Tacoma native and former Seattle theater stalwart Louis Hobson scored his first Broadway role this year, and it's a great one. Not just a great role, with turns comedic and dramatic, but one that's in a terrific and affecting show. Hobson plays Dr. Madden in the musical Next to Normal, which concerns a woman's struggle with mental illness. (We know, sounds odd, but it's amazing, trust us. Or trust Ben Brantley. Or Peter Travers.) We first interviewed Louis two years ago over e-mail, when he was starring in the 5th Avenue's production of West Side Story. This time we met him in the lobby of New York's Booth Theater, about 90 minutes before he was to take the stage. more ›

Husband and wife theater team Mike Daisey (the monologist) and Jean-Michele Gregory (the director) met and began collaborating together in Seattle before moving to New York eight years ago. We spent an afternoon in their ground floor Brooklyn apartment, talking about the move, about how starting out in Seattle helped their careers, and what they miss about our town. more ›

HALF-NAKED BOOTY GIRLS: The 2 Live Crew outta Miami is at Nectar tonight, and you know what that means: half-naked booty girls, according to local emcee Wizdom. "I believe it," he told us with anticipation. The 2 Live Crew has been holding down the sexually explicit end of hiphop since the '80s. Warning: there might be juggalos present. Locals Mad Rad, Champagne Champagne, and Jay Barz open for this promisingly profane and colorful evening. more ›

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook by preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. more ›

Last football season we taught ourselves to cook by preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. By the playoffs we had mastered the art of cooking, and in fact delivered a eulogy at what we thought was Julia Child's funeral. more ›

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. more ›

KEXP moved ahead yesterday with its plan to broadcast on a radio station in New York City. Hopefully you remember the gist of the story, but if not, a bit more than a month ago, the station announced a partnership with Radio New York called Radio Liberation. The plan at the time was to export six hours of programming to a terrestrial radio station in NYC. more ›

• Gothamist found that an explosive set off outside the Times Square army recruiting center may be similar to five past bombings in New York City.
• Seattlest worried when severed right feet and bottles of rat poison started washing up on local beaches.
• Shanghaiist was surprised by Bjork's rooting for Tibetan independence at her concert (see video), and the political fallout has only just begun.
• SFist debated the merits of new bronze plaques that will be placed in locations where San Francisco's homeless have died.
• DCist was obliged to respond to the worst Washington Post Outlook column ever published, in which conservative writer Charlotte Allen tried to make the case that women are dumb.
• LAist found Satan's ice cream truck trolling the streets, and they recorded the music.
• Some crafty Torontoist readers didn't like the dearth of ski hills in downtown Toronto, so they just built one of their own on their deck and (of course) recorded a video of them all taking turns on it.
• Bostonist knows the city's subway and bus system, the MBTA, has problems. So does this 17-year-old who submitted a report and told the MBTA brass how to fix it.
• Phillyist explored the possibility of an Ivy League prostitute, while their commenters debated the most ethical approach to proving or debunking the story.
• Londonist spent a little too much time looking at airbrushed operatic private parts, and enjoyed an enlightening comment from someone who was there. more ›

At last, Patrick and Agnes find the decadent apartment of his only living relative, Auntie Mame Dennis and, well, this is where it gets good. Did we say good? We meant marvelous, fabulous, breathtaking, spectacular and any number of other big words meant to convey a sense of awe and grandeur. more ›

"The Next Slum" is the name of the article in the March Atlantic (not online yet), and Seattle gets lots of mentions. Author Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that as demographics and energy use changes over the next 15-20 years, there will be a growing surplus of large-lot homes that no one wants, decaying on the market. more ›

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Absurdistan is an allegorically rich comedy care of witty German director Veit Helmer and filmed in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. In the tiny titular land, a war of the sexes break out when the local aqueduct ceases to work, and the men are too lazy to fix it. The women declare a strike--no water, no sex--and two childhood sweethearts find themselves feuding instead of consummating their long-standing love. Looks like it's up to the kids to fix the water pipe and get everybody laid. Helmer directs this charming, mostly dialogue-free little film with childlike wonder, with shades of Jeunet in his use of fanciful contraptions, like a gondola on pulleys flying over the town. more ›

Starting tomorrow night, SIFF Cinema is showing Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, a documentary that examines Hollywood's relationship and depiction of one of the 20th Century's defining events. more ›

Coming home from work on the bus last night, we got to thinking about how even getting to vote on a light-rail package this year is going to be an uphill fight. The dire prospects for light rail anytime soon pushed us to extrapolate the costs to our psyche of waiting during the ride home. more ›

Clubs aren't taverns; they don't grow finer with age. It's better to have a steady, sustainable turnaround of clubs and venues. It helps keep the music scene itself from stagnating and compartmentalizing.There's nothing more depressing than a club reaching mythic "legendary" status with 45-year-old, original patrons -- trying to relive old memories -- throwing lecherous glances at the 16-year-old noobs who go there because it's the cool place to be.The best thing that can happen for a club is to close before it gets tired and becomes a caricature of itself. Clubs best live on in the slightly hazy, alcoholic fog of memories of past patrons. more ›

We were introduced to In the Bowl: Vegetarian Noodle Bistro on Capitol Hill a few days ago and have been planning our return ever since. New (to us anyway, apparently it's been around since at least February), In the Bowl is a welcome addition to the quick, cheap Asian-fare genre on The Hill. A bonus: It's all-veggie and every meal comes with Black Rice Pudding for dessert. The restaurant is small, with an atmosphere reminiscent... more ›

Until the day after Thanksgiving, Seattlest hadn't seen The Nutcracker -- probably the world's most famous ballet -- in years. But we had a solid image in our head of what it looked like because when Seattlest was a little kid, our mom made an annual birthday tradition to see it every year on opening night. For much of our childhood, this meant getting all spiffed up and walking a few blocks to Lincoln... more ›

That headline was designed to hector Seattle because we know how awful it is for this part of the world to be compared to New York City. But showing Seattle how New York does something better seems to produce results (the M's notwithstanding). This time they're creating truly bike-friendly streets. more ›

Two-thirds of Pacific Northwest Ballet's "All Balanchine" show is surprising and exciting. Showcasing three ballets spanning the career of George Balanchine, the leading American ballet choreographer of the 20th Century and famously the co-founder of the New York City Ballet, PNB manages to both remind audiences of how adventurous dance can be, while at the same time reinforcing the sense that major ballet companies have to carefully balance the experimental with the traditional in order to keep audiences coming. more ›

After paying for a financial feasibility study, the Muckleshoot tribe announced today that they'd be willing to donate land for an NBA arena down there in Auburn. more ›

Is the office slightly quieter today? Were there fewer parents dropping the little ones off at school this morning? Were there a lot more parked cars in certain spots around Wedgwood, Seward Park or Mercer Island? more ›

Last week, Seattlest Kim wrote a post about New York City that pissed off New Yorkers. The angry comments to said post were oddly familiar because we got similar comments on a post about Seaside, Oregon that Seattlest Tom wrote in May. more ›

Seattlest got the news from a coworker yesterday: an explosion in midtown Manhattan had resulted in a collapsed building (MSNBC); then that no, in fact, it was a transformer that exploded, leaving a nearby building "shaky" (CNN). more ›

Mom always told me not to talk with my mouth full. But that's just what Leite's Culinaria wants local food writers to do for a project about food writing. Launched last year in New York City, now spreading around the country, "Talking With Your Mouth Full" is a night of reading by food writers "to highlight the versatility of the craft." more ›

We're pretty sure we stumbled across Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place at Bailey/Coy Books. It's been years since we first read it, and since then "You like mysteries? Have you read The Blue Place?" has been a regular part of our conversations. more ›

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!" more ›

The American Institute of Architects asked 1800 Americans to name their favorite buildings in the US. After further refinement and surveying, the AIA compiled a list of the top 150 and released it on Wednesday. more ›

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. more ›

The NY Times ran an article (select only) that shocked the baking world--alleging that you can make amazing bread without kneading. more ›

Jagshemash! more ›