We don't even know 1621 12th Ave anymore. So much has changed in the building that formerly housed the Capitol Hill Arts Center that it's undertaken a completely new identity. First, there's the obvious: CHAC was kaput as of June 30th (though the un-updated website lives on). Now Velocity is set to move their dancers in, having just signed a ten-year lease, and the news broke last week that Crave would be out of......

We think this counts as "writing on both sides of your brain." Starting tonight and running through June 1 at CHAC is one of the more unusual solo performer shows we've heard of: former Washington State Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn (a theater major, natch) has written a play about her experience wallowing in the mud of the election politics. Granted, the wallowing was not her idea--the mud was pumped in from out of state--but you......

Along with all the hiphop this weekend and the hella rad Subtle laser show tonight, there's a few more music events of note. First up, tonight State Bird plays an early show (8 p.m.) at the Q Cafe in Ballard. How both the venue and this great group of Ohio tribal-folksters have been under our radar is beyond us. Also tonight: Cat Power plays the Showbox SoDo. We know that Chan Marshall's not half as......

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......

SOCIAL HOUR: Girl Power Hour, we remark without comment, lasts two hours. It's is a "social networking experience for young professional women in Seattle... for meeting other cool women, sharing ideas, inspiring each other and connecting on a personal or business level, over cocktails." Meet up at the W Hotel for spring fashion tips from Closetfly, fitness advice from Sassy Fit, and declutter advice from A Logical Mess. There's also a clothing drive for......

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......

Local Singer/Songwriter Joanna Horowitz got a crazy idea a year or so ago. A long-time musician involved in the theater business, she thought it might be fun to write a musical. Enter 100 Heartbreaks... The plot, in a nutshell: Singer/songwriter Charlane wants to cross over into country music. She figures that, if she gets her heart broken 100 times, maybe she'll be ready to write an honest country heartbreak song. She gets stuck when......

Is live theater still relevant in a society where computer users can create high-quality video and distribute it almost instantly via the web? That's been the subject of an ongoing, rancorous debate between two Seattlest contributors, Jeremy and Charles, both former theater artists. Jeremy maintains the theater can yet be a powerful art form -- Charles feels it's a dying, irrelevant medium (most likely wounded by its own hand). To stir them up appropriately, the......

We walked into our caucus location -- a hot, overcrowded elementary school with signs that said "Welcome to the First Grade" -- as an undecided voter, and two and a half hours later walked out as an undecided voter, but with a deeper appreciation of democracy. Not that it made much difference in real-world terms. Our precinct (189 people turned out) went heavily Obama, which we understand is how the wind blew in Seattle......

We're sure we don't need to say this, but you can't miss your caucus. This is the first year in our whole time in the Pacific Northwest where it matters what Washington voters think. If you're still wondering where to go, here are two Dem or GOP caucus locators. Caucusing starts at 1pm. We understand that if you know who you support and you don't want to spend an hour or two talking about it,......

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......

Reliable sources tell us that if you ask Mike Daisey what he does for a living, he replies that he's "a monologist." Daisey may be the only person in America who introduces himself that way. If only those hordes who introduce themselves as "mortgage bankers" or "members of the Bush Administration" were as good at their jobs as Daisey is at his. We saw his Monopoly Saturday night at CHAC--it's smart, funny, and well......

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......

We've got less than totally positive feelings about the sate of theater today. In fact, last time the subject came up in the Seattlest newsroom, we were vociferous in our belief that it's a dead art form. But whenever we take such a dramatic and unwavering stance on one side of a debate, we're reminded that the world is not black and white and is actually shades of gray. So we'll admit it here and......

Monologuist and fascinating human being Mike Daisey arrives in town next week for a Jan 18 - Feb 3 run of his show Monopoly! at CHAC, followed by a shorter try-out of his newest piece, How Theater Failed America. We got Daisey on the horn the other day and took a walk down memory lane with him, a la Dick Cavett, to soften him up before surprising him with hard-hitting questions about how many pictures......

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......

Recommendeds are awesome. They let you tell us what you want more of (food posts) and what you don't (high school basketball previews). Keep letting your fingers do the talking! Here are the seven most-recommended posts of 2007: Dishin': Malay Satay Hut, by Seattlest Jay. 31 recommendeds! Happy Birthday Dear GuywhocanshutdownGasWorksParkwithasnapofhisfingers, Happy Birthday to You, by Seattlest Dan. 27 recommendeds. Seattlest Would Like to Apologize for Drunkenly Heckling Teenagers, by Seattlest Seth. 24 recommendeds. You......

Making up for weeks of hibernation and workaholism, Kim will hit the parties this weekend. Tonight, she’ll don her Groucho glasses for a lesbian function at Jabu’s celebrating the births of her two favorite Sagitarii. Saturday, it’s to the War Room for a company party with the missus and her workmates. Finally, she’ll ship off to the sub-tropics on Monday, where she’ll spend what remains of 2007. While his wife is taking a Wilderness......

Maybe the first thing we should tell you about Striking 12 at CHAC -- besides the SAD tie-in, the rave reviews, or the fact that only 600 people in Seattle will have the chance to see it -- is that you can win half-off tickets to it. A limited number of $15 tickets are being held for those who correctly answer the following trivia question:Name at least one of the bands featured the first year......

This is the end, the end of free movies, care of Scion. Single tear. Via their Route film series, the youth-oriented car company has already tackled the true-to-life topics of blood diamonds in hip hop and nightclubbing in the late '80s NYC queer community. Now for something completely different: Daft Punk's Electroma is an odyssey of two robots who journey across a mythic American landscape of haunting, surreal beauty on a quest to become......

As previously mentioned, Les Savy Fav play Neumo's tonight. If the idea of a pregnant dude spitting water on you doesn't quite float your boat, head to the Croc to check out Cave Singers and Fleet Foxes. Tonight is also a free-free-free hip hop show at the War Room with Bun B and Swizz Beatz, care of the redundantly good people at Goods and Zune. Show up early; the last event like this, with Clipse......

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......

One of the great things about Seattle Opera's Young Artists fall show is that while it's staged and costumed, that's about all you get. The set is "suggested," the lighting minimal, the props bare essentials. So what's on display are the singers' voices and any dramatic talent -- plus, CHAC, compared to McCaw Hall, feels pretty much like your living room. But we don't have to tell you how cool that can be; both Friday......

Saturday, Tera will give herself a VIP tour at the opening of Aritzia. She will follow this potentially hectic event by introducing a friend to her newest wine obsession - Twisted Cork. Sunday she will trek to Qwest and root for Chicago, uh, eh, oops...Seattle. Yes, root for the Seahawks. Jack's heading to the Showbox proper tonight to see Canadian indie pop band Stars. Sunday, he's hoping to see Rex Grossman slip into old......

Trouble in Tahiti / Rita: Seattle Young Artists Program @ CHAC 8-10pm, Nov. 16-17 // CHAC // Tickets $20 in advance Friday and Saturday, Seattle Opera's Young Artists Program perform at CHAC with an unusual double-feature. We buttonholed our friend Jonathan Dean, the Education Department's Artistic Administrator, and peppered him with hard-hitting questions to get to the bottom of all this. MvB: You're doing two shows, one by Leonard Bernstein, one by Gaetano Donizetti. What's......

We're doubling up this evening, and dropping in at chamber guitar group Tuning the Air, in their new CHAC-tastic location, for some Robert Fripp-ist unchained melodies. Here's the pdf of their Seattle Magazine profile. If you like acoustic guitars, this is your home on Monday nights. 8-9pm // CHAC // $10 suggested donation Then if the power's still on, we're off to Fremont, and the Jenny Owen Youngs show at the High Dive. We had......

We made the freaking expedition to Ballard to hear Tuning the Air once, but now you don't have to -- they've moved to CHAC on Capitol Hill for a 10-week run. Tonight's the kick-off. Tuning the Air is guitar-topia, a guitar chamber orchestra -- a dozen or more guitarists playing works from Fripp to Bach, the Beatles to the Beach Boys, with original material and improvisations mixed in. And it's all done in a circle......

Kim is off to see Susan Werner at the Triple Door Sunday night. This weekend is a toss up for Matt between going down to Portland for the final days of the Body World 3 show at OMSI or heading out west to the The 26th Annual West Coast Oyster Shucking Championship and Washington State Seafood Festival. As previously noted, Seth is going to take The Grand Tour with George Jones at the Paramount. Friday,......