I said it exactly 5 years ago, and say it again today:

We don't need two hours of Spider-Man thwipping through the skyline. A Spider-Man movie should be low-budget--long, murky shots of Peter Parker sitting on his bed in his lonely apartment, head in his hands, fretting about his mixed-up life: What's wrong with my best friend, Harry Osborn? Why do the police hate me? How can I tell my girlfriend who I really am?

And wasn't it supposed to be the original clone story this time?

!!! (pronounced as any three repeated sounds—most people say "chk chk chk," but you can call them "ding ding ding" if you feel like it) turn punk purists into disco fanatics and stiff asses into funk jelly. !!!'s eight members combine horns, percussion, guitars, and live effects into taut funk and psychedelic disco backdrops for Nic Offer's goofy dancing and like-I-give-a-fuck vocals. Song titles like "Get Up," "Freak the Funk," and "Take Ecstasy with Me" disclose !!!'s mission: total dance-floor hedonism. (Neumo's, 925 E Pike St, 709-9467. 8 pm, $13 adv, 21+.) Eric Grandy

Spider-Man 3 is a dog, and critics are scaling the heights of eloquence to sum up its awfulness.

From the New York Observer:

Bloated and stupid, this movie is so bad you can't even review it. Over- produced, over-publicized, over-designed, over-computerized and just plain over the moon, it's so preposterously overwrought with so many bewildering plots juggling simultaneously for over-emphasis, there's no entry point for criticism. You just stare at it, as you might a great big exploding pile of cow manure.

From the New Yorker:

In an early scene, a meteorite crashes to Earth, and from it crawls what seems to be a tiny garbage sack with half a mind of its own: not a bad image of where this film belongs.

From the Village Voice:

The best that can be said of Spider-Man 3 is that it sheds some light on the whole skinny black jeans phenomenon. Rest easy Hedi Slimane and residents of the 11211, the origin of overpriced mantyhose may now be attributed to the nefarious agenda of intergalactic goo

From something called Ropes of Silicone:

Spider-Man 3 presents a world where people come into rooms, make heartfelt speeches, and then exit for no apparent reason while the other person looks off into the distance. It's all a wacky attempt at Steel Magnolias (with webs) and it comes off as fully contrived.

And from our own Bradley Steinbacher:

They took a comic, made it into a film, and ended up with a cartoon.

Thanks to Radar for the awful quote-compiling, and condolences to the 500 million people who are still going to see SM3 this weekend.

It pains me to say it, but it is that time of the year when the lovely and talented Abigail Guay must retire to her South Pacific hideout. Otherwise, she'd *totally* continue performing the thankless, pay-free task of compiling the visual art calendar week in and out, doing the occasional research on arcane subjects, and cracking open the strange missives and first novels that arrive in my mailbox.

So until you must retire to your own South Pacific hideout (read: running and screaming from the tedium of data entry), would you like to take her place?

Here's what I need: Organized. Meticulous. Knowledgeable about contemporary art. No flakes. Seriously about flakes: I'm not fooling.

And ideally, I'd love someone who, like Abigail, wants to write as an art critic. Here, here, and here are some of Abigail's writings. (Not every intern writes, but the internship can lead to writing opportunities.)

If you're interested, get in touch with me at jgraves@thestranger.com. The internships tend to last about 3-4 months, are unpaid, and take about 10 hours a week, at least some of which are during daylight hours.

When you write me, feel free to say something, anything, about this:

^{Camouflage by Julie Blackmon (2006, archival pigment print, 22 X 22 inches), in a show opening next Thursday, May 10, at G. Gibson Gallery.}

And now for a little beauty, which is plucked like a fruit from one of the many pages that make up what is often claimed to be the first novel, The Tale of Genji, in all of the world that (barely at first but more so later) made it into the recorded history of the only animal in the universe known to this animal, the human, that can store its language, its memories, its ideas, debts, dreams externally, inorganically, outside of its body as marks that to the poetically minded appear as the dessicated breath of this being, this exception to the living rule that can be no more or less than the measure of all that is to it on this side of nothing:

…[I]t seemed as though the waves were at Genji’s door. Night after night he lay listening to that melancholy sound and wondering whether in all the world there could be any place where the sadness of autumn was more overwhelming. The few attendants who shared the house with him had all gone to rest. Only Genji lay awake, propped high on his pillow, listening to the storm-winds which burst upon the house from every side. Louder and louder came the noise of the waves, till it seemed to him they must have mounted the fore-shore and be surging round the very bed on which he lay.

I was putting together next week's theater calendar when I noticed ACT is opening Souvenir, a play about Florence Foster Jenkins, the real-life would-be opera diva who self-confidence was only matched by her complete lack of rhythm, pitch, and tone. She was so confident and awful that people crowded to see her. Jenkins sold out Carnegie Hall on October 25, 1944.

About her critics, she said this: "People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing."

Here is a sample of her singing a famous passage from Mozart.

It's amazing.

'Johnson Pit #30' (GRAZED ART) When Robert Morris converted an abandoned gravel pit into an earthwork in 1979, he didn't intend to cover up the land's past abuse and turn it into an idyllic setting. He carved his pit into pleasing curves but left human-height tree stumps, coated in black creosote, for all to see. Over the years, another unsightliness came into view: rampant blackberries. So, in April, a Vashon Island rancher named Tammy Dunakin let her herd of 60 goats clean up the place. It's as good as old. (Johnson Pit #30, S 216th St and 40th Pl S, SeaTac, 296-7580. Daylight hours, free.) JEN GRAVES

At the top of ArtsJournal this morning is a link to LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's review of the new Seattle Art Museum.

The ArtsJournal teaser reads:

A Museum Where Art And Architect Cooperate
Christopher Hawthorne loves the Seattle Art Museum's new home, mainly because it manages to properly showcase the art inside it without subsuming the architect's skill and vision.

And then I read the review, which is a sly one. Hawthorne doesn't love the Seattle Art Museum's new home at all. If I'm reading correctly, he seems to find it decent, fairly good, but lacking in the sort of "real architectural cleverness and daring" that you find at the new ICA in Boston or the new Walker--buildings, he says (I haven't been to either one, sadly), that have calm and well-proportioned galleries but are not humorless.

And I will admit, I hadn't thought of it before, but the new SAM is humorless.

In my review of the new SAM experience, coming out today, I fail to notice the humorlessness. On the issue of art versus architecture, though, I come out siding with Hawthorne. All the discussion of the new SAM not being "look-at-me" architecture during last week's press opening events, of the new SAM putting the art first, was tiresome hooey.

As both Hawthorne and I point out, there's a lot of room between aggressive architecture that forces the art into a corner (and at the art world's latest architectural bete noire, Denver Art Museum, reportedly, there are some interior corners so sharp they had to be cordoned off), and a humble servant of a building that simply fades into the background and barely registers as architecture. "There is plenty of ego, after all, in Cloepfil's design," Hawthorne writes. Indeed. (Check the minimalist majesty of the elevator bank, and you can start there.)

I am skeptical of the interior usefulness of Cloepfil's brise soleil. Hawthorne questions another one of the sun shade's stated purposes, its ability to transmit the outdoors into the museum:

The sections of the museum facing west are shaded by a stainless-steel brise-soleil system that can be manually shifted when curators want to change the lighting as they rearrange the exhibitions. But Cloepfil also uses the system to frame and restrict views and even to actively block them. It's a game he's played before, particularly in an impressive recent house in Sun Valley, Idaho. The result here is a museum whose views can't begin to match those of Rem Koolhaas' nearby public library ...

But where Hawthorne really twists the knife is at the end of the piece, when he describes that it's fashionable to diss the 1991 SAM design by Robert Venturi (the old SAM building). I call Cloepfil's new SAM a kinder, gentler MoMA (the new MoMA in NY, by Yoshio Taniguchi). Hawthorne writes:

The truth, though, is that cycles of taste move much faster than construction in the architecture world. Planned at roughly the same time as Taniguchi's museum and in something of the same spirit, the new SAM arrives just as many of us are feeling ready for at least a small corrective to MoMA's upright and largely corporate approach — for a bit of humor and maybe a splash of decoration as well.

That doesn't mean going back to the stage-set Postmodernism that Venturi and Scott Brown were turning out in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was often tinny and overly mannered. It only means that every time Cloepfil or Gates or Walsh brought up the Venturi design just to knock it, it served mostly as a reminder of what the new wing is missing.

This is provocative writing, and convincing.

I only have one thing to add: Mr. Hawthorne, you're lucky you didn't have to actually use the Venturi building for the last 16 years. It may be vogueish to slam it, but how can you blame us? It was a terrible building, inside and out. Was it worse for having tried at wit, and failed? Perhaps. I suppose that the prospect of another grossly failed attempt at levity and decoration may have seemed too much for this city to bear.

And so we have SAM The Serious.

The museum opens Saturday morning at 10 and stays open for 35 straight hours, until 9 pm Sunday.

Posterwire caught a little difference between the standard and IMAX Harry Potter posters.

(Larger photo can be found here--you big perv.)

Andras Szanto over at Artworld Salon reports today that the EU has passed a law to keep cultural promoters from misquoting critics.

Szanto writes:

For those of us in the visual art world, this news raises some disquieting questions. First, how would promoters shrink sentences that run, on industry average, four to seven lines of text, into their meager advertisement space? Second, how would these unscrupulous arts advertisers manipulate the meaning of critical utterances, when those utterances themselves are so often nonsensical and, as surveys have documented, devoid of clear judgments?

Yes, yes, we are terrible. Imagine if the US passed a similar law, and we had to be legible, strict, and sound-biteable without reverting to mere punditry? As Szanto points out, it may be a good imaginary restriction for us to put on ourselves before we sit down to write. Who really is smart, opinionated, and quotable?

This weekend brings the much-anticipated return of performance artist Cynthia Hopkins to On the Boards, and if you're a fan of big, smart, brainy theater (packed with kick-ass music, no less), I urge you to check her out.

I first saw Hopkins when she brought her show Accidental Nostalgia to OTB in 2003. Here's what I wrote about her then:

As all those lucky enough to attend can attest, the singing/songwriting/dancing/theater-making Ms. Hopkins is some sort of performance art super-woman, whose press-pack comparisons to Laurie Anderson/Tom Waits/Lou Reed are nearly as flattering to the name-checked superstars as they are to the up-n-coming Hopkins, who should return to Seattle as soon as possible for the rock-star reception she deserves.

Hopkins's new show is Must Don't Whip 'Um, and it's billed as both a prequel and sequel to Accidental Nostalgia. As for characterizing Hopkins's work beyond "amazing," I can tell you her shows feature big ideas, great music, moments of stunning beauty and deep hilarity, and a full band.

For more info (including press clips and music samples), check out Hopkins's website. If it seems like something you'd be into, it is, and you should get your tickets here.

So I'm headed to Chicago next week, and I was checking out the Art Institute of Chicago's web site this morning when I saw this:

In 1425 Lorenzo Ghiberti was commissioned to design a pair of bronze doors for Florence’s Baptistery. He labored on the task for 27 years, fashioning a masterpiece that Michelangelo called “truly worthy to be the Gates of Paradise” for its remarkable beauty and grandeur. For the past 25 years, Ghiberti’s gates have undergone extensive conservation, and they are now nearing completion. To celebrate the conclusion of this arduous project and its stunning results, three relief panels from the left wing of the Gates of Paradise and sections of the door’s frieze will travel to North America. This exhibition will afford viewers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe Ghiberti’s work up close before the individual elements are reintegrated with the rest of the doorframe and put on permanent display in a hermetically sealed room in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, never to travel again. Other Venues: The exhibition will also travel to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Seattle Art Museum.

That's not hyperbole, folks--these gilt panels are founding monuments of the Renaissance, both beloved and important, and this is their first time traveling to the United States since they were made more than 500 years ago.

If they are in fact coming to SAM, it's a huge deal. (I didn't even get to see the doors when I was in Florence a few years ago, because they've been replaced by replicas and the originals have been taken in for safekeeping.)

It has been repeatedly reported that they'll come to Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, and then be whisked away back to Florence. But has the West Coast found a way in?

A SAM spokeswoman said nothing is yet firm, and SAM's web site doesn't list the show under upcoming exhibitions.

But that's not a denial, is it?

As for timing, the show just opened in Atlanta Saturday and will spend the summer in Chicago and the fall in New York. After January, maybe we'll get a glimpse at the gilded bronze panels depicting scenes from the Old Testament.

For now, here's a CNN story with a good slide show with the curator posted yesterday, timed to the Atlanta opening.

Here's an image from one of the restored panels:

And here are images of the replicas of the panels that are traveling (top to bottom, Adam and Eve, Rebecca giving birth to Jacob and Esau, and David cutting off Goliath's head):

Back in September, I reported here on Slog that Seattle Art Museum has owned a James Turrell light room for two decades but never shown it--but that it would soon come out of storage for the grand opening of the new SAM.

Scratch that.

The Turrell is still in storage.

This from SAM:

The Turrell was going to be installed in the Venturi galleries on the fourth floor, but the exhibition schedule meant that it would only be on view for six months. So curatorial decided to postpone the installation so that it could stay on view longer. We are working on the schedule now and hope to have it view in the near future.

Just didn't want you showing up this weekend expecting to see something like, you know, this

or this.

Hidmo (SCENE) Run by beautiful sisters, Hidmo is not only a great Eritrean restaurant, but the place to be and to see some of the dopest hiphop headz in the 206: Silent Lambs Project, Blue Scholars, Abyssinian Creole, Specs One, Amos Miller. You will also hear new hiphop and pop from Addis Ababa and feel the spirit of a new Africa, one that has not lost a sense of its past but is oriented to the future. I love Hidmo. (2000 S Jackson St, 329-1534. 11 am—midnight.) CHARLES MUDEDE

i
The last pagan emperor of Rome is Julian II. The result of a series of unexpected events was his enthronement in 380 AD, at the age of 30. At 32, however, both life and throne left Julian on a battlefield. To this day it’s not known if an enemy or one of his own killed him with a spear. Much of the reason for the confusion about his death can be attributed to the disastrous war he instigated with the aim of popularizing his flailing program to reestablish paganism as Rome’s official religion. A victorious war would have shown the people that the gods were on his side, and not the side of Christianity, which became the state religion with Constantine’s conversion near the opening of the 3rd century. Using the maximum of his political might, Julian tried to reverse the march of two generations. But the harder he pushed—persecuting Christians, reserving Greek literature for pagan teachers, returning the Altar of Victory to the Senate House—the harder nothing happened because a considerable portion of the population had nothing to gain by going back to the pagan world of Penates, door deities, and augurs. Christianity was a much better deal for them. With paganism, then a religion that had retreated to the elite, all the poor got were monuments and bloody spectacles; with Christianity, there was at least the democratic ideal of real charity—feeding and clothing the less fortunate. Julian was aware of this and tried to reform paganism, making its type of charity more like Christian charity. But before any of these changes became stable and had any effect on Roman society, Julian’s life met its terrible (and inevitable) end in a war he foolishly started.

In the way that the last pagan emperor tried to reestablish an old order on a radically new Rome (transformed by Constantine and his Bishops), George Bush tried to reestablished an older order—oil and church power—on a radically new America (transformed between the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989, and the WTO protests, 1999). In fact, it’s not hard to imagine a future that will look at Bush and see him as the last Christian president. And the future might also see the connection between Bush's disastrous war in Iraq and Julian’s disastrous war in Persia.

ii
The lovely lips of Joan Chen:

The scene that first exposed me to the ultimate power of cinema: Joan Chen eating a white flower. The scene is in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. Chen's character, the wife of the emperor, goes mad when she sees in the future the disaster that will become of her husband's decision to cooperate with Japanese militarism. The weak emperor, who turned to the Japanese for support, is now nothing more than a puppet. Chen sees this fact, sees the emptiness of his power, and as the music plays in a hall celebrating the agreement between the emperor and the enemy of his countrymen, Chen begins to eat a flower, chewing its petals--her red lips, the green stem, the slow and bitter swallowing. The perfect image: beauty eating beauty.

iii
After Burton Watson's translation of Xiang's "Cook Ding" story, the peak of literary greatness, follows this short piece of writing by Walter Benjamin:

Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderon, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers, “enter, fleeing.” The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. Their entry into the visual field of non-participating and truly impartial persons allows the harassed to draw breath, bathes them in new air. The appearance on stage of those who enter “fleeing” takes from this its hidden meaning. Our reading of this formula is imbued with the expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of on-looking strangers.

Rords of the Froor IV (BLOTTO BREAKDANCING) Getting drunk and breakdancing at the same time? Hell-to-the-yes! The fourth installment of Rords has a pro-am spin—amateurs compete for four slots, then get paired with pros and battle two-on-two, all the while being force-fed shots of booze. Who'll hold it all down for the $1,001 cash prize? Costumes are required for participants. Oh, yes. You know you want to. (The War Room, 722 E Pike St, 328-7666. Registration and doors at 9 pm, $10, 21+.) KELLY O

The first sentence of Wikipedia's entry on swing set: "A swing is a hanging seat, usually found in a playground for children, a circus for acrobats, or on a porch for relaxing."

Yesterday a swing set was found in the Olympic Sculpture Park. From an email:

And then, right around 1:00 pm, the most extraordinary thing happened. A team of five walked into the park from the south entrance wearing white coveralls, white gloves, and hard hats. In their hands were an assortment of metal objects and signs. Everything was white. Without a word, they marched single file through the park and defined a work area in the grass. Within minutes they had assembled a perfectly white swing set--well, that was until the title sign went in the ground. The title was in French... The sign read, "This is not a swing set."

Evidence:

The email continues:

Well it sure looked like a swing set. But then again, they did set up a-frame signs around the piece, that bore an uncanny resemblance to those employed by the park. The signs asked the audience not to touch the "art." My four year old nephew wanted to swing. It was a very confusing moment. Was this swing set sculpture or did this sculpture just look a heck of a lot like a swing? And who is this PDL anyways?

What happened:

I thought you might enjoy these pictures I took of the event, as the "art/swing set/thing" is no longer there. The park staff came and said that it had to leave because it was a liability. I didn't understand why it would have been a liability any more that Anthony Caro's "Riviera," but it was a beautiful day and my mind quickly returned to leisure.

The email, by the way, came from PDL. (According to that link: "This new artist trio, known as PDL, will spend the next twelve months aggressively creating new works, challenging perceptions of contemporary art, and causing general mayhem in the great Pacific Northwest.")

It was a beautiful weekend. In France, too.

In the comments Leeerker asks...

If someone lit Rush Limbaugh on fire, how long would his bloated corpse burn?

William Shakespeare gives us the best estimate, I think. In Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Syracuse has to fight off the advances of Dromio of Ephesus' BBW girlfriend.

Marry, sir, she's the kitchen wench and all grease.... if she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.

'Girls Will Be Girls' (CULT CAMP CLASSIC) Prior to distinguishing himself as one half of the writing team that made Arrested Development, the most dazzlingly twisted sitcom in American history, Richard Day wrote and directed this unsung camp classic. With its erotic abortions, casual rape, and pervasive blithe cruelty—executed by an all-male cast—Girls Will Be Girls will shock the unshockable. It will also make fans of John Waters, Arrested Development, and ferocious comic mayhem pee their pants. (Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave, 686-6684. April 27—29, 7 and 9:30 pm, $5, late show 21+.) DAVID SCHMADER

Adult. and Erase Errata (MUSIC) Erase Errata scavenge the ruins of riot grrrl and disco punk to bring us dark, nervously energetic rock that sounds both paranoid and passionate. The trio jams coercive rhythms, twitchy guitar, and the odd blast of trumpet into quick, careening tracks that are just a second shy of exhausting. Adult. make clean, icy electro and skuzzy, gothic no wave, bound together by the disaffected vocals of Nicola Kuperus. The recorded output of Adult. may not be what it was, but their live shows, like Erase Errata's, are still totally magnetic and unsettling. (Chop Suey, 1325 E Madison St, 324-8000. 9 pm, $10, 21+.) ERIC GRANDY

An astonishing number of films opening this weekend didn't screen for the press. Take this to mean this week's releases are all awful, take this to mean critics are outdated, take this to mean whatever you like.

But first, the news:

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for Robinson Devor and Charles Mudede, whose documentary Zoo (which was preceded by this feature in The Stranger) was accepted into Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. (Via GreenCine: a quick rundown of critical response following the NYC opening.)

In the New York Times, Sharon Waxman reports on the rapid fade on female powerbrokers in Hollywood. The past 14 months have seen the departure of three of the four women in top jobs at Hollywood's major studios:

Nina Jacobson, president of Disney’s motion picture group, lost out in a power play. Gail Berman, the president of Paramount, did not mesh well with her boss, Brad Grey, the studio’s chairman, and was pushed out. And Stacey Snider, the former chairwoman of Universal Pictures, chose to defect to DreamWorks, now a Paramount subsidiary, rather than continue to labor under the pressures of Universal’s ultimate corporate parent, General Electric.

Opening today:

Jen Graves and David Schmader squabble amicably over the 30-year-old Annie Hall. They do agree on one thing: It's the best romantic comedy EVER.

Brendan Kiley hates, hates, hates on The Condemned: "If watching a good movie is like eating fine steak and watching a bad movie is like eating a cream puff, watching The Condemned is like eating air."

Plus, Next, Kickin' It Old Skool, The Invisible, Wind Chill, and more.

And in On Screen this week, the zany slowness that is The Taste of Tea at the Grand Illusion (Charles Mudede: "This could have been a perfect picture"), the abs&ass parade that is Boy Culture at the Varsity (Dan Savage: "Filmed in Seattle, Boy Culture would have us believe that our sleepy little burg is a city of wet, neon-streaked streets crawling with hustlers, wannabes, and the kind of broad-shouldered, big-titted, narrow-waisted gay men you're more likely to find strolling through West Hollywood (and through casting agencies in Hollywood) than dancing at any gay club that exists in Seattle"), and the delayed coming-of-age that is Diggers (Me: "As a movie, Diggers is affable and lazy—its purpose obscured by a swarm of clichés. As a comic sketch about Frankie and Julie, it's great").

Movie Times can be found over there in the upper right-hand corner, or click here. Nice to know: Rear Window is screening at MOHAI next Thursday, so you can do a Disturbia double-header; the Seattle Polish Film Festival (official website) is screening movies about patricidal ideation, depressing towns, and police officers having mental breakdowns; there's a special big-screen revival of Dirty Dancing; Rudy Ray Moore is in town for a doc about his life and work; and Silent Movie Mondays launches Monday with exciting Harold Lloyd shorts.

Ah look, you started reading. Cool.

You know something strange is happening to you when you find yourself reading poetry at the gym. Especially if you're usually sort of hostile to poetry. I'd forgotten how much I love Heather McHugh's poems. Then I caught her reading at the close of the Seattle Poetry Festival last weekend (recapped in this week's Nightstand). The next day I was talking with a friend who was looking through the new New Yorker and said, "I don't like poetry," and I said, "Have you ever read Heather McHugh?" And because he hadn't, I spent part of the next day typing her poem "Intensive Care" into the body of an email. "Intensive Care" is the one that begins: "As if intensity were a virtue we say/good and. Good and drunk. Good and dead." And ends: "Today we were bad/and together; tonight/we'll be good and alone."

The reason I was typing that into an email--typing it straight out of my hardcover The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal... and Everything Else in the World Since 1953--is because "Intensive Care" isn't anywhere to be found online. Makes sense, since it's copyrighted. But the Poetry Foundation--as I learned in that NYer article that pissed everyone off--has something called the Poetry Tool, a searchable online library of poets' "best and most representative poems," and they have eight poems by McHugh.

But, uh, Poetry Foundation: on what planet are these Heather McHugh's best poems? These are okay, totally fine, but you have so many to choose from! Can't you put up some more? For the sake of poetry? What about "Intensive Care"? Where is "Where," the one that starts: "I leave the drink and cigarette/where the music is, and go/outdoors where nothing/is the whole idea.//The winter zeros in on eyes and/orphans everyone, and clear//is not a kind of thought./Outside you're not/as gone as in a house..."

And where's her sense of humor in these eight poems you've chosen, Poetry Foundation? What about, like, "20/200 on 747"? From near the beginning: "Given an airplane, chance//encounters always ask, So what/are your poems about? They're about/their business, and their father's business, and their/monkey's uncle, they're about/how nothing is about, they're not/about about. This answer drives them/back to the snack tray every time./Phil Fenstermacher, for example, turns up/perfectly clear in my memory, perfectly attentive to/his Vache Qui Rit, that saddest cheese." And it gets better, plus there's even more making-fun-of-Phil: "Mister Fenstermacher is relieved/to fill his mind with the immediate/and masterable challenge of the cheese/after his brief and chastening foray/into the social arts."

What about one of the fucked up love ones, like "The Most"? ("We are, for your comfort, far from the town/of your friends, of mates and mistresses, and of/amends.") Or "Preferences," which pretends to be about Antarctica (where "the plain truth oversimplifies/the human state") but isn't (suddenly, outta nowhere: "The heart's two-timing, thicketed and wrong/but reason doesn't simply make us single").

Most of these are in the National Book Award finalist Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, the book I've been reading at the gym, pedaling a bike to its rhythms, because she has the best rhythms, like "one by one the winters nailed/more cold into her house." Or like:

The fruit is heavier to bear
than flowers seem to be.
But that's a lover talking
not a tree.

Here's a picture of her back:

And here's an audience review she wrote for The Stranger after a reading she did in 2004.

Heather McHugh is the bomb, the shizzle, the kahuna, the mack, the tits, the g. She's dope. Sweet. Tight. Phat. All that. And she lives in the same city you do, if you live in Seattle.

I went to the Un Chant d'amour/Kenneth Anger screening yesterday, and it was awesome. Except at SIFF, I've never seen so many people packed into a screening of experimental films. This is the good that gay content can do. (For the bad that gay content can do, see Dan Savage's review of Boy Culture, which was, embarrassingly, filmed in Seattle.)

The surprise of the evening for me was one of Anger's less admired films, Rabbit's Moon. Here's Brian Frye's description in this week's DVD column:

In Rabbit's Moon, Pierrot pantomimes his love affair with the moon. Shot in 35 mm on a Paris soundstage, it represents Anger's re-creation of the theatrical Hollywood fantasies of his youth.

I've never been particularly excited about commedia dell'arte, perhaps because I've never seen it done or used well. (Incidentally, I've concluded there exists no good web page on commedia. Can somebody get on that, please? This one, which is in French, is along the right lines.)

Anger's Pierrot (André Soubeyran) is adorably rabbity, with neither twitchy nose nor curled up paw-fingers to assist. It somehow seems right that he'd be in love with the rabbit in the moon. And the repeated moon sequence--close, closer, split-second of craters!--is just great. Admittedly, Claude Revenant (the actor who plays Harlequin) sucks. And it goes on too long. But Rabbit's Moon is incredibly interesting: it's Kenneth Anger without the testosterone, where performativity is inherent and isn't just this coy leather costume that veils muscles as it draws attention to them.

If you missed it, you need this DVD:

And this one:

The Blood Brothers (MUSIC) Suggesting that music lovers of Seattle go to a Blood Brothers show is about as pointless as telling Anna Nicole Smith that she's dead. You already know all about the Blood Brothers and their hyperactive, pioneering, snotty prog-meets-hardcore sound that, when played live, turns the room into a dripping, sticky pit of flailing limbs. Right? Right. I'm sure you do. (The Showbox, 1426 First Ave, 628-3151. 8 pm, $13 adv/$15 DOS, all ages.) MEGAN SELING

^{For Eighty Cents! (Per ottanta centesimi!), 1895, oil on canvas, by Angelo Morbelli.}

Divisionism/Neo-Impressionism: Arcadia & Anarchy: All right.

(Straight-up impressionism makes its next celebrity appearance in Seattle a year from now, in this.)

In this week's feature on Gage Academy of Art, I write about the academy's conflicted director, Gary Faigin.

Faigin is one of my favorite characters in Seattle art. He is eccentric and stubborn, and openly admits he is threatened by a newfound open-mindedness that has taken him over in the last few years. The fight at the heart of Gage Academy is the fight at the heart of Gary Faigin, between an emphasis on time-tested skill in art--the stuff you can't bullshit--and ideas, feelings, all the things you can't measure, but which ultimately make art what it is.

Actually, that's the conflict at the heart of art, too. Which must be why I like Faigin so much--he invites the conflict and sits with it.

What I couldn't fit into the story were the details of Gary's life. As one-half of the couple that founded Gage Academy (Pamela Belyea is the other half), Faigin might seem from a distance to be a patrician. After all, he's the guy behind Seattle's only "classical" academy, a place from which all manner of finely honed drawings of nudes and genteelly painted still-lifes issue forth like a parade of dead white kings.

But Faigin is no silver-spooner. Here's a section I had in the original draft of my story, but which got cut for space:

Faigin got started in art the way most artists do: by drawing. He dropped out of college in the name of political activism (among other things, Faigin protested the Democratic nomination of Hubert Humphrey over the anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, in 1968) and generalized hippie wandering ("a couple of guys came and said, well, there are whole sheets of blotter acid in San Francisco, and what were we doing wasting our time in Ann Arbor?"). Then, he tried becoming a novelist. He discovered he liked doing illustrations in the margins better than writing. His first complex drawing from life was in his 20s, of his own feet sticking out of his sleeping bag. (Belyea still has the drawing.) He was so satisfied with the act of achieving a likeness that he decided to go back to school—"art school, not college." In December of 1976, Faigin and Belyea hitchhiked from Vancouver, B.C., to New York on less than $100. He was headed for the Art Students League of New York. In a catalog he'd found, the school listed its prerequisites as, "There are none."

Yesterday, in a perfect twist, I found out that Faigin plays prominently in a new photograph by Thomas Struth--the artist who shoots museum visitors as they survey masterpieces. Turns out Faigin was leading a Gage tour at the Prado, and gesticulating in front of Velazquez's Las Meninas when the photo was taken, in 2005. (The photograph is up at Marian Goodman Gallery in NY through this weekend.) Faigin is the only person in the photograph whose face really shows, and in an April 10 review in the NYT, Michael Kimmelman mentions him, "the smiling tour guide, leaning into a goggle-eyed scrum of visitors who lean oh so slightly away from the Velázquez, as if intimidated by its reputation.”

"How about that for a crossover of the Classical and the modern?" Faigin emailed me. Indeed. Thomas Struth had no idea what he'd captured.

A few months ago, Theater Schmeater announced it was going to maybe-sorta-kinda get the ball rolling on a new performance festival by hosting Open Stage, a kind of mini-fringe, timed to match the summer Canadian fringe circuit, so that it might eventually grow into a full-fledged, big-city festival, with touring acts and everything.

You know, like they kind they have in bustling, grown-up cities like Saskatoon (population 200,000, nickname: "POW City!").

Theater Schmeater was going to accept applications, choose twelve plays by lottery, help small companies produce their own shows. But it ain't gonna happen. Only six people sent in applications. One-half of the minimum number needed.

It might've been the $500 venue fee. It might've been bad advertising. It might've been timidity. I guess we're just not ready to pony up and join bustling, grown-up cities like Winnipeg (population 630,000, nickname: "The Peg") and Regina (population 180,000, winner of the 2004 "Cultural Capital of Canada" designation—in the over 125,000 population category) and good old Saskatoon.

Backstage Thrift, on 11th and Pike, right next to the Northwest Actors Studio, is going out of business.

Greg Kerton, a former NWAS student, opened the thrift shop in 2003 to try and help the struggling theater/acting school. The theater is still there. Soon Backstage won't be.

Kerton has run up personal debt in trying to keep the thrift store alive. How much? "Too much," he said. "So now I get to go be someone's star employee."

"It's a little embarrassing," he said. "I feel like it's my fault—I came at it kind of ignorant about how to run a business. My intention was to be supportive."

Do-gooders take heed.

'Un Chant d'Amour' (Film) Jean Genet, the baddest bad boy of French letters, made only one film, and this gorgeous swoon of a semipornographic prison fantasy is it. First smuggled into this country by Jonas Mekas, Un Chant d'Amour attracted some hot censorship action before slipping into obscurity for nearly 50 years. See it tonight in pristine 35 mm, alongside short works by Kenneth Anger: Fireworks, Scorpio Rising, and the world premiere of Elliott's Suicide, a film about Elliott Smith. (Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, 267-5380. 7 and 9:15 pm, $10.) ANNIE WAGNER

and

Gary Shteyngart (READING) Most readings aren't great because most writers aren't great readers. Then there's Gary Shteyngart, who, if he hadn't moved with his family to New York City when he was 7 and grown up to become a best-selling writer of comic literary fiction, probably would have ended up as some sort of charmer in a Russian circus. He reads from the paperback of Absurdistan, a novel narrated by a grossly overweight man with "a pretty Jewish beak." (Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600. 7 pm, free.) CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

The press preview for the new, expanded Seattle Art Museum begins right now. I wasn't in Seattle for the opening of the Robert Venturi building downtown in 1991, the first of the rash of capital projects across the region. But I was at the early walk-throughs for the Bellevue Art Museum, then the revamped Bellevue Art Museum, the Museum of Glass, and the Tacoma Art Museum, so I'm feeling a little nostalgic, and I'm tempted to consider how this building stands up to the others.

I've been through the new SAM a few times already. These spaces are much, much better than the Venturi galleries. But I don't think this museum will steal the title of best work of Northwest museum architecture from Antoine Predock's 2003 Tacoma Art Museum, which manages to be open and light-filled while providing a surprising level of intimacy and subjectivity in each space. It's also warm where the new SAM is cool, even corporate.

This is TAM (photos from SAM forthcoming as they're available):

One exception: I've never been in love with TAM's great big high-ceilinged contemporary gallery. I'm not sure whether it's the dark slate floor that dampens the place, or the way the window slits are placed at the base of the room instead of up high. SAM has a gallery in the same mold, but, I think, far better—with a large corner window, a lookout onto the public area of the museum, and a cutout in an upper wall into the antiquities gallery.

Did the finance and operations director of the Austin Museum of Art really have to steal at a street fair?

Caught art-handed in Texas, thanks to the Art Law Blog.

The Back of the Line is a collaboration between artist William Powhida (remember his enemies and friends lists?), writer Jeff Parker, and the design firm DECODE (Stephen Lyons of Platform Gallery). It's $25 and available here or by calling Platform Gallery, which, by the way, is having this great show by Jesse Burke.

Here's the description of The Back of the Line:

Through four stories interwoven with images, The Back of the Line follows the plight of ornithophobic, cuckolding, leering, scooter-thieving, laundromat loving, peeing-while-sleepwalking James J. Wreck. The narration—in the suspect, second-hand account of James's best friend—sometimes agrees and sometimes conflicts with the documentary evidence of James's deeds, creating fissures in the story as each of the two men see it. Motivated alternately by revenge, jealousy, altruism, and obsession, they continually misread one another in a train wreck of egos and desires.

I wish I could show you an image of One Shot, the other release today, because it's a good-looking little black book with an even littler white pistol embossed on the cover.

This is the parting work of Visual Codec, which was a great online regional art mag run by M until earlier this year, when she needed her life back. One Shot is simple, like the process that prompted it. A group of jurors working individually (including Liz Brown of the Henry, Beth Sellars of Suyama Space, Greg Bell of 4Culture, and me, representing Seattle, plus jurors from Portland and BC) received a series of single images, one from each artist, but without names, cities, artist statements, or gallery affiliations attached. The only information we got was medium and title.

The images the judges chose are in the book, which is a straightforward, vivid parade with little text to clutter the experience of a regional overview.

The book is $20, on sale at Powell's in Portland (or online) and Wall of Sound in Seattle. The Hideout hosts the release party this Saturday night from 6 to closing, and One Shot also will be for sale at the opening of the Lead Pencil Studio show at Lawrimore Project the night of May 3.

Three Dollar Bill has added a second screening of Un Chant d'amour to the Scandalous! series that I've been praising to the heavens.

The only film by French professional bad boy Jean Genet is the one must-see screening in the series. It's a stunningly photographed thinking-man's porno, which was originally meant for private collections and later disavowed by Genet. Fairly hot, very smart, and embarrassingly romantic and beautiful.

Plus, and perhaps even more excitingly, Genet's film will be accompanied by shorts by Kenneth Anger, including the classics Fireworks and Scorpio Rising and a brand, brand new world premiere of Anger's latest, a film about Elliott Smith.

Curious trivia: You might think that Genet influenced Anger, and not the other way around, but in fact Genet saw the then-teenage Anger's Fireworks in Paris a year before he made Un Chant d'amour. (For a deluge of other meticulously researched facts, see Edmund White's masterful biography Genet.)

Tomorrow: Thursday, April 26, 7 and 9:15 pm. Northwest Film Forum. Get your advance tickets here.

Also, check out our DVD review this week: Kenneth Anger, Vol. 1.

Last year was a great one for new, graduating talent in Seattle: Susie J. Lee and Tivon Rice, among others, emerged from the crop. In a few weeks the annual BFA and MFA shows will open up, on May 11 at Cornish and May 12 at the Henry.

I know of at least one grad who'll be in the UW show at the Henry, Nola Avienne. I ran into her work recently in the UW Art School gallery, and was momentarily stopped in my tracks at its spidery strangeness. Avienne makes her small sculptures (that also function as spatial drawings) out of metal filings and magnets:

1. This spicy conversation over at Artworld Salon about the Jerry Saltz v. Alanna Heiss, museum v. market debate. Clearly the subject is ready for an exhibition taken from the other side: how the museums are part of the market, not separate from it. Any curators out there willing to take on that ball of wax?

2. Great post by Tyler Green over at Modern Art Notes called "The national mood as reflected in arts criticism".

3. Robert Storr with Richard Lacayo on the big show at the Venice Biennale this summer:

The underlying premise of the show is that there has been a division between the conceptual and the perceptual, between the "criticality" crowd and the beauty crowd. The argument of the show is that first rate work is always both conceptual and perceptual and the artists making art are far less concerned with these divisions than people who write about them.

Rather than writing extensively, critically, and authoritatively about the changes that have taken place at Pacific Northwest Ballet since the arrival of artistic director Peter Boal, the Seattle Times reports that the New York Times likes PNB! Like, really, really, likes us!

Breaking news: Zoo, written by our very own Charles Mudede, has been accepted into Cannes. (I assume that means one of the non-competition sections, but I don't know for sure.)

And here, in the New York Times, the inimitable Manohla Dargis gives Zoo a good thrashing and--can it be?--comes out in favor of horse sex.

Okay, technically, she reasons thus:

After all, Bible-believers notwithstanding, if you eat and wear animals and agree that it’s O.K. to torture them in the name of science and beauty, what’s the big deal? Human beings subject animals penned in factory farms to far more grievous abuse than anything apparently done to the horses in “Zoo,” and on a daily basis human beings also subject themselves to greater risk. One zoophile’s fond memories of cooking up ham for his brethren indicate that theirs was not a PETA-approved animal love, true. But, as Mr. Devor makes clear, again and again, these were men who truly loved their animals in sickness and in health and, at least in the case of one unfortunate soul, till death finally did part them.

UPDATE:

Charles confirms that Zoo is in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar, where it'll join Caramel, the Ian Curtis biopic Control, Apres lui, and more to be announced May 3.

Speaking of space: Please enjoy the original Star Wars trailer in all its cheesy glory.

Hey, Stranger arts staffers, you may reel at all my posts about state politics from Olympia or the recent stuff about the Port scandal, but I'll have you know that way back when (1995), I was published (along with arts writers like Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, and Sarah Vowell) in a round-up of our choices for "Artist of the Year."

Click on the above link, scroll past the essays on Eddie Vedder, Jane Austen, Sirius B, Howard Cruse (Dave Marsh's choice), and other stars of '95, and you'll come upon my choice.

p.s. Sarah Vowell's choice was Ian Brown, the American Public Radio host for the Canadian show, "Sunday Morning."

(Documentary)While watching this dark Canadian masterpiece from 1969, my boyfriend and I became obsessed with whether it was real. "It has to be fiction. Look at those facial expressions!" "It's a documentary, but he's wearing bikini briefs because it's funny." "But they're constantly at each other's throats." "I think they're us." "I am not hysterical." "Well, you're the guy, and she's me." Then they started hitting each other, and we were both too alarmed to speak. (Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, 267-5380. 7 and 9 pm, $5—$8.50.) Annie Wagner