Results tagged “india”

Travis Arket, one of the three founding members of Seattle-based Team Robot House to take part in a Himalayan rickshaw race to raise money for Mercy Corps earlier this summer, hardly knows how to begin to describe their adventure. "It was so surreal, so condensed. Think Indiana Jones meets Commando meets Ghandi meets Hotel Rwanda, mashed up into a ball and forced down your throat. Luckily we have most of it on video," he says. "Absolute insanity. Overwhelming," his teammate Matt Crabtree agrees. The team raised thousands of dollars for charity, and the donations are still rolling in.

"What’s exciting about sitting at a resort somewhere? Where’s the living in that?” Travis Arket asks, and sets down his pho chopsticks. Matt Crabtree nods. “Not exciting.” Travis and Matt (pictured) are two of the three members of Team Robot House, a non-profit adventure philanthropy corporation based here in the Seattle area that takes on a few extreme challenges each year to raise money for charities such as Mercy Corps.

It took filmmaker Jennifer Fox four years, seventeen countries, and 1,600 hours of footage (which she whittled down to 6 hours of film) to fully cover the cross-cultural confusion of modern womanhood. The project didn't start out that high-minded; Jennifer was dating two men and not entirely happy with either, which led to an identity crisis that inspired her travels exploring what it means to be a woman today. The result is her sweeping, compelling tour de force Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. Along her journey, there’s a lot of girl-talk over food and drinks, and in that way, Flying is a slow-moving and much smarter version of Sex and the City, where Carrie Bradshaw eschews the contrivance of writing a newspaper column and just addresses the camera directly. But at the same time, it’s a state of the union on the current female experience, covering everything from physical and sexual abuse, orgasm, sex trafficking, honor killing, female genital mutilation, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and marriage.

Seattlest first heard about the Raveonettes from a troubled, neurotic friend. He recommended their '03 release , which struck us as analogous to that friendship: addictive and harping on the same two or three themes.

We had heard a lot of good buzz going into Sunshine Cleaning, starring the perpetually lovable and talented Amy Adams and the nearly as up-and-coming Emily Blunt as sisters who break into the lucrative niche growth industry of crime scene cleanup. Dealing with the literal blood, guts, and body fluids of the recently departed forces the ladies to examine some of the biohazards in their own lives. Wackiness and personal growth ensues. Unfortunately, the movie is good but not great, and the rest of the audience seemed to like it a lot more than we did. With a cute kid and Alan Arkin in tow as the sisters' crotchety dad, director Christine Jeffs is totally aiming for Little Miss Sunshine Cleaning, but with a wisp of a script and a couple overwrought scenes, this film ain't making it to the pageant.

SHERMAN FREAKING ALEXIE: The best-selling author returns with his first novel in ten years. Flight tells the story of an orphaned Indian boy who travels back and forth through time in a violent search for his true identity. Real Change-published poets (that would actually include Alexie, too) read as part of the program.

FANTASTIC FICTION SALON: Novelist, nonfiction author, and short story writer Terry Bisson has swept every honor in the science fiction field as well as France's Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. He joins Hugo House's Writing Fantastic Fiction workshop series, where he will teach "Who Likes Short Shorts? We Like Short Shorts!"

SEATTLEST BOOK CLUB PICK: For March, we're reading Jonathan Raban's Surveillance, set in a not-so-distant future, when everyone's actions are highly monitored. Get a head start on the conversation by hearing from Raban himself. (We'll know if you went or not.)

AUTHOR, AUTHOR: In Bich Minh Nguyen's memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, a young family escapes from Vietnam shortly before the fall of Saigon and relocates to Grand Rapids, Michigan. "In her recreation of a world populated by family ties, Ritz crackers, and Judy Blume books, she has captured the 1980s with perfection," says Kirkus Reviews.

LOCAL AUTHOR, LOCAL AUTHOR: Clear Cut Press presents two of its novelists: Matt Briggs' Shoot The Buffalo is about a boy growing up in Snoqualmie during the '70s. Stacey Levine's Frances Johnson, set in a small town in Florida, details the random choices made by the eponymous Ms. Johnson.

We’re not the only ones who noticed Redhook’s recent India Pale Ale facelift. They changed the brew’s name to "Long Hammer" and removed the reference to "Ballard Bitter." And as far as we can taste, didn’t change the beer’s recipe. Pyramid did the same thing last year with their IPA, appending “ThunderHead” to the acronym. Finally—someone’s applied the porn name game to beer!

Apparently, Cedars / Taste of India is an endless well that powers the rumor mill. As our palatial manor is sandwiched in between the two restaurants, we salivate at any mention of either.

We were warned: "Go to Taste of India, and you'll get addicted."

Alice Cooper was right about one thing: school was out for summer. But his corollary argument was faulty: school need not be out forever.

At the Northwest Film Forum this week, there's a Jean-Luc Godard mini-series. As usual, the price is right: $8 for general admission, $5 for members. Their Capitol Hill theater is on 12th Avenue, between Pike and Pine.

Now that we're well into the new year, movies can go back to sucking. Sure, there's a few Oscar-worthy films that have yet to open in Seattle (see: The New World, Transamerica, Match Point). But for the most part, films released in January blow big-time (don't see: Grandma's Boy, Tristan and Isolde, Last Holiday, Annapolis). Thankfully, there's an alternative to the schlock, in the form of two primo film series opening this week.

Seattlest eats too much meat. Let's start from there. A few weeks back we decided that a good experiment would be to not eat meat for lunch for a one week period. These would be dine-in or take-out lunches in and around the Pioneer Square area, not something we brought from home. They have to be fast and relatively cheap and they can't contain Pad Thai, which we hate. They also need to be pretty hearty because our breakfast consists of coffee and they need to be within easy walking distance of, say, the ferry terminal. Next week seems to be as good a place as any to start because 1) it consists of only four lunches and 2) we actually tried to start the previous two weeks and failed.

Seattlest has learned that Folklife, our favorite of the Seattle Center festivals, has gained the reputation of being a four-day conclave of smelly, weed-smoking, WTO-hating, free-loving hippies.