Seattlest has heard good things about the All-Star Pop Culture quiz at Jillian's ever since it started up. We still haven't had a chance to check it out—Tuesday's our regular trivia night, even when we're not hosting. But since the spring season kicks off tonight, we did the next best thing: interviewed Trevor Trifiro, the brains behind the quiz. Assume I've never played pub trivia before. What should I expect when I come to All-Star......

Apparently we're not the only ones with hope for Microsoft! Wired Magazine published an interview this morning with Mary Jo Foley, author of the cutely-titled book Microsoft 2.0, about the future of the company as Bill Gates leaves the day-to-day ops in the hands of Steve "I walked away from Yahoo" Ballmer. Her verdict? "It's dangerous for companies of any size to count them out. They're still good at figuring out how to come......

Seth Kolloen starting covering sports for Seattlest in January 2005. Late last year he took over as editor, before leaving us to become the editor of the brand new Sports Northwest Magazine. We caught up with Seth poolside at the W Hotel to discuss the move to press row, his sports blog, and why he won’t be calling Maggie Gyllenhaal any time soon. How did you get involved with the new magazine? In one sense,......

Laura Veirs has been writing and performing dreamy folk and pop songs for nearly a decade. She graces Seattle with a solo performance this Friday night at the Triple Door. 7:30pm & 10pm (21+) // Triple Door // $17 adv, $20 dos // Liam Finn opens Seattlest: Can you tell us a little about the solo tour? Laura Veirs: I start on Wednesday in Vancouver and then the second show will be in Seattle. It's......

Hiphop's King of Ballard, an inspired young emcee named Grynch, sat down with us over chicken satay (which he thought was delicious, and said so several times) to discuss everything from backpack rap to The Program. Here's what the man has to say. And catch his set tomorrow night at The Sunset--it's your last chance until June! Where in the family tree of hiphop would you place yourself? I think you can't really put......

Lo-fi indie pop band Say Hi used to be known as Say Hi to Your Mom. It also used to based in Brooklyn and now it's found in Seattle. Regardless, the man behind the band is Eric Elbogen, who records the songs at home, playing all the instruments, providing most of the vocals (except for the occasional guest artist), and even mixing the tracks his own damn self. His last album (pre-name change), Impeccable......

Eric Alterman is the sort of liberal we like to refer to as a "Democrat," as in, capitol "D" Democratic Party stalwart. As such, this Nation columnist and Media Matters blogger was an arch-partisan prototype for those crazy kids at DailyKos, back in the days when armchair politicos were relegated to penning rants to the editor of their local newspaper. In advance of his appearance tonight at Town Hall to promote his new book, Why......

The Boy Scouts really are good training for being a journalist (or pseudo-journalist, or pasty-faced blogger, however you want to refer to your intrepid Seattlest contributors as): Like those scouts with their trusty Swiss army knives, rule one is "Be Prepared." Alas, last night, we were decidedly not prepared. Admittedly, who could blame us? We've been hassled at more than one club's door for trying to carry in a voice recorder, and why bring a......

Seattle hiphop artist Kublakai (aka Ian Waller) released The Basics in early January, and we've happily kept tracks from the record such "Oh Lord" and "Power Food" in our frequent playlist rotation ever since. This week, Kublakai talked to Seattlest in an exclusive about jazz, Snoop Dogg, his mom, a budding film career, and more! What kind of music did you listen to during your growing up years? What was the first record you......

Musicians who remain active in the recording industry for over 20 years usually become internationally famous and aim to save the world, or quietly cultivate a devout fan base by emancipating humanity one pair of ears at a time. Mark Pickerel—drummer, vocalist, and Ellensburg native—has followed the latter career path. While in high school, Pickerel joined what would become one of the most notable—and yet most overlooked—bands of the grunge era. Seven years later,......

Seattlest's been hearing a lot about The Physics lately, and we love their 2007 release, FutureTalk. What goes on behind the scenes? We decided to just ask, already. You were named as 2008 Young Ones by The Stranger....were you expecting that? What does 2008 look like for The Physics from your perspective? We weren't expecting to be named as one of the Young Ones. It's a very good look and we're looking forward to......

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......

On Saturday, we took our godson, his mom and his dad to Baby Loves Disco. Since we don't have a kid of our own and don't have any experience with kid-themed events, 17-month-old Eli agreed to let us interview him about the party. We'd like to preface his comments by saying that from the moment we walked in until the time we left, Eli was trailed by a gaggle of older-than-him little girls. Undoubtedly this,......

"You can't reinvent how to write a song," Robin Pecknold once said in an interview. "I don't listen to too much new music unless it adheres to tradition." Generally we might take that to mean Neil Young or Fleetwood Mac, but the polyphonic choral intros and sense of space to newer Fleet Foxes songs pull from early American hymns, maybe even monastic chants. The complicated multi-part harmonies have prompted Pecknold to start air conducting --......

Back in 1981, Mike Nichols directed a famous version of Waiting for Godot at the Lincoln Center in NYC, starring Steve Martin and Robin Williams. We recall that at some point in college, we saw an interview with Steve Martin about that production, and Martin said something memorably apt: "We decided to serve the comedy of the play, because the ideas would serve themselves." Steve Martin's intuition was on our minds Saturday, while sitting......

Last we talked with Carrie Akre, she was gearing up for the release of her latest CD, Last the Evening. Now, a couple of months later, the CD is officially out, and Akre is buzzing from the aftermath. Indeed, most of us music critic types have had nice things to say about the disc, which showcases her exuberant, imagery-laden lyrics and alt.country sensibilities, and shows off the great musicianship of her backup players. We......

We're not yet convinced that the current War on Plastic Shopping Bags/Global Warming will stand the test of time, but we sure are intrigued that everyone everywhere seems to be trying to make the eco-friendly message stick (do you really think NBC's "Green Week" is destined for the history books? Neither do we.). We're feeling equally ambivalent about "Geography," the latest piece from local choreographer/composer duo Scott/Powell Production, premiering this weekend at On the Boards.......

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.......

Attention Pearl Jam fans and Flatstock attendees: You need the new, superfancy art book Pearl Jam vs Ames Bros: 13 Years of Tour Posters. The book is a compendium of the band's 1995-2007 gig posters by artists Ames Bros and Brad Klausen, PJ's exclusive print-design minds. Though (sadly) it doesn't date back to the Golden Days of Grunge, at 229 posters, it's an exhaustive collection. But it isn't just poster reproductions. Pearl Jam vs......

Adrian Tomine started making comics in his teens when he created Optic Nerve. In it, he tells stories about people who tend to be searching for answers to questions they seem to think everyone else already knows. After a few years putting out Optic Nerve on his own, it was picked up by publisher Drawn and Quarterly. Tomine is coming to Seattle to promote his first full-length graphic novel Shortcomings. Seattlest used it as......

Being born about three decades too late early to appreciate Go, Diego, Go LIVE: The Great Jaguar Rescue, a musical based on the TV show of the same name, we sent our two-year-old nephew. Seattlest: How did you like Go, Diego, Go? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew: (swaying from side-to-side) Goooood. Seattlest: Did you have fun? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew:: Yes. Seattlest: What was your favorite part? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew:: (Prolonged silence) Wow, we had no idea that......

Some people take to relationships like a cat to water. The Swell Season's Glen Hansard sounds nice enough, friends all over Dublin, bit of a hippie -- but give him a girlfriend's ear and he's prone to red-faced verbal jabs, depressed miseries, and emotional archery. He can't keep up, or won't try.We made a choice and we knew we would pay / for stealing the joy and trying to escape / from the arms of......

Sometimes, the hip-hop planets align and send their benefactions down upon Seattlest. This was probably why we ended up standing in line behind Nam at Chop Suey on Saturday night, waiting to get into the Little Brother show. (Watch for an interview with him later this week!) However, we give full credit to Northwest hip-hop promoters Obese Productions for the line-up that allowed us to finally see The Physics AND Grynch (at right). AND Dyme......

In 2004, Ken Jennings redefined success on Jeopardy!, banking over $2,500,000 as he won 74 games. Those of us who get paid in bar credit know it's hard to make a living through trivia, but Jennings has done it. He turned his obligatory cash-in-on-your-15-minutes book, Brainiac, into something much better and broader, an examination of trivia history and culture. He also moved from Utah to the Seattle area. That, and Brainiac's paperback release tomorrow, gave......

Those who attended the Issaquah Village Theater’s matinee of The King and I today may have come away a little disappointed. Dino Rossi used the stage to announce his candidacy for governor. After his Eastside announcement, Rossi raced the telegraph wires to Spokane and made his announcement again this afternoon. The man who got his asshole handed to him three years ago by current governor Christine Gregoire, has been the Republicans' guy since he decided......

We've been delinquent. Show after great show keeps arriving at Roq La Rue, and we keep not telling you about them. We could list excuses, but they're mostly varieties of "we should learn how to effectively use a to-do list." Case in point: the current show, featuring Yumiko Kayukawa (whose Princess of Darkness is pictured) and Ojimbo, opened October 12. We should have promoted opening night. But the show's still open, the art's still there,......

This weekend, Seattlest scored an email interview with Larry Mizell Jr, aka Gatsby of Cancer Rising, aka Man About Town (our term, not his). Readers: read on! Mr. Mizell, you write for The Stranger and keep an active music blog, in addition to being a local hiphop artist. What's it like to be an artist AND an observer of the Seattle hiphop scene? What trends are you seeing in local hiphop? It's been fantastic writing......

The first thing to know about Devra Davis is that she's not speaking from the sidelines: she's director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is an environmental health expert, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. So when she said that the war on cancer has been almost......

Last Friday we saw Sea Wolf at Chop Suey. We found this Pop Matters review of their first full-length album, but if you'd like to learn more, here's an interview by Sound on the Sound. The band says "We want to be JUST LIKE:"Wolf Eyes, Wolf Parade, We Are Wolves, AIDS Wolf, Wolfie, Wolf Colonel, Patrick Wolf, WolfMother, Guitar Wolf, Steppenwolf, Hugo Wolf, Kate Wolf, Laurent Wolf, Wolf City, Duran Duran (though they don't really......

Rockstar Seattlest commenter (ex; you're dead to us, Jake) 8bitjake had the scoop earlier this week for those that were paying attention. He got an email from a friend at the Eastside game studio Bungie: "So heres my big secret. You should google Bungie + Microsoft + separation this week. You know that big ol BILLION dollar franchise Bungie has created for Microsoft, to show their appreciate Microsoft is letting Bungie leave. Of course Microsoft......