Bumbershoot Sans Music

Man, is there a LOT of Bumbershoot stuff on Seattlest right now. If you're anything like Editor Dan you're hoping for a break in the Bumber action; a contributor's recounting of a trip to Lake Chelan, a reaction to a dunderheaded Seattle Times editorial, or even some lame PR survey naming Seattle 16th Most Fashionable City West of the Rockies. Anything! Well, you can hope for something different, but your hopes will be dashed because this is another Bumbershoot post.

No music, though. How about that?

Rat City Roller Girls et al
Three cheers for Bumbershoot doing away with the Key Arena music venue. If it ain't good enough for the Sonics, it ain't good enough for Bumbershoot. On Saturday Key Arena hosted the Flat Track Invitational roller derby thing and even though we didn't get to spend as much time as we would have liked in there, we were able to stop in and see a half of hot Rat City action. In concept this event is so cool we think it could stand on its own and we're looking forward to a similar tournament outside of Bumbershoot. Seattlest felt a little like a European watching the Seahawks in there, though. Next time someone hosts a roller derby tournament like this where spectators are expected to drift in and out, the fact that they don't understand the game has to be addressed. What the hell is a Lead Jammer and what gives her the right to call it off?

Poetry Bus
We were all set to make fun of the poetry bus. The sign said that an event started at 4:30 and according to our watch it was 4:26. We're there, it's there. It's a poetry bus. This should be terrible. The event scheduled at 4:30 was something like "826 All-Stars" and if there's anything that can stem the tide of Seattlest's scorn it's 826 Seattle. We got on the bus, which turned out to be packed with fine and upstanding patrons of the arts who were there to enjoy some poetry. We had to part a few of them to get a seat and promptly the poetry began. A kid! A tiny little girl started reading poetry in the middle of the bus in a tiny little voice and we strained our ears and heard a few excellent poems. A poetry bus is like a ridicule magnet for Seattlest, but talented and tiny little girl poets have a built-in ridicule force field. A slightly older kid of the male variety read some angry poems and they kicked us off the bus, which will soon be headed on a 50-day, 50-city tour.

Experimental Housing Project

When we saw this installation on Saturday morning, we told our companions it looked ripe for abuse. When we saw it on Saturday night, it was being abused. When we saw it again on Monday, it was closed. Thanks, kids.

Pixel Dolls, Meat-Space, and Everything All At Once
If you could find this, you were one of the lucky ones. It was kind of tucked away at the back of what Bumbershoot called the Northwest Rooms, and even if you got into the exhibition, there was no guarantee that you'd find your way all the way into the Second Life projection room at the back. Thank god Seattlest did. The artists here built virtual art on an island inside the game-like thing Second Life and in this room a couple of players' screens were projected on walls in the middle of the room. The players explored and chatted and generally did nothing. "Hey, where are you?" "In the hot tub." "Which one?" "Here, I'll teleport you." Cut to two avatars sitting in an hot tub atop a giant housing structure. "I think this is chemical waste." "Me too. It's not a hot tub." Despite being visually spectacular and enthralling Seattlest for the better part of an hour, we don't quite get the idea behind this one.

Softly Threatening: Artwork of the Modern Domestic
We lucked into a tour of this exhibit with the artists and each and every one of them showed incredible work. The Home Ec stuff has gotten a lot of press lately, and the art is well-focused inside the "political commentary on the idea of our modern domestic" ouevre. To Seattlest it's more political commentary on the idea of our ancestor's domestic, but whatever. Tree cozys, knit uzis, and giant grandmas wearing gasmasks and wholly constructed of frosting are all disturbing. The elk piece with the chandelier and the entrails made us want to go cry in the shower until the water ran too cold.

This was supposed to be the digital revolution vs the domestic arts. Jen Graves said in The Stranger:

The handcrafters make art that is confrontational, impolite, and cerebral—not folksy and nostalgic. And the online world that provides a medium for the digital artists is only shocking in that it is so routine—it is a fake real world, where “residents” have “real estate” (the term finally comes to life!) and create lives mind-numbingly similar to the ones they live offline.

Personally, we don't buy the "this vs. this" of the two exhibits. The materials are different, but the actual machinations behind creating the two styles of art are remarkably similar. They're both geeky. They both require hours of drudgery. Some of the clicks come from a mouse while others are provided by knitting needles, but the repestitive tasks that are required to construct a shotgun out of yarn are very similar to the building of a virtual house, and we suspect that the artists behind each have a lot in common, despite their vastly separate tool sets. The people behind the geek bible Make Magazine (which Seattlest has contributed to, btw) have recently launched a quarterly magazine called Craft, and we suspect they see more than a few similarities between technological hacks and domestic arts. And if you're about to say, "but the virtual art wasn't political at all and that's a huge part of the domestic thing," well, you're right in this case, but the majority of the art installations we've seen or heard about in SL ARE political.

ASSCAT
Not as funny as it was billed, DAVID. Fatigue probably had something to do with that, though. We saw the afternoon show on Monday and while there were lots of great comedians in there from all your fave TV comedies (Upright Citizens Brigade, Man Bites Dog, Best Week Ever, Saturday Night Live, 24), there were some dead spots. Still funny, but not as funny as we were led to believe.