraction. With Gates, the center is the attraction. Appelbaum: What people will encounter is how an American family really became engaged with complex and serious issues and found their own way to contribute. Arnold: Do you see this becoming a popular attraction in Seattle Appelbaum: We're in the heart of the city, across from the Space Needle and the EMP (Experience Music Project). What we offer people is a promise to awaken them to a new knowledge base. People are fascinated by what the foundation is and how it reflects the interests of this extraordinarily generous family. Arnold: How will you make sure that visitors leave feeling inspired, but not coerced, to be more charitable? Appelbaum: There's a natural philanthropy in American society. We admire it. We respect those who do it. But often we don't think we have a role in it. We think the most we can do is to respond immediately through some charitable act. But in fact, there are lessons to be learned about developing a much more strategic, familial type of philanthropy, no matter what your economic group is.

A building as a rhetorical device encouraging me to start giving help and money to people who need it? I'm sort of fascinated.

But will it be architecture?

That is only of course the best line in the Charles Mudede/Robinson Devor movie Police Beat, by which I mean the Mudedest line.

Have you not heard it spoken? Have you not seen Police Beat?

I ran into this syndrome a few months ago, when a friend I recommended it to couldn't find it at the video store.

Now, just this week, it's out on DVD, in all its strange and beautiful glory.

(In honor of the release, the LA Times saluted it on Sunday as one of the "least likely and most original American independent films of the last few years.")

You can finally get your hands on it.

Regina Hackett breaks the news that the installation Alex Schweder made for Suyama Space this winter is becoming a part of the permanent collection at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Henry Urbach, a veteran supporter of Schweder's work, recently went to work at SFMoMA.)

Want to hear Schweder talk about his own work?

Listen to this podcast.

Uncle Vanya

(THEATER) The Bush years are coming to a close, Congress is no longer giving him a blank check, and the war is deeply unpopular. We have been under a cloud for most of this decade. As we begin to enjoy the light of the returning sun, we need to fill our lungs with the lightness and laughter of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, a comedy about a bitter, ineffectual man and his botched attempt to commit murder. (Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer St, 269-1900. 7:30 pm, $44.) CHARLES MUDEDE

Fido

(ZOMBIE COMEDY) Fido, about domesticated flesh-eaters who act as milkmen, mail carriers, and best friends to lonely little boys in an otherwise prosaic town, is deliciously ridiculous and totally entertaining. The cast, especially Carrie-Ann Moss, injects just enough coy subtlety to balance the rampant camp. (See Movie Times.) AMY KATE HORN

And from music to comedy to lit offerings, it looks amazing. Among the many many many delights: Art Brut! Gogol Bordello! The Salon of Shame! The Moth storytelling with Kimya Dawson and Dan Savage! FOUND Magazine extravaganza! Miranda July! Stella! The Estate of Nick Drake! (?!) Cyclecide Bike Rodeo! Portable Confessional Units! And of course the previously hyped Shins, Wu-Tang Clan, etc etc etc. Full lineup here.

Desert Fury and Leave Her to Heaven

(FILM) A pair of seriously perverse "Technicolor noirs" from the 1940s, Desert Fury and Leave Her to Heaven are two of the wackiest finds at the Noir City series—a week's worth of $10 double features launching the new year-round SIFF Cinema. Oedipal passions! Gay gangsters! Obsessive love! Dreamboat Burt Lancaster and then icy-hot Gene Tierney! These are not archetypal noirs, but they're dark as night. (SIFF Cinema, 321 Mercer St, www.seattlefilm.org. Desert Fury at 1, 5:05, and 9:10 pm, Leave Her to Heaven at 3 and 7 pm, $10 for two consecutive shows.) ANNIE WAGNER

'Shaft'

(BLAXPLOITATION NOIR) I love Central Cinema—home to beer, pizza, old-school previews, and DVD-projected flicks—so much I'd suggest going there to watch paint dry. So I doubly suggest going there to see Shaft, Gordon Parks's 1971 blaxploitation classic featuring one smooth black detective, the Italian mob, and a classic Isaac Hayes soundtrack. (And don't be scared to drink lots—at Central Cinema, there's always a pee-friendly intermission.) (Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave, 686-6684. 7 and 9:30 pm, $5, late show 21+.) DAVID SCHMADER

Sorry about the delay, but it's finally up. (Technological problems abounded; they did, they abounded.)

Meet the inimitable Mr. Bruch.

It's a slightly sluggish weekend at the movies, because the big'uns (the tolerable Transformers and the execrable License to Wed) opened early for the Fourth. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (I saw it yesterday, and it's pretty bad, except for Imelda Staunton) opens next Tuesday.

But that's cool, because SIFF Cinema is launching this week with fourteen noirs of various shades and cross-genre pollinations. It should be awesome, and you should be there. Buy tickets at the SIFF website.

In On Screen this week: Transformers ("Transformers is loud, extravagant, and void of logic, but for the most part it lives up to what we expect from a Transformers movie--which is to say, it has giant robots crashing, puny humans scattering, and Optimus Prime preaching," says Bradley Steinbacher), You Kill Me (Andrew Wright: "No matter how played out the introspective hit man concept feels by now, though, the film often still runs like a dream, courtesy of director John Dahl's knack for finding room for such dependable heavies as Phillip Baker Hall, Bill Pullman, and (especially) Dennis Farina to shine."), the Robin Williams-meets-The Office disaster License to Wed ("Sorry," writes Lindy West, "but I don't even understand what this movie is about."), Fido ("worthwhile for the less demanding horror fan," admits Andrew), and a quick preview of my picks for Noir City.

In Film Shorts this week, check out Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern at Northwest Film Forum, where the local filmmaker Linas Phillips's excellent doc Walking to Werner is also holding over for another week. There's another batch of killer monster double features at Grand Illusion this week: Stop in Friday through Sunday for Troll and Troll 2 or Monday through Thursday for Swamp Thing with The Gate. Plus, Sigourney Weaver as an autistic lady in Snow Cake at the Varsity, and some hot summer Shaft at Central Cinema. Enjoy.

Schmader,

As you may know (cuz I've told you every personal story I have), my mom's and my claim to fame is that we walked out of E.T.

In my precocious youth, I went in believing (thanks to the review I'd read in Time) that E.T. was going to be the 2001 of my generation.

About halfway thru the movie, I thought my mom was crying during one of the sad parts. I checked, and it turned out she was laughing. I nudged her and said: Let's split. We did. Giggling as we hurried up the aisle.

'Interactivity' (ART) Interactivity isn't just a temporary art show for McLeod Residence, it's the young gallery-bar-hangout's entire reason for being. Hell, some members get so interactive, they legally change their names—so the McLeods have extra reason to do this one right. With digital prints and "biomimetic butterflies" by the Barbarian Group, textiles that respond to touch by Maggie Orth, a laser installation by Joel S. Kollin, and mixed-media work by Felix Livni. (McLeod Residence, 2209 Second Ave, 441-3314. 6—9 pm, free, 21+.) JEN GRAVES

and...

KJ Sawka CD Release Party (MUSIC) The origins of KJ Sawka are unclear—it's said that this human/drum hybrid was first encountered after a meteor collision in the Nevada desert. Now he calls Seattle home and makes music as inscrutable as it is unmistakable: liquid synth washes; dubby, reverbed samples; and shape-shifting beats perfect for jacking dance floors. Cyclonic Steel, Sawka's second LP, came out last week, further documenting the development of this evolutionary anomaly. (Neumo's, 925 E Pike St, 709-9467. 9 pm, $8, 21+.) JONATHAN ZWICKEL

Yesterday the Chicago Tribune took on a topic near and dear to my heart: Movies that make you flee the cinema prematurely. The Trib's reject roundup is curated by film critic Michael Phillips, who quickly earns my affection by admitting to fleeing one of the first films I ever fled: Billy Bob Thornton's career-making Sling Blade. (Phillips admits to wandering out of Sling Blade "more or less subconsciously," while my exit was purposeful and passionate. We only have so many years on this planet, and God can go fuck himself if he thinks I'm going to spend two hours of that time watching an uppity, artsy variation of an Adam Sandler-retard flick that you're not even supposed to laugh at.)

The follow-up list of rejects supplied by fellow critics and readers is also interesting, name-checking two of my personal-favorite terrible films (Empire Records and Under the Cherry Moon) and introducing me to a lot of new horrors. (Who knew so many people went to see the Richard Gere/Winona Ryder death drama Autumn in New York, much less walked out of it?)

Enjoy. (And thank you, MetaFilter.)

I went back and forth about whether or not I should post this, but it has been haunting me (much as it haunted Megan Seling on Line Out) and so to Slog I go on Independence Day.

I went to see the Transformers movie at Cinerama on opening night. I was curious. I don't know why, I just was. I never liked Transformers as a kid (even 9-year-olds can tell when they're being cheated), and am not interested in cars or airplanes as an adult. I do like robots from outer space though, particularly when they're trying to take over the urf. Anyway, I left after about an hour because if I want to see retarded Republican-scented fascism porn, I can just read the Drudge Report or whatever (the biggest cheer in the first hour was for the screen credit "in association with HASBRO"). Seriously, I have never seen such un-human corporate bullshit masquerading as entertainment. Even the magical outer space robot car fights are lame.

HOWEVER, it was what I saw before the film that sticks with me: In a packed house full of excited people playing (networked) video games and working on laptops and talking on cell phones while doing both of the above while waiting for the film to start, I was taken aback by the guy in front of me, an adult, who was carrying (along with a Transformers action figure), a legal document certifying that his middle name had been changed from "Michael" to "Megatron." He showed it to his (attractive) date, other people from other aisles, and (inadvertently) me. He was obviously proud and it obviously meant a lot to him, or he wouldn't have gone to all that bother. And, again obviously, what better time to flaunt such full-blooded identification with a toy and the decision it inspired? But, having never had any connection to these toys (and always having resented the way they stole quality cartoon time away from the stuff I did like) I found it sort of troubling, like those people who used to get bar code tattoos in the '90s, only way more severe. Still, his body, his choice.

Then the movie came on and I just felt really bad for the guy. Dude, you changed your name for THIS?

The Thing from Another World and The Thing

(DOUBLE FEATURE) Compared to its gooey 1982 remake, 1951's The Thing from Another World is a quaint relic. But even as the original, rumored to have been ghost-directed by the great Howard Hawks, has lost punch over the years, it remains required viewing for anyone interested in the sci-fi genre. As for John Carpenter's remake of The Thing, I need only offer a single name: Kurt Russell. For a double feature, this one's a no-brainer. (Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St, 523-3935. See Movie Times, page 81, for show times.) BRADLEY STEINBACHER