Capitol Hill's hardest working man in show business, CHAC's Matthew Kwatinetz, has been devoting long hours to the survival of Odd Fellows Hall as an arts space, ever since he found out about the planned sale. A pragmatist, Kwatinetz isn't tying all his hopes to keeping the Hall for arts use; he's more interested in it as evidence of the arts being forced out of Capitol Hill, an area they once defined. After hosting an......

Ever since we heard that Nick "Hedwig" Garrison was going to be the Emcee, we were looking forward to seeing Cabaret at the 5th Ave (through April 13, tickets: $20-$77). We imagined that Garrison knows exactly what life in little cabarets is like. And, it turns out, he does--of all the performers onstage, he's the one who gives that extra wattage for the big numbers, dials it down for friendly, catty asides, and acts like......

FILM: If you see only one documentary about fonts this year, make it Helvetica. New York taxi numbers are also in Helvetica. The font is on IRS tax forms, U.S. mailboxes, and ConEd trucks. The 50-year-old sans serif font spells out countless logos: Sears. Bloomingdale’s. JCPenney. Crate & Barrel. Target. Fendi. Jeep. Toyota. Energizer. Oral-B. MetLife. Nestlé. Once you realize Helvetica is everywhere, says Hustwit, "you just can’t stop thinking about it." 7:15, 9pm......

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from......

There are two more poets due in town for the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series, both in April. Lucille Clifton shows up at the Intiman on April 7, Edward Hirsch on April 21. We hadn't been to one of these poetry talks before, and since Irish feminist and poet Eavan Boland read from both her prose and poetry, we're not sure we got a typical experience. Whatever it was, we were happy we dropped......

BOOKS: Novelist Richard Powers reads tonight at Benaroya Hall for Seattle Arts and Lectures. The former computer programmer's latest book, The Echo Maker, is "a haunting novel about memory, identity, and the boundaries of neuroscience," (Booklist), and won the National Book Award and all sorts of "Best Book of the Year" awards in 2006. He's a novelist of "ideas"; David Foster Wallace is a big fan. Here's an interview in the P-I. 7:30pm //......

POETRY: Eavan Boland is from Dublin, Ireland, and we take it that "Eavan" is a girl's name there. It's not immediately obvious, it it? She carries more of a charge in her than that boggy, peaty, old Seamus Heaney. One of her poems, The Pomegranate, begins: The only legend I have ever loved is the story of a daughter lost in hell. And found and rescued there. Love and blackmail are the gist of......

Theatre: A production of Mr. Marmalade got introduced by Curtain Up thusly:If you've always associated marmalade with sweetness, you're likely to expect the title character of Noah Haidle's play to be a sweet, lovable guy -- just the sort of imaginary friend for a four-year-old moppet named Lucy. Well, think again. Playwright Haidle's Mr. Marmalade is a cocaine snorting, emotionally out to lunch businessman with a briefcase packed with kinky sex toys. Not a......

Are you looking for exciting theatre outside the Seattle city limits? If you are interested in the artistic works of people from all around the Northwest, you can still check out the four remaining shows of the Northwest Playwrights Alliance (NPA) Festival of Northwest Plays in Tacoma. The festival will showcase three new full-length plays and several 10 minute plays with themes varying from disaster survivors to “tongue-in-cheek potty humor.” Proceeds from the festival......

Is February Jane Austen month? PBS has turned every Sunday evening into a Jane celebration (see the KCTS Jane Austen blog for the definition of overkill), but if you want to experience Jane Austen the way she meant to be experienced (if you get our drift) and are too lazy to read a book, then Book-It's Persuasion is all you, baby. Book-It is the place where they actually act out the whole book, which to......

Tonight the documentary Inlaws & Outlaws opens at Central Cinema. It's about marriage, who's got it, who doesn't, who wants it. As it's showing at Central Cinema, it all comes with pizza and beer if you want to make a dinner documentary of it. As the film begins, you meet each person without cues as to who’s gay or straight or coupled up or single. As the stories unfold, stereotypes crumple. Expect "candor, good......

From the real-life inspiration of Seattle-based writer and performer Joanna Horowitz comes 100 Heartbreaks, a story about country singer hopeful Charlane Tucker. Tucker, a self-proclaimed expert at hook-ups, break-ups and hangovers, is a regular girl who desperately wants to "make it" in the country music world. Her genius plan to get to Nashville: Find 100 men who will love and leave her. 100 Heartbreaks is a one-woman country musical, performed by Horowitz, that follows......

We see on CL that Richard Hugo House is now accepting applications (deadline April 11) for its writer's residency program. Only two writers will be selected, who will have the chance to teach in the Hugo House's writing classes. The residency starts this September 1, 2008, and lasts one year. The highlight is you get to live, subsidized, in one of the “Hugo Huts”—Seattle’s historic Belltown Cottages. The rent subsidy doesn't include utilities, jackets with......

Mike Daisey has been in town performing his notorious Monopoly, a controversial monologue exploring the excesses of American capitalism (particularly of the Wal-Mart variety). But this weekend, Daisey turns his withering gaze on the theatre itself, with How Theater Failed America at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. Daisey takes aim at the theater for its manifold failures: its pretentions, its disconnect from the world around it, its self-satisfaction. (Check out a five-minute sample over at......

CHAC's indefatigable Matthew Kwatinetz is organizing trips to Olympia to show support for extending the use of King County's Lodging Tax for culture. Kwatinetz claims that without the extension, arts funding could be "cut from $35 million per year to less than $2 million per year." Thursday morning's caravan leaves from CHAC at 10am. Who knows, maybe you'll run into Josh Feit in the Olympian halls of power. Think about that.HOW: Buses and vans will......

For Drought and Rain, Vol. 2, Vietnamese choreographer Ea Sola follows up her dance exploration of life during wartime with war's effects on the next generation. Sola was only twelve when she left Vietnam in 1974, so she has a foot in both worlds. There's more preview video, if you're into that kind of thing. There are thirteen dancers and, happily, six musicians (we get a little tired of canned music and dance). In the......

For all those interested, tonight the Capitol Hill Arts Center will be hosting a panel discussion with the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce on the topic of "Is there still room for culture on Capitol Hill?" The impetus behind the event is the generally rapacious rate of condo-conversion and construction that's pushed out notable businesses along Pike/Pine, and now finds its apogee in the sale of Oddfellows Hall, which threatens to displace a number of......

Last night we made up for our dumb-assedness last week and caught episode 2 of Douglas Coupland's JPod, and damn if that weren't a strange beast. Coupland's surreal, self-referential, novelistic discourse on globalism has been transformed into an odd-ball, dry-humored, dramedy miniseries that's strangely addictive. The show centers on Ethan and his fellow programmers in the "J" pod at Vancouver's EA (redubbed Neotronic Arts for the show) campus. Ethan & co. are working on a......

We here at Seattlest use the internet a lot, so when a website we visit strikes us as exceptionally useful, we think it deserves some props, even if doing so makes us look a little dorky. We'll warn you in advance, it’s going to be hard to swallow what we're about to say, so brace yourself. For all its faults, our city's government has a truly great website because it is astoundingly helpful and......

In preparation for his upcoming visit, Seattlest sat down and emailed four fairly inane questions to the novelist, essayist, and MacArthur genius Colson Whitehead. It's true: we could have tried asking Whitehead insightful questions about his brilliant novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, and Apex Hides the Hurt, but we figured, everyone tries to do that and he winds up getting asked them same question over and over again. So instead, we asked him about......

How about opening your big yap in person for a change? Join the panel discussion about how to keep a healthy arts community on Capitol Hill. Meet up at CHAC next Wednesday, the 16th, at 5:30pm and plot next moves over a martini. As hosts the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce put it:In 2007, the Urban Land Institute named Seattle the #2 real estate market in the nation (after Manhattan), and Americans for the Arts......

This morning we were glancing through the Going Out section of the Seattle P-I when we ran across these two questionable entries:"War and Peace": 1 p.m. Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel (part one screens today) is widely considered to be one of Russia's greatest achievements. Right up there with Ivan Drago and those wooden dolls that open up to reveal a bunch of smaller wooden dolls. SIFF Cinema, Nesholm Family Lecture Hall, McCaw......

Hoo-eee, was Chop Suey's stage packed on Friday night! Promised: Macklemore, Gabriel Teodros, Rajnii, Language Arts, Knowmads, Hella Maze, and DJ Marc Sense. Performed: all of the above, plus XPerience, Khingz, and some group called 2012. Sometimes it can be exhilarating and refreshing to have so many artists jumping on and off stage in one night. In this case, it was confusing and overwhelming, and we hardly know where to start when telling you......

Sometimes the world really is a beautiful place. Specifically when there's beer involved. Jack's meeting friends on Saturday for a session of oak-aged beer tasting at Brouwer's Big Wood Fest. He'll then spend the rest of the day rubbing his tum tum and smiling a lot. Thrilled about the possibility of the year's first snow fall, Kim will spend as much of the weekend as possible getting over the cold that's been lingering for a......

It seems like we've been seeing a lot of plays lately with children in them. Into the Woods at the 5th Avenue had kids, and Whistle Down the Wind at the 5th Avenue and A Christmas Carol at the ACT both do. We wondered, who are these child actors? How do they find time to act when there is so much television to watch? So we had a short chat via email with Elijah Ostrow,......

Let's talk about the kind of band Moving Units is not. If any of you have seen Broken Social Scene live, you know that one of the most engaging aspects of their show is that it's one big love-fest. Everyone on stage smiles, laughs, and cracks jokes. It's one big happy family, and for the entire performance, you're welcomed as part of it. Moving Units on the other hand, seems like the kind of band......

Tuning the Air continues their multi-guitar soundscape at the Capitol Hill Arts Center showroom every Monday through 12/17. So you've only got four more chances to see the guitorchestra in action, playing their fusion of the old and new, the classic and the modern, live and in the round. Intrepid reporter MvB has seen them on more than one occasion and had this to say about the CHAC residency: Tuning the Air is guitar-topia,......

Tuning the Air has been performing their big guitar orchestra take on all genres, from classical to rock, pop, and ambient, for a couple years now. Think the Beatles back-to-back with Bach, and some improv thrown in for good (huh huh) measure. The show used to be in Ballard, but for the past few months, they've taken up a weekly residency at the Capitol Hill Arts Center, in the CHAC showroom on Mondays through......

It was four years ago that we'd started falling in love with the woman who would one day be our wife. It was about that same time that she'd lent us an album called Night Songs by a band called Stars. And if memory serves us with any amount of clarity, our devoted attention to that album became one of the many things which cemented our infatuation with this woman. Night Songs (Stars' first LP)......

It's not that development in itself sucks; it's that our county and city government doesn't believe in development for art's sake, despite all those studies about the half billion the arts return to the community. When we look around, we don't see a lot of public investment in the single most expensive thing that artists and smaller arts organizations have to face: a place to work, rehearse, show, perform. We did see this notice that......