Arts & Culture

  • Boxed Sets: Finding a Playlist in a Box

    While I have an extensive CD library, and spend a fair amount of time and money on music, I generally don’t shell out the cash to buy box sets. But I stop by my local indie music store, Easy Street, fairly often to peruse their shelves to see what’s new. Not familiar with box sets?… Continue reading

  • Read & Listen: White Bicycles

    The first in an occasional series in which we pair reviews of music criticism/history books with a list of accompanying albums for your reading and listening pleasure. READ: Walking off the baseball field of his Connecticut prep school one evening in the late 1950s, Joe Boyd heard the strains of the most recent Fats Domino… Continue reading

  • Knitting

    In 1917, the West Seattle Branch of the Seattle Public Library had a Knitting Club, to help in the War effort. Girls would meet once per week, and while one of their members read out loud, they would knit socks and ambulance pillows out of sturdy wool. A Red Cross volunteer handed out the yarn,… Continue reading

  • TV, TiVo or DVD?

    Take your pick — which couch potato format would you prefer? After sampling all three formats, I choose TV on DVD for my maximum viewing pleasure. The obvious virtues pertain — no commercial breaks, no need to skip activities that may occur and interfere with a television program and (for an addling brain) the ability… Continue reading

  • David and Brutus

    The gifts of a great artist can be used to further political ends. Jacques-Louis David, painter of the French revolutionary era, created several wonderful paintings that were fraught with political and social meaning, but are still notable on a purely artistic level. One such painting tells a remarkable story. Called Brutus, or Lictors Returning the… Continue reading

  • Sound Before Our Eyes

    Researchers have found a song recorded before Edison’s phonograph. A Frenchman used a phonautograph [a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back] on April 9, 1860. The song is 10 seconds of a crooner singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville went to his grave convinced that Edison… Continue reading

  • Shakespeare Lives!

    It is easy to take Will Shakespeare for granted.  So established is he in the cultural and academic pantheons that even the frequent attempts to update or “jazz up” the plays feel time-honored and traditional.  Two recent movies provide a nice antidote to the standard bardolatry, reminding us just why he is truly immortal. Hank Rogerson’s Shakespeare Behind Bars observes a troupe of… Continue reading

  • Ghost Singer as Author

    As I read a recent Seattle Times review of the traveling production, My Fair Lady, the name Marni Nixon “jumped out” at me. The former Seattlite was playing the non-singing role of Higgins’ mother. What a surprise, she’s still active, I thought. A long time admirer of hers, I wondered what would it be like… Continue reading

  • Just for fans of Sex and the City …

    All the hype around Carrie Bradshaw and Big hitting the big screen is giving me happy flashbacks to those weekly Sex and the City get togethers — 30 minutes with the TV and another two hours gabbing and laughing with friends. Sure, reruns are on almost every night of the week (or you can reserve… Continue reading

  • The Genesis Suite

    Have you heard about the Genesis Suite? In 1944, Hollywood composer/arranger Nathaniel Shilkret commissioned leading composers of the day (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Milhaud, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Tansman and Toch) to write a piece based on the book of Genesis. The seven-movement work (Shilkret himself wrote one of the movements) premiered in 1945 in Los Angeles. In the early… Continue reading

  • All Robbins all evening: a Pacific Northwest Ballet Preview

    Discover the artistry of choreographer Jerome Robbins at a lecture and video preview of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s program, All Robbins. All Robbins includes three ballets: Fancy Free, In the Night and The Concert (or, The Perils of Everybody) with music by Leonard Bernstein and Chopin. Doug Fullington, Educational Programs Manager at PNB will discuss the… Continue reading

  • Read a Movie, See a Book

    “See what it is invisible, and you will see what to write. That’s how Bobby used to put it. It was the invisible people he wanted to live with. The ones that we walk past every day, the ones we sometimes become. The ones in books who live only in someone’s mind’s eye.” A Love… Continue reading

  • King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

    I thought the days of video gaming on console machines were over, but it is not a lost art. King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters is a truly entertaining documentary about an underdog challenger to the Donkey Kong high score title.  After being laid off from Boeing, Redmond resident Steve Wiebe hones his Kong skills with… Continue reading

  • The Making of a Museum

    With the opening of the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) on March 8, 2008, Seattle’s cultural map expands to include one more unique and interesting destination. Through interactive exhibits, programs and events the museum promises to “document the unique historical and cultural experiences of African Americans in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.” NAAM is, clearly,… Continue reading

  • Cherry blossoms bloom herald the spring

    The appearance of cherry blossoms marks the arrival of spring in Japan, sending revelers of all ages outdoors to enjoy wine and picnic lunches under flowery pink canopies in the nation’s parks and orchards. One cannot delay cherry blossom viewing, or “hanami,” because the cherry blossom is like life: beautiful and tragically fleeting. In Seattle,… Continue reading

  • Turn It Up!: Cambodian Cassette Archives

    Unless you were living in Phnom Penh in the 1960s, you’ve probably never heard anything quite like Cambodian Cassette Archives: Khmer Folk & Pop Music, Vol. 1  (Various Artists, 2004) before. Painstakingly compiled from over 150 cassettes found in the Asian branch of the Oakland Public Library (by folks at Seattle’s own Sublime Frequencies label), this album… Continue reading

  • 30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity

    30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity Across Time and Space  inspires readers to think about art in a different way.  Accessible and not stuffy, this work looks chronologically across the centuries of art in a way that avoids the thematic conventions and classifications of the way we typically study art history. This… Continue reading

  • Gentrification and the Arts

    If you have picked up this year’s Seattle Reads novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu you’ve had a chance to get one novelist’s take on some of the issues and pressures that can fracture a community changing in the face of gentrification and immigration. Facing similar issues, particularly those of gentrification… Continue reading