Results tagged “design”

Design geeks, jot a note on your Helvetica fonted calendar: If you didn't make the weeklong run of Objectified at the Northwest Film Forum--its last showing is at 7 p.m. tonight--you'll have another chance come August. The NWFF just announced that Gary Hustwit's documentary on how everyday items around us came to be will return for one more weekend in August. There'll be two showings a night the 14th-16th.

DESIGN: Attention parents! Before you pony up the dough to send your little Da Vinci to Cornish, drop in at the Design Faculty Exhibition and see what the faculty at the Design department (Susan Boye, Jeff Brice, Tiffany Laine De Mott, Jon Gierlich, Jacob Kohn, Claudia Meyer-Newman, Julie Myers, Ellen Forney, Julie Gaskill, Hovie Hawk, BeAnne Hull, Marisa Mangum, Dan Shafer, Hal Tangen, Daniel Thornton, and Junichi Tsuneoka) can do. It's due diligence, people, and worth it for no other reason than because Ellen Forney's name is in the middle of that list.

Other than the perfunctory post-holiday shopping sales, Seattle's fashion community pretty much goes in hibernation in January and February—with the exception of the second annual Project Red Dress fashion competition. The Seattle chapter of Fashion Group International is brightening up our fierce-less February with the largest student fashion design contest to hit Seattle, and not a minute too soon for those interested in fashion beyond North Face fleece.

According to an email we just received and the permit application it linked to, Seattle's Greyhound Bus Station is ambling slowly and uncomfortably towards the end.

Attention Pearl Jam fans and Flatstock attendees: You need the new, superfancy art book Pearl Jam vs Ames Bros: 13 Years of Tour Posters.

Outfit called Not For Tourists has just published a guide to Seattle. It's a handsome book, looks just like Moleskine journal, complete with oilcloth cover, fat elastic closure, gorgeous paper. The Seattle version is tenth in a series, cobbled together by a design staff in faraway Noo Yawk with input by a locally based "city editor" named Fred Beldin, who contributes occasional music reviews to The Stranger.

Seattlest--very much not a design geek--loved last week's match between designers Naz Hamid and Chris Glass. It works like this: One designer creates an image in fifteen minutes. His opponent then has fifteen minutes of his own to edit/riff on/respond to that image. They go back and forth for ten rounds, all while the peanut gallery (that's you) and a designated commentator judge the results.

We were bummed we didn't make it down to Portland for Jim Blanchard's show at the Night Gallery (we were stuck at the Ballard Sunset Bowl where we overheard a guy in the bathroom piss AND puke at the same time, which can't be normal. Who pukes standing, while pissing?), but lucky for us the show is now on the gallery's site. There are some classics here - including the Afrouni-Teat, a version of which we already own - plus some new surprises like the image above, evidently titled Le Spider, 2006-2007 acrylic on stretched canvas, 20 x 20 inches.

We recently asked friends and strangers if hosts of popular television shows “Devine Design”, “Flip This House” and “House Hunters” were real-life designers and real estate agents before network giants “discovered” them.

Kim is off to see Susan Werner at the Triple Door Sunday night.

We don't mean to steal Mary's thunder; however, her photograph moved us to write down some of the thoughts we've been having about the Ballard Denny's closure. We knew it was coming; however, just like the presence of vampires in Sunnydale, we didn't actually want to think about it. The light, the clouds, the darkness of the trees, and the Shell sign way in the distance all punctuate the loneliness of the now-derelict sign.

There were all the things a soapbox derby should have at last weekend's Redbull Soapbox derby in Fremont: sleek, high-design vehicles next to totally scrappy, yet hysterically themed clunkers (the pickle seemed to be a crowd favorite). Attitude, bravado, and shenanigans mixed with derring-do. There were kids and old folks, and everyone in between. And ridiculous skits before each run (many requiring the removal of pants), a nice twist. Unexpectedly, there was Sir Mix-A-Lot and Travis Pastrana (we actually thought that was cool, but many seemed not to know the moto trickster by name) for judges. There was just one thing we wish there had been more of, and that was sightlines for the race. Or, as fellow Seattlest contributor Jack put it: "No matter where we stood along the course, it was hard to see anything without dry-humping the person in front of us as we leaned forward hoping to catch just a glimpse of our heroes cruising down Fremont Avenue."

Seattle Rep's Twelfth Night, which they're nerdily calling Twelfe Night as per the First Folio, is nearly shipwrecked by dull production design and the cast's inability to make anything of the esoteric wordplay that audiences once found witty, or at least clever. But the portrayal of life lived to excess is still gripping drama, and Frank X.'s steward Malvolio burns with a self-importance that veers from comic over-stepping to something much eerier. Tickets start at $15 ($10 for 25 and under).

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 order to keep audiences coming.

In December we wrote about local restaurant review site Urbanspoon. We loved it then, we love it now, and we've been loving it in the interim. Since we last chatted with Ethan Lowry, one of the three brains behind the site, Urbanspoon has really fleshed things out and branched out to a bunch of other cities.

This weekend Seattlest was standing outside of Jules Maes in Georgetown trying to explain to someone which part, exactly, of the Rainier Cold Storage compound across the street was about to be torn down. It's the Stock House which is north of here a bit--it's, uh...no. Ok, it's down there near the...no. Not thirty feet from us and directly across the street there's a sign that says "Stock House." Yep, that's it.

We're up late on a Sunday morning and find ourselves riding the #17 through a lovely residential neighborhood in North Seattle. We round a corner and see Caffe Fiore.A coffee shop? Time to ring the bell and jump off the bus.

The Rainier Cold Storage Stock House--part of the beautiful and historic and absolutely irreplaceable Rainier Cold Storage campus in Georgetown--is being replaced. The building cannot be saved as Seattlest has previously discussed here and here, and a campaign to try to force property owners Sabey Corp. to preserve it as-is seems like it wouldn't hold up in the face of the condition of the building, despite the Seattle Historic Landmark status it currently enjoys. Brooke Best, Friend of Georgetown History, told Seattlest in an email, "Sabey made great efforts (beyond what most developers would have done) to come up with alternative proposals to demolition." But demolition it is.

Last week Seattlest whined about the pending doom of the Rainier Cold Storage Stock House in Georgetown, a building that is a Seattle Historic Landmark. "'Historic Landmark' might as well be a death sentence in Seattle," we said, meaning that any building so labeled in Seattle would be quickly demolished (although later in the week the Seattle Weekly would have a different take on the phrase in an article about Peter Steinbrueck and his recent Landmark-a-thon Downtown).

Well-known alterna-librarian Jessamyn West came to town recently, and finally had a chance to check out our flagship library. Her verdict?

I saw a real disconnect beween the lovely outside and grand entry spaces to the library, plus a few other very design-y areas, and the rest of the building. Materials were hard to find. VERY hard to find. Signage was abysmal, often just laserprinted pieces of paper, sometimes laminated and sometimes not. Doors to areas that may have been public were forbidding and unwelcoming. There weren’t enough elevators. There weren’t enough bathrooms. There wasn’t a comfortable place to sit in the entire building. There were lots of “dead spaces” that, because of architecture, couldn’t really be used for anything and they were collecting dust. The lighting was bad. Stack areas were dim and narrow. The teen area seemed like an afterthought. Bizarre display areas with a table and some books on it were in the middle of vast open areas. Most of the place felt like it was too big and then the stacks felt too crowded and I had to climb around people working to find things. Shelvers shut down the entire “spiral” concept with booktrucks. The writer’s area in this library is a shadow of the glorious writers room in the old downtown building where I had a desk briefly.

As a teenager, Seattlest loved posters. We plastered Miami Vice stills rock gods, Tiger Beat pages swimsuit models and sports stars on our walls with tacks, tape and that white boogery stuff. Some boys grow up and out of the phase. Others become obsessed with poster art, set up savings accounts for Flatstock, and bitch about those who “flip,”—resell high-demand gig posters—for a steep profit. (We fall somewhere in between.) Artillery Design, a new site from Seattle-based artist extraordinaire Brad Klausen, should satisfy the latter group.

The cold wind of actual necessity is blowing up Seattle's skirt. Much like our childhood erector-set constructions, the Viaduct has a certain amount of "give" in it (though hopefully not due to the same reason: our dislike of tightening every single nut on things we were just going to take apart anyway), but the news last week that it has sunk 5 inches at its saggiest point has bells going off because 6 inches is the magic number when it's an emergency. Aaooogah!

reports on his blog that state Sen. Joe Zarelli recently hosted right-wing Israeli politicians and others at a two-day conference down in Vancouver, to fan the flames of Islamophobia.

Hey--Seattlest Seth here. As you know, I could talk about sports for hours (Never, ever, sit next to me at a dinner party). And since I don't want Seattlest getting too sports-heavy, I'm moving Tonight's Target over to a new, sports-only blog I started yesterday while listening to the Mariners game on my porch.

8pm Thurs-Mon, through June 11; Tickets $18 general/$10 students, seniors

We had to agree with On the Boards' executive staff (Lane Czaplinksi and Sarah Wilke) statement in the liner notes to The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil that they had been “excited about presenting Vancouver’s neworldtheatre since the first moment [they] saw the image of a smiling President Bush holding a little wild eyed man baby.” Admittedly, this was a large part of the reason why we wanted to see this piece, in addition to the generally good reviews and awards it had won in Canada. In its U.S. debut, the play more than lives up to that photo, with its pointed and consistently funny script.

Vitals: Bartolo Colon, 33 yo RHP. Born in Altamira, Dominican Republic. 6-6, 245. 144-87, 3.97 career. 4-0, 3.66 in 2007. $16 million salary.

We caught La boheme at McCaw Hall Wednesday night and the place was packed. We haven't had a chance to revisit the venue since an old friend of our's who did the Opera's phone sales got us in to the preview rehearsal performance of Parsifal right before McCaw Hall's grand opening four years ago, the first and only time we ever made it down there. The only opera we've seen since then is the over-rated Trapped in the Closet, which isn't one-tenth as funny as everybody says it is (yet still worth watching, however). So obviously we're completely unqualified to comment on an opera of this magnitude, but we'll note this for the record: