THEATRE: Young Jean Lee's Theater Company presents Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (A Show about White People in Love), which is an aggressively exotic title for someone raised in Pullman, WA.Writer/director Young Jean Lee's worst nightmare was to make a confessional, ethnic identity play with a flowery Asian-sounding title. So, the young NYC-based artist did just that [...] a character named "Korean-American" navigates increasingly disturbing levels of a pseudo-Korean world intercut with......

The Irish writer whom we hadn't heard of until writing this, Anne Enright, is in town flogging her fourth book, The Gathering, a Booker Prize winner. (Which reminds us that Eavan Boland is visiting this March 3.) Her book, says the NY Times:...inhabits the restless, angry consciousness of Veronica Hegarty, one of a dozen children of a “vague” mother — a “piece of benign human meat, sitting in a room” — and a mannerly,......

Down here in the Seattlest newsroom, we rarely find time to pay attention to the upper echelons of the American chattering classes, what with their myopic focus on the other Washington (as they relish in referring to us as, in the rare event they mention us at all). But this morning, as the astounding news of Obama's four-peat trouncing of Clinton over the weekend percolated through the commentariat, we noticed an increasingly shrill response from......

Thank goodness for a Congressional committee looking into misleading pharmaceutical ads to detail the shady saga that is pseudo-jock Dr. Jarvik. You know Jarvik from the Lipitor ads: late 50s, receding hairline, cornerstone of Pfizer’s $258 million cholesterol-lowering campaign. Apparently he’s a fraud. Well, when it comes to rowing. We became suspicious of Dr. Jarvik the moment the ad with him jogging with his robotically stiff son came out. "These guys don’t jog," we thought.......

There's really no time like an election year for reminding us of our chimpanzee progenitors. So it's a good time to catch a one-night-only showing of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Cinerama in glorious 70mm. It's an original print in "B" condition, for those of you who know what the hell that means. This site claims to explain what 2001 is about, in Flash. When it opened, the NY Times' Renata Adler pegged......

We haven't yet seen The Battle of Algiers -- we weren't alive in the '60s, we weren't working at the Pentagon in '03, and last time we checked the Criterion release out of the library we never got a chance to watch it. So we're happy to see it turn up on local screens again this Sunday, at the SIFF Cinema. We could point you to a bunch of reviews that mostly tell you......

"getty-up!" by Dean Forbes, from Flickr via Creative Commons license. Yes, the irony is thick. Fremont's own Getty Images wants to auction itself off and could sell for up to $1.5 billion, reports the NY Times. The stock photo agency has had a rough go of it lately: But the rise of digital photography and the Web created a host of competitors that charged as little as a dollar for an image. Recent events......

John Markoff of the NY Times talked gadgets with Steve Jobs. Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.......

Depending on how excruciating your teenage years were, the documentary Billy the Kid [blog] will have a different effect on you. Certainly if you have or know someone who has Asperger's syndrome, it'll make you squirm a bit. But it's also about being an outsider in a small town. About wanting to share interests. About negotiating the changes life throws at you. About falling in love for the first time and emotional insecurity. Except for......

That's NYC experimental group Radiohole not Radiohead. We don't bait and switch here at Seattlest. Their show Fluke is an "enigmatic riff" on Moby Dick, says the NY Times, adding: "It has always been easier to like a show by Radiohole than to understand it." On the Boards describes Fluke like so:Inspired by Melville’s leviathan epic, Fluke tosses unlikely shipmates from Captain Ahab to Tokyo Rose around on a claustrophobic, spring-loaded, jury-rigged set that......

starbucks, howard schultz, sonics...

N+1, the NYC-based literary magazine, launched with a bang back in the fall of 2004. In the inaugural issue, the editors took aim Dave Eggers & the McSweeneys/Believer crowd, deriding them as "the regressive avant-garde," and at the iconic critic James Wood (then at The New Republic, now at The New Yorker) whom they called a "designated hater," and who--along with his TNR co-horts Leon Wieseltier and Dale Peck--they accuse of writing literary criticism that......

Have you heard of cask beer, but maybe avoided it because you think it is supposed to be served warm and flat? Well, you need to find out what you're missing. Cask-conditioned beer, often referred to as 'real ale', is brewed from only traditional ingredients and allowed to mature naturally. The unfiltered, unpasteurised beer still contains live yeast, which continues conditioning the beer in the cask (known as 'secondary fermentation'); this process creates a......

The overnight blogs are abuzz: Tenet (slamdunking Iraq) and Goldy (recycling poisoned pet food). Both merit close attention, but Goldy (David Goldstein) is right here in Seattle, and he's making international news. Let's not forget that his blog, HorsesAss.org, was the first to reveal Michael Brown's bogus credentials to run FEMA. This time, it's another fuckup, but with truly ominous potential: China's melamine-laced pet food was recycled as feed for domestic pork, and our......

--Legendary car salesman Cal Worthington divulges something unexpected in this neat little NY Times profile: He never liked the car business. --Impeding Fogey-dom Alert! The Mariners' top prospect, according to USS Mariner, was born in the 90s. --Is Seattle's high cost of living leading to spiritual bankruptcy? --Land a new job by dishing about your current one? Makes sense to Trench Mice. --It may be just a Wednesday night for you, but Japan's already......

KARAOKE: Wednesday night is always karaoke night at the Little Red Hen, an outpost of country music that's inexplicably smack dab in the middle of Volvo-driving, NPR-listening, holiday-tree-owning Green Lake. The crowd veers toward the early-20s spectrum, so if you need a break from parties where people discuss mortgages, the new Whole Foods, and their fucking jobs, this is the place to go. Tip: Bring cash so you can buy beer from the guy with......

With visions of sugar plum fairies dancing through their heads, the -Ists began to get into that holiday mood. Well, some did. Austinist wasn't as the NY Times dissed them and a local Tex-Mex institution sold out. Making them feel better was music, sweet music and the local theater getting name checked on "Heroes" Chicagoist tried to wrap their heads around a religious movie being banned from a Christmas themed park. To wash that......

The NY Times ran an article (select only) that shocked the baking world--alleging that you can make amazing bread without kneading. We asked Rachael Coyle, former pastry chef at the Herb Farm, to test it out. I teach classes for home bakers and while most believe it the task of educators to encourage others to reach their lofty goals--regarding bread, I am a stark realist. I tell people the cold, hard truth about crusty “european”......

Gothamist, among many others, is reporting that a plane has apparently crashed into a building on the upper east side--you can see the exact location on 72nd via Gothamist's Googlemap hack. Currently it is being reported as a helicopter that crashed into the building. You can see pictures at the Gothamist site (national news sites didn't have anything yet, but they've got screen captures from local news up on their site). Update: From Gothamist: City......

"What are you going to do, shoot us?" These were evidently the last words of Seattle actress Nicole DuFresne, murdered in NYC in January 2005 during a botched mugging. Rudy Fleming, who's charged with the shooting, did so because she challenged him to, according to testimony in Fleming's trial (NY Times, reg req.). Tatiana McDonald, one of the teenage muggers with Fleming that night, testified that the seven-person group attempted to mug two other people......

Consider two of the "ten most emailed" articles from yesterday's NY Times (registration required): * A eight-year-old Scarsdale tot who obsesses over outrageously expensive fashionable jeans * A nine-year-old African boy who spends his days breaking up rocks that his mother sells for pennies to a cement contractor How can Americans put up with this kind of disparity? The only explanation we at Seattlest can come up with is mind control: they're putting something in......

Out-of-town friend writes that he loved slurping half-shell oysters at The Brooklyn on a visit last week. But wait, aren't the oyster beds closed because of the dreaded vibrio parahaemoliticus outbreak? The answer is yes and no. Says Kim Zabel-Lincoln of the state Dep't of Health, it's the worst outbreak they've seen, but it hasn't closed all the beds. Hood Canal, Dabob and Quilcene bays, Totten and Skookum inlets, yup, they're shut down. But plenty......

The New York Times, with annoying & typical provincialism, claims that black chefs are "struggling" [note: free registration required]. Not so in Seattle, where a culinary star like Daisley Gordon shines at Campagne. More to the point, a baker's dozen black chefs gathered last night to present "Food As Art," a celebration of African-American culinary expertise, at a fundraiser for the ">Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas. Subject of a splendid profile in the......