CELEBRATE THE SALMON: The Pacific Northwest is known for coffee, technology, and Boeing these days, but three hundred years ago we were known--if you'll allow us some leeway in the use of "known"--for salmon and trees. A group of Northwest Indian tribal organizations throws an annual, multi-ethnic, three-day party down on the Waterfront to celebrate the spiritual and ecological importance of salmon in our region, and the party commences today. Along with the music, dancing,......

That is, get Mingle, The Saturday Knights' latest all-star party album that is blowing everyone's minds in the music world and beyond, for free right now. Go to music blog Seattle Subsonic for the download link, and do it now, because soon Seattlest's favorite hiphop/rock/?!! album of the year will cost you money again! Our favorite tracks: "Dog Star," "Private School Girl," and "Nobody Beats Us." But we could have said any three tracks, really,......

Road trip! The seventh annual What the Heck Fest is taking place all weekend at venues in Anacortes. Mt. Eerie is but one of the many bands set to perform. If you're staying here in town, tonight loud-ass two-piece Middle Class Rut plays King Cobra, along with Burning Brides.......

Get your name on the official list for Experience Music Project's 2008 Pop Conference, taking place in our very own Hendrix-drenched, spring-obsessed city from April 10–13. That's next weekend! This year's theme is "Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict, and Change," and EMP has gathered over 160 writers, speakers and musicians to expound on the many facets of the subject. (The conference is completely, gloriously free.) The many panels we're excited about include Riotous (featuring presentations......

Seattlest is quaking in their boots (bought especially for the occasion) with excitement for this years SXSW in Austin, Tex. We're making our initial sojourn to the festival and are so pleased to see there will be a strong Seattle contingent joining us in Austin this year. There are, to our calculations, 29 Seattle bands officially associated with the festival this year. These bands will be playing sanctioned showcases, what we will call "the......

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 //......

Pity poor Pluto. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified the celestial body as a dwarf planet. Along with being totally emasculating, the IAU's declaration meant that Pluto was stripped of its rights as a full-fledged planet, including health insurance (medical, vision, and dental), a sweet parking space, and a Platinum American Express card. Well, now Pluto is fighting back, or at least it's found a group to take up the cause: On Saturday,......

U-N-I, the L.A. headliners at last night's show at Chop Suey, is the profoundly West Coast hiphop equivalent of human superficial fascia: loosely, intricately webbed, sticky, and pliable. Tricky, surprising beats backed Thurzday and Y-O's tight rap in a dizzying but relaxed kind of way. The night was solid for such an unsung show, with performances from some of 2008's most promising local acts: J. Pinder (his ballsy, impeccable timing meshing perfectly with high-power......

This folk-music-related post is about participation, not performance. Shapenote singing (aka Sacred Harp) has been part of American life for well over 250 years, and has been sung in Seattle for 30 or 40. A sizeable group of people will gather in Ballard this weekend, at the Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Convention, to sing it again. When we first attended this event in 2004, we'd never tried singing in this style but, by the......

As our friend who sent us the info announced this news, so shall we: "GAY GASP! Hillary's coming to town tonight!" Okay, so we were at an event on Saturday, when Maria Cantwell joined longtime local Hillstumpers Jay Inslee and Ron Sims for a chat about Mrs. Clinton's Clean Energy Plan. A young woman who claimed to be a UW student stood up and asked the three if they could do something to get......

Honestly. Why aren't more book readings held in bars? Bookstores are antiseptic places where talking loudly is verboten--when an author does it at a reading, it feels impolite. In a bar, though, attempts to command attention are commonplace and usually welcome. And let's not forget the fact that pretty much everything is better when you have a drink in your hand--and when you know that, worst case, you can head to the video poker machine.......

In case it doesn't snow too much tonight, or in case you're not too much of a pussy to venture outdoors, head to Queen Anne to network with the organizers of South by Southwest and other like-minded music geek individuals. Join us from 7-9pm on Monday evening, January 28th at Solo Bar in Seattle (200 Roy Street). This is the chance for Pacific Northwest digital creatives to meet with SXSW organizers, as well as......

Early in our parenting career, we took a Bringing Baby Home class developed by UW researcher John Gottman. He gave us better parenting advice than any other resource, at least until we saw the Blue's Clues episode about being frustrated. (Stop, breathe, and think is our new mantra.) So we were intrigued to discover Why I Hate John Gottman. What did he do? Whose life did his advice steer onto the rocky shore? Someone who......

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......

The dispiriting weather forecast--below, via Google. Friggin' cold and friggin' rainy. On days like these, there is but one sure pick-me-up: soup. In a typically magnificent essay her classic How to Cook a Wolf, the food writer M.F.K. Fisher made an inarguable case that, if you can make tea, it's silly not to try and make soup.The natural progression from boiling water to boiling water with something in it can hardly be avoided, and in......

We knew WaMu had run into some fiscal turbulence (and some legal headaches). We imagine money's tight. But we can't believe it's come to this. A customer service employee says a memo went out that WaMu is "going to stop providing us plastic cutlery, hot chocolate, creamer, and anything but regular tea." Granted, it's environmentally friendlier to use real cutlery instead of plastic, but when that teller's smile wavers as they enumerate the benefits......

This Seattlest took one look at the weather forecast and headed to sunny Florida yesterday. Now here we are in our hometown of DeLand, population 24,375 (per 2006 census). Our mother doesn't have wireless at the house, and is operating off a 1997 iMac. It's cute and compact, but slow as hell, so we headed out this morning for the one source of public wifi in town: Boston Gourmet Coffeehouse. A couple of things about......

After the lukewarm show on Friday night, Seattlest wasn't sure we were up for any more unsure bets on local hiphop shows. However, we bundled up, put on a brave face and ventured back to Chop Suey last night for the Parker Brothaz/GMK show. What we came away with: GMK is incredibly tight and infectiously energetic, the "L" in "put your L's UP!" stands for Lucciauno (as in "Free Fatal!"), and we want DJ......

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......

The snow is falling, our dear Seattle friends, it simply isn't falling here. Whistler just announced it is open for business, bagging the ultimate ski resort coup of cutting powder before we cut the turkey. Of course you want to go, but in fondly recalling the days of 1998 when the US-CA exchange rate swung wildly the other way, you fear you can really only afford to stay home and play Ski Resort Extreme Halo......

Six Organs of Admittance is one man--Ben Chasny--and whoever he gets to come along for the ride. Shelter From the Ash, Chasny's ninth album under the Six Organs name (out today), features contributions from his Comets on Fire bandmate Noel Harmonson, Elisa Ambrogio of Magik Markers, and Superwolf/Zwan's Matt Sweeney. The album is a freak-folk magnum opus, full of well-restrained improvisations and fluid ruminations, considered and varied instrumentation (electric, electro, and acoustic), hypnotic vocals,......

Just in case anyone reading this blog is a sixteen-year-old girl and/or writes for Gawker, have we got big news for you: Meet Chace Crawford, who plays Nate on Gossip Girl. He’ll be appearing at the University Verizon Wireless store at 12:30pm on Saturday November 17. Any fans in the area can come out to see him, get autographs and posters, win gift bags, or submit questions to ask him (interrogate him about Ms.......

Well, it's been a month, and that can only mean one thing: time for the next free edgy youth culture documentary, care of Scion. Last time around, the topic was blood diamonds in hip hop; this time it's all about nightclubbing in the late '80s NYC queer community. Paris is Burning is all about New York fashion houses, but not the ones you may think you know. African American and Latino gay men and......

When Semisonic's Feeling Strangely Fine came out in 1998, Seattlest was 18 years old and leaving the crushing open spaces of Wyoming for good. We liked the album then, but it wasn't until a year later -- this time leaving Phoenix, Arizona for good -- that we really fell in love with it. We were by ourselves, pulling a U-Haul trailer behind our '76 El Camino, and we were on our way to Washington state......

Scion's back in town bringing music, art, and culture to the kids. Sure it's subversive corporate lifestyle marketing to the coveted youth demographic, but we do like that it's free. Their art installation is at BLVD Gallery for a few more nights, while their film series is running once a month at the Harvard Exit. Somehow we missed the September film (Mayor of Sunset Strip), but we'll definitely be there tomorrow night for Bling:......

A while ago we interviewed local author Amanda Ford about her new book Kiss Me I'm Single: An Ode to the Solo Life. Tonight's book reading is supposed to include "one or more of the following: a lively discussion of archetypal paradoxes that pervade human existence, origami lessons, singing of vintage sorority songs, libation consumption, kissing, the use of metaphors." Elsewhere she says the book grew out of:...the stormy, excited-yet-fearful energy that has enveloped me......

"Keep in mind the name Matthew Brzezinski. This book feels like a practice run from a young author destined for big things." So says author Brian Burrough, upon reviewing Brzezinski's Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age. Brzezinski, says Burrough, is a born storyteller, and his narrative reads like a movie. Brzezinski is also, as you can see, dreamy. The book is about the early days of the space......

Finally, after five years of screwing around, making babies and whatnot, Imperial Teen are back with a new album and touring the country with their made-in-California indie pop. The not-so-teenage rockers roll into town today for a free in-store at Easy Street (Queen Anne), then on to the Crocodile. 8pm // Easy Street Records // Free! 9pm // The Crocodile Cafe // $12......

When we were last up in Whistler, local stores had signs next to their cash registers that read: "Exchange rate: on par." We figured they just didn't want to bother with the shrinking exchange rate, but there still had to be one, right? We must still be in better financial shape than Canada, sheesh. No? Oh. Long gone are those heady days when we first made pilgrimage to Whistler and emptied our wallets to the......

Kakuta Hamisi, a member of the Maasai tribe of Kenya, is working over the summer at the Woodland Park Zoo, talking to zoo visitors about Maasai culture and conservation. Hamisi, an Evergreen State grad, evidently likes his job--he recruited several members of his tribe to work with him. But Catherine Claiborne, a grad student at UW's Evans School, has a message for Hamisi: You are being exploited. She tells the Times that the exhibit could......