John's band, in light of America's financial misfortunes, will be returning to the home-made recording studio to use our economic meltdown as inspiration for new songwriting material. David will be watching as much playoff baseball as he can, since it's the first weekend in October, while his new live-in girlfriend wonders what she did, and if it's not too late. MvB is earning his man-about-town stripes with a Saturday visit to the scissors wizards at......

Seattlest’s Olympic correspondent Mark Siano has been hard at work in Beijing getting the stories that you won’t hear about anywhere else. Protesting: Having the protest sign on the back of a map was the perfect distraction to get it past the Chinese sensors. I just folded it up with the "USA out of Iraq" part hidden and slid right on in. Layer after layer of security let me and my giant map go......

Perugia's lead prosecutor in the case against Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito says the three suspects will shortly be charged in Meredith Kercher's death. All three stand to be indicted not only with participating in the crime, but also its cover-up. If convicted, Knox and company could be spending upwards of 20 years in an Italian jail cell.......

The Euro Cup starts this weekend-- it's just like the World Cup except there is more overt racism, and the fans have free health care. All of the games will be shown at the George and Dragon, Café Presse, and in your living room via the ESPN family of networks. The Kangaroo and Kiwi will open at 11am to show the late morning game live, and then they will show a replay of the early......

Everybody's got a stereotype, and Italians are no different: wildly passionate one moment, indifferent the next. Political corruption? Cynical indifference. Matters of the heart? Passionate but fickle. Matters of the table? Ah, passionate to the core. Seattlest's Italian restaurant friends get particularly incensed when American chefs misappropriate Italian culinary language and apply a name like "carpaccio" to a plate of sliced raw meat or "pesto" to any old green sauce. So let's be clear: the......

Last night the Northwest Film Forum had a line out the door with moviegoers eager for some classic European cinema. As previously mentioned, the Italian sex comedy Divorce--Italian Style (and its follow-up, Seduced and Abandoned) are showing in the small theater through tomorrow, leaving the big one to hold the main event, the NWFF's latest film series, Duel of the Cool. In this corner, France's Jean-Paul Belmondo, former boxer (hence the big, oft-broken nose),......

Amanda Knox, the 20-year-old University of Washington student at the center of an Italian murder investigation, has been ordered to remain in jail. Knox, along with her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Hermann Guede, are the top suspects in the death of Meredith Kercher. Kercher, a 21 year-old exchange student from England, was found half-naked with a fatal stab wound to the neck in November. She was killed in the apartment she shared with......

We spend a lot of time at the Seattlest newsroom talking about the problems bicycle riders in this city have and how the city should make it easier for us since we reduce congestion and emissions at the same time. Now we realize we’ve been ignoring the good our our two-wheeled motorized brethren (and sistern) on scooters. According to the PI, Vince Rowley and Eric Pravitz are regular scooter riders who want the City Council......

None of this stuff about "timeless" settings for Tosca: the story takes place in Rome over a specific, eventful weekend in June, 1800, as Napoleon's troops are invading Piedmont on Italy's northern border. The story, on the other hand, is a potboiler involving a beautiful opera singer, Tosca; a fugitive politician, Angelotti; a famous painter, Cavaradossi; and a villainous police chief, Scarpia. By the end of the opera, the genuine Napoleon has won, and all......

This, honest to God, is what we would do if we won the lottery: We would purchase a Portuguese League basketball team and stock it with former Washington Huskies. We would spend our mornings sipping sangria by the seashore, our afternoons trying to say that ten times fast, and our evenings watching some of our favorite ballers ever. But until our lucky numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) come up, we're settling for......

Picture a small town in the south (southern Italy in the 1950s, as it happens) where people talk slow and not much happens until the sun goes down and the church bells ring. (Think Faulkner, Song of the South, Porgy and Bess.) Then a travelling circus comes to town, a whole troupe of clowns (those irrespressible pagliacci), squeezed into a real clown car, a tiny black Fiat 500. You can guess what happens next: sex,......

We're not sure exactly what this is...seems like it's some voice software reproducing some of the comments Amanda Knox has made in relation to the slaying of her roommate in Italy. In Italian. With English subtitles. And music. And slides.......

Franklin vs. Garfield is one of the Seattle sports events that you just shouldn't miss. Here's what we wrote about it for The Stranger in September:True local hoops fans don't miss this game between two perennial inner-city basketball powerhouses, even at the cost of connubial tranquility. The 2005 game at Garfield fell on Valentine's Day, but happily married Husky basketball coach Lorenzo Romar was there anyway. A win in this game means neighborhood bragging rights......

From the papers in Europe, and particularly in England, you'd think that UW student Amanda Knox had already been tried and convicted of sexually assaulting and killing her roommate Meredith Kercher in Perguia, Italy. The source said: "The flat where Meredith was killed was full of evidence, there was blood, fingerprints and other bodily substances. "It was obvious very quickly that those responsible were from a close circuit of friends and we were able to......

(This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs.) Seahawks vs. General Tso's Chicken preview. As we wandered the aisles of Safeway shoplifting the......

Rick Steves. The man lives in a pleasant world. The voice, the haircut, the folksy European dinners with friends one after another after the other. Just once we want to flip to PBS in time to see Steves in Friedrichstraße going berserk on a ticketing agent, but it won't happen because the world is his oyster. A friend of Seattlest's is currently on a 5-week Rick Steves tour of Europe, which we love telling people......

Just when you think you've made up your mind about a place, about Tavolata specifically, along comes a dish of gnocchi akin to a religious experience. Regular readers know that Seattlest has been Seattle's lone holdout in the standing ovation for Tavolata. Ethan Stowell--who pays ferocious attention to his reviews--has not been happy with us, going so far as to purge a critical thread from one of the Chowhound discussion boards. Yet we keep going......

Seattle a sports town? After this weekend, sure. Hawks win! Huskies win! Mariners win! Cougs win! Shit, everybody wins. Ah, not so fast. Mustn't forget soccer. Saturday's World-Cup rematch between France and Italy brings together a couple dozen Seattle restaurateurs to root raucously for les Bleus...or cheer boisterously for gli Azzuri. The venue is a plasma TV at Sorrentino's, on Queen Anne, hallowed ground of sorts, since Mamma Enza comes as close as anyone in......

N.P. Thompson went to SIFF, and we all benefit now that he's written about the best and worst films of the festival -- and launched a few broadsides at SIFF and select members of its audience: The 33rd Seattle International Film Festival ended two weeks ago; it’s taken me this long to gain enough distance to sort and sift through all I might conceivably have to say on the subject. Even so, the movies under......

Too disturbing for the Market? Lemme tell ya, we think this whole Pigs on Parade thing has gotten out of hand. You know the concept: local artists create fiberglass scultpures based on Ur-piggy Rachel, eventually sold to raise money for the Pike Place Market Foundation. One such sculptor is Colin Reedy, an Oregon furniture designer whose previous contributions include a couple of ride-em "Pork Choppers." This particular creation, titled "Prosciutto and Melon Pig," ought......

Slate takes 1,700 words to say what we already know instinctively: wine's a drink for elitist snobs, beer's for real men. Wine is “aspirational,” beer is for real men. The current Henry Weinhard campaign puts it bluntly: beer tastes better than soy milk. Well, duh. Beer's great, no doubt about it. Thirst-quenching, satisfying in ways wine can never be. Most wine people love beer. But here's the problem: beer has always been popular because of......

Times are good for folks with new Italian restaurants (Sorrentino, Tavolata, Barolo, La Spiga, Bèato): lively, fiercely independent, stamped with the vibrant personalities of their owners. And then there's the local outpost of Il Fornaio at Pacific Place, a chain that's been around for years, putting its own stamp on regional Italian cuisine with a monthly "culinary festivals." The fornaio is Italy's baker, and crusty, fresh-baked bread is indeed one of the restaurant's signatures. (The......

The Light in the Piazza @ the Paramount Through April 29, Tickets $25-$72 The reviews are in, and it's unanimous: the light in this piazza is startlingly beautiful. Misha Berson puts it best: When the Adam Guettel-Craig Lucas show had its world premiere here at the Intiman Theatre in 2003, this tale of a mother and daughter's life-changing sojourn in 1953 Italy was a pen-and-ink sketch. In Bartlett Sher's splendid staging, it is now......

What's that horn? Our own? You don't say! Latest issue of Seattle Magazine names Best Restaurants as well as Best Food Blogs. So here's the first entry, by Matthew Amster-Burton, about Seattlest contributor Ronald: Cornichon (cornichon.org) Ronald Holden is a PR agent by day and Belltown's boulevardier by night; he never misses a grand opening and never holds back with his opinion. (Full disclosure: Holden once called me a "normally reliable freelance foodie," which I'm......

Monday 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. 7:30pm // Elliott Bay // FREE Tuesday ANNE LAMOTT RECOMMENDS: Elizabeth Gilbert talks about her book Eat, Pray, Love:......

There's no sign outside, no street number, just a Vespa on the sidewalk below a fluttering Italian flag. Welcome to Tavolata, the long-awaited Belltown outpost of Union's Ethan Stowell and business partner Patric Gabre-Kidan. Neither has clogs-at-the-forno experience in Italy, but that didn't stop them from creating an upscale, "modern Italian" restaurant in Belltown. Now, before you start reading accolades from folks who can't get a seat at 8 o'clock, consider this: at midnight, bracketed......

Sounds like the title of an aria by Verdi or Bellini, doesn't it? (Imagine an evil basso singing "Nessun mangia!") But, hey, it's just noodles. And noodles can be very tasty, as we know. Still, these are special. So, the background. Alfred, Prince of Windischgrätz, had a distinguished career as a general in the Austro-Hungarian army. At the end of the 18th century, he commanded the Marche region, south of the Po delta on Italy's......

Back after a week in northern Italy, hamming it up in Parma and so on. We turn our back for a couple of days and all hell breaks loose. And we're not even talking about the Xmas tree fiasco at SeaTac (pause, wait for it, waiiit, nevermind). Nope, the first big story that crosses our screen is "Soy Makes You Gay." Apparently because soy is a feminizing devil food. And here we were so hoping......

Wednesday, December 13 >>>Hugo House, 7:30pm. Screenwriters Salon: Geoff Miller and Mark Handley invite you to bring your questions about format, technique, structure, dialogue, writing characters, and how to use your catering gig to hand your script to celebs. $5 general/$2 students. Free to members. >>>Seattle Public Central Library, 5:30-7:00pm. Mayor Greg Nickels and City Council President Nick Licata rochambeau to see who gets to salute Seattle author Tim Egan. His book, The Worst......

We sent our passport off to Philadelphia last week for routine renewal, then got unexpected assignment to cover a travel symposium in Italy...next week! No chance of getting new passport in time. Called State Department, expecting endless bureaucracy, got helpful advice on first ring. Used automated system to schedule interview right here in Seattle, got appointment within the hour. Impressive staff at Passport Office. At least one federal agency doing things right, makes leaving home......