Not that there's anything remarkably surprising about this. Most of us here in this hippy haven understand full well that the War in Iraq was forged under false pretense, and there have been plenty of news stories in the past five years to back up our suspicions. But, now there's a study showing that, in fact, it was the confluence of 935 lies the Bush administration told in order to set the stage for......

In some early canvassing for "show/concert of the year", we've gotten two votes for The Avett Brothers at Bumbershoot, from which we reported live (ish). So we suspect that tickets to a two-show visit in April will sell out fast. Reports our friend Monica, "I don't think I have ever put anything in my calendar that far ahead as this show." You'd better get on the good foot. Tickets are $22.50, plus service fees, at......

As a soukous band plays and the audience noshes on couscous, red rice, and chicken, all doused with a hearty amount of spicy peanut sauce, a man sways to the music while carrying a fluorescent light to the center of the floor. We whisper to our companion for the evening, "I think it's started." Festival of Lies is the powerful Seattle debut of Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and his company Les Studios Kabako. The......

On Wednesday, we spent $50 to see a basketball game between two mediocre college teams. The game was sloppy and largely unremarkable. We enjoyed ourselves immensely. We enjoyed ourselves immensely because we love basketball. And we suspect that if you love musicals as much as we love basketball, you won't mind spending $50 to see the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Whistle Down the Wind, playing through December 2nd at the 5th Avenue. The two leads,......

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......

There's nothing like the prospect of a smart hip-hop show to build up our anticipation on a Saturday night. One where we know that the act we're going to see can't fail to deliver, cranks that up a little higher than we can generally handle when we're forced to first stop by a friend's party before the show. To all those in Shoreline that we bored with excited chatter about Lyrics Born and Blackalicious......

Time, having surrendered to the whims of sound, had fallen away to some dark corner of the hall and in its place was a band on a mission to go out in style. We had no idea how long the final encore had gone on. We knew only that we didn't care. This wasn't some finale we wished would come to an end, so we could finally walk to our car, pausing for a......

Last night's Arcade Fire show was rife with problems. Not with the Arcade Fire, Lord knows they can do no wrong, but with the opening bands, and most of all, with the venue. Somehow, even though the scheduled time for the show was 7:30pm, the time published everywhere---on the Ticketmaster site, in ads for the show, in UW emails, on the goddamn tickets---doors actually opened at 6:30pm and the Gossip started playing right around......

Last night was our first live encounter with Ohio's Over the Rhine, and the Triple Door turned out to be the perfect venue for the neo-cabaret sound of their new album The Trumpet Child (which they're streaming on their site). Tonight's show is sold out, but they're doing SRO sales at the window. The Triple Door website will tell you the show's at 8pm, but we showed up at 7:45pm last night and got sat......

Leavenworth, "Washington's Bavarian Village", is a little burgh situated in the Cascades on the other side of Stevens Pass. It lies just beyond the border between the West Side and the other state of Washington. It was originally a railroad stop and hub for the Great Northern Railway. Aside from being a marginally kitschy, entirely cute place to spend a beautiful summer weekend, most visitors don't know much about the town's fascinating, unique history......

It's east meets west tomorrow night at the Crocodile. Come for the psychedelic rock of Brooklyn's The Comas, stay for the indie pop goodness of LA's Great Northern. Both bands released a new album only a few months ago. Pitchfork gave The Coma's Spells a not-so-bad 7.4, and Great Northern's Trading Twilight for Daylight is pretty much your classic California rock album, which is a good thing. Crocodile Cafe // Doors at 9pm // $8......

It's SIFF's last bleary-eyed, numb-assed, popcorn-butter-fingered weekend, so if you haven't stopped in for some film-festy fun, you gotta act fast. We held Audrey upside-down and shook her until she gave us some selections -- no, no, you deserve the best. There's no telling how far we'd go to make you happy. Before we get to that, here's some film-related goings-on that you might like: Friday night there's Kinski performs Berlin: Symphony of a......

On Saturday, a tractor clearing brush from under I-5 near South Massachusetts struck and killed a homeless man in a sleeping bag, hidden away in the blackberry brambles. The accident is "sparking," as the P-I has it, "a policy review.""This is a horrible accident for everyone involved," Transportation Department spokesman Russ East said. "We're going to take a look at our practices and procedures. We're asking, 'What do we need to do to make sure......

The Seattle Times tries to put a happy face on the news that the Seattle Symphony is projecting an accumulated $5.5 million deficit by pointing out that ticket sales are up. But the troubling fact remains that over the past three years the deficit has grown from $1 million, to $3.2 million, to $5.5 million. For an annual budget of around $21 million, a deficit of $5.5 million is remarkable. It's true that the......

Last year Eddie Guardado had a terrible April and lost the M's closer job to J.J. Putz. He thought Mike Hargrove would give him a chance to win his job back, but, in his mind, he didn't get that chance. And he's not happy. Guardado tells the P-I's Jim Moore:Grover knows he gave me a bunch of bullcrap. I'm a man. I want people to respect me. I was told a bunch of lies by......

Editor Dan loves you, Seattle. City, people, land, water and professional sports franchises; all of it. However, he cannot back you on the issue of the Seattle Seahawks vs. the Chicago Bears. If you're looking for calming words of compassion or hilarious Seahawks histrionics Seattlest will take care of you there, too, but one of us grew up with a Bears helmet painted on our neighbor's garage door and didn't appear in a photograph......

The Decemberists played the Paramount Friday night and it was packed all the way up to the nosebleed section. A friend of ours warned us not to go as he feared they would be playing too much from the new album, The Crane Wife, which he hated and which we are sorry to say we've been too busy lately to have even heard about. We loved their earlier work--elaborate, sad, heavily orchestrated--which seemed to......

We've always wanted to see Racine's Phaedra -- apparently only cheese-eating surrender monkeys the French really go for it, so it's not performed all that often in these parts. Yet what drives the story is as universal as the suspicion that something might be up between Carol and Greg on the Brady Bunch. When Phaedra marries the warrior-king Theseus, she develops "feelings" for her stepson Hippolytus -- but he's got eyes only for Aricia......

We rifled through Sunday's New York Times Arts Section cover piece about Starbucks thinking that if we looked hard and fast enough we'd find a punchline in there somewhere. When it turned out that no punchline was forthcoming we wrote it off to some kind of East Coast joke that was over our heads. Not even Gawker made any mention of the article so it couldn't have been legit and, well, we've spent thirty two......

They're talking; are you listening? Here's the round-up on speakers of note. Thursday, September 14 >Town Hall fielder's choice: at 7:00pm, rabble-rouser Jim Hightower ($10) on sustainable communities, or at 7:30pm, Irwin Redlener ($5) on what’s wrong with our approach to preventing and responding to mega-disasters. >Elliott Bay. 8:00pm. Jennifer Gilmore reads from her debut novel, "Golden Country," about the Jewish Immigrant Experience Project. Free, our hand to God! Friday, September 15 >Third Place......

The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby is disturbed by a disparity in the national media's treatment of Mel Gibson's liquored-up anti-semitic rantings versus Naveed Haq's shooting spree at the Jewish Federation: Unless you've spent the past week submersed in the Mariana Trench, you know that the intoxicated driver in Incident A was Hollywood's Mel Gibson, who railed at a Los Angeles County police officer about the "[expletive] Jews" and how "the Jews are responsible for all......

Seattlest is home sick this afternoon. Bad. But, happily, we're able to watch disgraced "memoirist" James Frey lick Oprah's boots on KING 5. She's decided that she was wrong to defend him and confronts him directly about his apparently fictional A Million Little Pieces, live. She also brings on the book's editor, literary celebrity Nan Talese, who comes off as a total phony. She says that an "author's note" will explain what Frey made up,......

Let's have a moment of silence to listen to the pitter-patter of raindrops and reflect on the poor citizens of Seattle circa 1953. That year holds the record for continuous days of measurable rainfall in Seattle (and thus provides the tenuous basis of this series) but 1953 also witnessed 94 continuous days of zero measurable publication of the Seattle Times. Writers and editors for that paper went on strike on July 16 to protest low......

Has the U.S. government ever screwed anyone as badly as it screwed the American Indian? Conventionally, we say "no." The native peoples of our beloved landmass are the reigning champions in that regard and will forever remain so. In there with all of the raw deals, outright lies, forced marches and whatnot, though, is the Makah Nation and the one bone they were able to wrest from the government: ''the right of taking fish and......

It's a primary election of merely local consequence and you have little to no idea who or what is being decided, much less which way you should vote. Additionally, the last time you visited your local polling place the day was capped by emotional scarrification the likes of which you will never recover from should you live through a dozen more Red State administrations. Go vote on the way to work tomorrow anyway. It's just......

Seattle musicians, if you can tear yourselves away from scanning threeimaginarygirls.com for any mention of your name for just a second and focus here we'd appreciate it. We know you're out there. We also know you're not working and right about now you're wondering how you're going to spend the day. Man, you lazy bastards. Hit the cafe again or just go straight to the bar? Just kidding - We know you're still in......

Seattlest loves the Seattle Public Library system. So what if the downtown library can, from certain perspectives, be compared to a smushed cheese grater? We hardly ever make it through the front doors, and we'll tell you why -- in a bit. But first, if you have $1 to spare, we want to tell you about the Friends of the Library Freeway Park Book Sale (which is a bit of a misnomer, since they also......

Initiatives, they are the voice of the people-- which is a really sad thought. Sure, Tim Eyman may have ruined everything in this state with his grand plan to fix local government and buy as much stuff as possible using his supporters' money; however, he is not behind the latest effort to get tax reform on the ballot. Initiative 912 would repeal the 9 cent per gallon tax passed by the state legislature. The money......

What better way to enjoy Memorial Day weekend than under a cloudless sky with a sweltering sun on the hottest day of the year? Seattlest hates hot weather (we tend to sweat easily and a lot), but we braved Saturday's exxxtreme temps to catch some outstanding music at Sasquatch. When it was all said and done, we had seen eight full acts and pieces of another three; we also managed to successfully avoid sunburn.......

Seattlest bit on New City Arts' "Build a Bench in a Day" class last year, knowing little about the woodworking studio on Lower Queen Anne that runs classes via Pratt. We drew a bench. We figured out how much wood we would need. The very capable, very forgiving instructors showed us how to use the table saw, joiner, and planer, and maybe another machine, we can’t really remember. The point is, Tom and Gudrun......