It's an honest question. Last week when we read and reported the story of James Paroline who was killed by a single punch, we were slightly stunned that the effects of a punch could kill a man. So much so that we assumed it was likely a very rare occurrence and a tragic case where the most imperfect circumstances lined up. However, tonight while browsing the local news we spotted the following headline: "Modified Guilty......

According to Slog, the Seattle Times is about to lay off 200 employees (at least 45 of them from the newsroom). As a friend noted, it's not entirely surprising. Print media far and wide are bowing to the evolution of demand for media. This Seattlest, for one, only ever touches a newspaper anymore if it's in a bin at our local coffeeshop. And, even then, it's to pull out the crossword. We get all......

Right on the heels of the announcement that the Mars Volta was added to the Sasquatch lineup, and right before tickets go on sale this Saturday, the three-day music festival has seen fit to delineate who will be playing on which day: Saturday, May 24th R.E.M. / Modest Mouse / M.I.A. / The New Pornographers / The National / Ozomatli / Beirut / Dengue Fever / Fleet Foxes / The Breeders / Okkervil River......

After months of wild speculation, the official 2008 Sasquatch lineup has finally been announced: R.E.M. / The Cure / The Flaming Lips U.F.O. Show / Death Cab For Cutie / Modest Mouse / M.I.A. / Flight Of The Conchords / Rodrigo Y Gabriela / Michael Franti & Spearhead / The Breeders / Built To Spill / The Hives / Tegan & Sara / The Presidents / Ghostland Observatory / Ozomatli / The New Pornographers......

Chris Walla is best known for being the guitarist in Death Cab for Cutie. Or he's known as a producer for Tegan & Sara and the Decemberists. Or maybe you heard about the little incident he had with Homeland Security confiscating his computer last fall. Now Walla's got another reason for notability: his first solo album, Field Manual, out today on Barsuk Records. Singer-songwriter stuff ain't exactly our bag, but Walla's smooth delivery ensures......

Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jules Dassin, Federico Fellini -- thanks to distributor Rialto Pictures, their restored films are popping up in theaters around the country, and, happily, here in Seattle. SIFF's classic film series, starting today and running through February 7, commemorates Rialto's 10th year in the movie business. Funny that a classic film company would be just ten years old, but life has a seemingly limitless supply of surprises, doesn't it? Tonight......

Former Washington governor Booth Gardner has Parkinson's. He's been using his leftover political capital to campaign for a "Death with Dignity" initiative, to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Washington state. And it's been working. Even the New York Times took note of Gardner's labors. But P-I columnist Joel Connelly disagrees with Gardner's stance. To Connelly or his headline writer, it's a "last selfish act." So, "for balance," Connelly says, he retails the story of Chris Carlson:Chris......

If you haven't yet heard through the grapevine, Death Cab will release their 8th studio album in May of this year. Teaser video HERE. (After watching the trailer, go on and check out the new look of their site. Sexy!)......

We've been hitting shows on the Seattle music scene for about four years now, and if there's one thing we can say with certainty, it's that Seattle doesn't need more musicians, it needs better ones. Such may be the consolation of learning that next week, the Seattle chapter of Paul Green's School of Rock opens. If Green's now famous "school" can help create a new generation of musicians whose influences go deeper than Green Day,......

DJ Nphared spins for Sportn' Life artists, including D. Black and Fatal Lucciauno, and he also DJs for Grynch. Seattlest enjoyed his mixes at the Parker Brothaz show on Monday, so we set out to learn more about this guy's ethos. What two records, more than any other records, influenced your adolescence? The first album I remember listening to religiously was Geto Boys' Till Death Do Us Part. I thought they were the illest,......

Inspired by a random iPod event at Seattlest's Thanksgiving, a friend lamented the early death of John Denver and then launched into a diatribe about how he didn't pull a Kennedy; that is, Denver wasn't a dilettante pilot. He went on to explain that Denver was an experienced pilot who owned many planes and flew often. He died, our friend claimed, when one of the fuel tanks in the experimental plane he was flying......

No. But that doesn't make this factoid from a political campaign article in today's P-I any less disturbing: "If it's OK to notify a political campaign about this guy, what about the neighbors he lived near for months?" said Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff's Department, pointing out that [Mitt] Romney's aides were warned about [Daniel Thomas] Tavares's presence here during the candidate's recent campaign swing through Seattle, though Troyer's own office......

A few weeks ago, singer/raconteur Jenny Owen Youngs was in town, playing at the High Dive the same time as the Fremont Bridge was being closed evenings, which led to our arriving mid-set in a state of high dudgeon. We decided to skip a half-assed review, and afterwards fired off some impertinent questions via email. We just heard back, and as you'll see, Jenny schools us a bit. Now we adore her even more. If......

Last night Seattlest made our way down to take a look at the big art installation at the Belmont. We didn't bother to get a ticket, but figured we'd be able to charm our way in regardless (we were). Walking up to the building, it was hard to not get excited. Sure, there was art to be seen, but this wasn't just art, this was an event. The crowds outside, the crowds inside, and......

The script to Birdie Blue is the sort that, if there was any justice in this world, would have been unceremoniously trashed by every producer whose desk it crossed. Unfortunately, this being the real world and all, this awful script has been produced off-Broadway and in regional theatres all across the country, despite the fact it's guilty of every terrible conceit and device you could associate with the modern theatre. Nothing would have made us......

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......

Next year’s publication of Itch, Love Stories About Heroin means that if you've been waiting for a full-length, in-depth book about Alice in Chains' Layne Staley—well, don’t get your hopes up. You'd think someone would've managed to write a Heavier Than Heavenish Staley biography by now. After all, Staley's voice was as unique, his contribution to Seattle's 90s music scene (arguably) as important, and his death as grisly as fellow heroin addict Kurt Cobain's.......

God knows we love that funny, brainy ole Tom Stoppard. If you're not an Oxford undergraduate or an actor of bit parts, though, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is just likeable, a diversion about the way we divert ourselves from facing death. Stoppard deploys his fearsome rhetorical skills, disembowels Hamlet, ponders probability, and argues mightily that death "is not." (So you can't, strictly speaking, be dead.) You can't keep Stoppard fans away from this kind......

Yeah, yeah, yeah… we’ve bawled a bunch about the blahness of Queen Anne cuisine, from the "exotic" Chinoise at the top of the hill to the "exotic" Racha at the bottom of the hill. So we lowered our expectations a bit to try some good ol' American food at Floyd's Place, which reviewers consistently Yelped as, well, "decent." "Decent" is a decent enough descriptor of the BBQ pork loin sandwich, served with sides of slaw......

Bumbershoot 2005 hosted the inaugural People Talking and Singing show, where 2,800 festival attendees packed McCaw Hall to see Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), Mike Doughty, Sarah Vowell, and Death Cab for Cutie, all the while raising $18K for 826 Seattle, the youth writing center in Greenwood. Last year's event, also at Bumbershoot, was hosted by Daily Show Resident Expert™ John Hodgman and singer Jonathan Coulton. Eggers, Handler, Gibbard, and Vowell were back......

Maybe it was the woods in Into the Woods at 5th Avenue Theatre that made us think of it as the "Schoolhouse Rock" of musicals -- they're cardboardy, blocky swirls of of branch and leaf painted a not-found-in-nature green. But the 5th Ave's show itself -- inspired by Bruno "I was wrong about everything" Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment -- brims with '70s-childhood nostalgia, rhythmic energy, and a love of lyrical ping-pong that recalls the gleeful......

Wait--choke back that vomit. We're making shit up. Speculating doom, if you will. Only half of that title is true. Charles Cross' 2001 biography of Kurt Cobain actually is being adapted for the big screen. By highly-anticipated The Kite Runner and Wolverine screenwriter David Benioff, no less. (Aside: Seattlest once met Benioff at an Austin bar, while unsuccessfully schmoozing with Hollywood types. Before we knew better, we asked him, "Are you a writer, too?" Ha.)......

Corner of 3rd and Union last night, the air's full of crazies. The rabid anti-Hillary crazies, fueled by and fueling right-wing panic even as they convince the mainstream that she's unelectable because she's so polarizing ("Just look at us!"). The Ron Paul crazies, all suited and tied. The 9/11 crazies in search of evil conspiracies. So what do the street crazies have to do with, say, the newspaper crazies? It's the possibility, however small, that......

We may have invested in a DSLR camera a few months ago, but we're not made of money. Which is why we've never gotten around to investing in Photoshop. At this point in our learning curve, we'd rather spend our time taking a lot of photos than tweaking them to death on our MacBook Pro. Give us infinite possibilities and we're paralyzed. Which is why, when we've been editing photos, we've been using locally......

Seattle Rep's The Murderers is three monologues, one after the other, that thankfully get more entertaining as the show goes along. Each monologue deals with a murder (or murders) committed at the Florida retirement community, and sends up a different view of senior citizens -- as old moneybags who keep their heirs on tenterhooks, as randy old goats, as cash cows for the unscrupulous. It's a mildly dark series of "I-dun-its" for Matlock's urban audiences......

In December 1992, Kurt Cobain and rock journalist Michael Azerrad began a series of interviews that would eventually become the beating heart of Azerrad's band biography, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. For that project, Azerrad recorded over 25 hours of the rock star's musings and reflections, but until pairing with director AJ Schnack to make Kurt Cobain About a Son, had never released the tapes' contents to the public. This film, then,......

We start things off this weekend with a simple two words from Donte: Muthafucking Justice! As Halloween approaches, it seems that the tradition of Seattlests stalking each other continues. Seth will attend the opening night of the Seattle Opera's first ever co-production with New York's Metropolitan Opera, Iphigenia in Tauris, which is conveniently scheduled at the exact fucking same time as the Husky/ASU game. He'll try to catch the fourth quarter at the Spectator on......

It's not often that a play comes along that unites both senior citizens and the people who want to kill them. If your parents are elderly, this may strike you as "fair and balanced" theatre. Seattle Rep's The Murderers also unites the talents of "highly respectable playwright" Jeffrey Hatcher and respectability's opposite in many ways, actress Sarah Rudinoff. Her character Minka says about killing: "You do it once, it just gets easier and easier --......

Along with the million other words being written on this topic, we at Seattlest thought it was a good time to share some of our thinking on the Roads and Transit bill we're going to have the chance to vote on this November. The crux is this: Voters in the greater Puget Sound region are being asked to approve almost $11 billion for a 50-mile expansion of light rail and $7 billion on highways around......

Two-thirds of Pacific Northwest Ballet's "All Balanchine" show is surprising and exciting. Showcasing three ballets spanning the career of George Balanchine, the leading American ballet choreographer of the 20th Century and famously the co-founder of the New York City Ballet, PNB manages to both remind audiences of how adventurous dance can be, while at the same time reinforcing the sense that major ballet companies have to carefully balance the experimental with the traditional in......