Alt.Bumbershoot - Sunday

All music all the time wears us out, so we decided to hopscotch around Bumbershoot this year and take advantage of the talks, arts performances, and art exhibits.

Thinking Globally I
We arrived a little late, having forgotten about a little thing called traffic (about half the people on the #8 bus disembarked and hoofed it from Dexter). Ngugi Wa Thiong'o was reading from his Wizard of the Crow (which we think John Updike was sort of panning in the New Yorker recently), and then the Stranger's Charles Mudede moderated a short discussion between Ashok Mathur and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o -- replete with the du jour references to "postcolonialism" and "lenses" and "being read." >>Snoozer.

The Like
We didn't know anything about The Like, the Los Angeles band who appeared not-entirely-fresh from a plane from London, but rocked like little Blondies anyway. They can play, and Elizabeth Berg (or "Z") can sing. We recorded snippets of their set to track down the names of the songs later, but who were we kidding? >>Fun!

Floyd Standifer
We didn't catch his whole set, but Floyd had the Earshot Jazz venue at SRO. It was going to be light on trumpet, since he was having technical issues with the brass. He was playing tenor sax mostly instead. If there's better music than jazz for 3:00pm on a sultry end-of-summer day, we don't know what it is. >>Satisfied.

The Language of Dance
This was an infuriating discussion with PNB's Peter Boal, Spectrum Dance's Donald Byrd, and choreographer Zoe Scofield (the guy from the Rubberbandance group couldn't make it). We're working up a rant on this topic for later, but essentially the panelists told the audience that "it's not us, it's you." Apparently it's the audience job to be open, able to "get" things, and the artists' job to be unable to describe their project, its purpose, or intention. Byrd was the lone panel member to discuss access points for people who haven't made dance their life's work. >>Grr!

The Show - Troy Miszklevitz
Here we made a wrong turn somehow. We believe this was actually a kid's show and we missed that disclaimer. Troy is a one-man show, an adept mime and vocal effects man, but not (if he's responsible for writing his show) a playwright. His characters aren't even stock, they're more like badly copied stock. People were fleeing after the first 15 minutes but like idiots we'd sat in the middle of a row, between two larger people we couldn't see edging past politely. Those who stayed, on the other hand, cheered. >>Dislocated.

Mike Daisey - Monopoly
This was our highlight of the day. We'd never seen Mike Daisey before, but had heard about his monologue based on Amazon life. He's hilarious. Monopoly is incredibly well crafted, setting up a number of diverse narrative threads and then slowly bringing them all together in unexpected ways. It's not all laughs (though his reaction to MS Word's "helpfulness" is worth the price of admission) -- there's poignancy, too. >>Fanfreakingtastic!

Great Big Sea
What's weird is when you stop by to hear a band that's new to you and the whole crowd, standing, packed into every inch of the lawn area, sings lustily along with a number of songs you've never even heard of. Great Big Sea is from Newfoundland, and they play a mixture of rocked-up folk songs and their own material, which struck us as the kind of songs that you hear at your summer fair. The crowd was in their palms the whole set. >>Sing-along sensation.