Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from......

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......

A friend of Seattlest sent us a link to Cakespy's examination of the history of the ubiquitous pink frosted cookie. Turns out "ubiquitous" only applies in the Seattle area: If you don't live in Seattle, you might not even know about this cookie (while it exists elsewhere, we've never seen it in quite the same proliferation in our assorted travels); even if you do live in Seattle, you might not have stopped to question why......

On Saturday night, we took one of our oldest and best friends to her very first hiphop show over at the Sunset in Ballard. She's typically more of a KT Tunstall/Garden State soundtrack kind of girl, and we had to bribe her with $2 mojitos at La Isla's late Happy Hour to get her to even leave the house after 9pm. Her feedback after three hours of Elefaders (trippy), N/NW (loud) and dj100proof's mixes?......

Theatre: We often short West Seattle because...well, we forget why, just like we forget they're over there, doing whatever they do in West Seattle. At the moment, though, they're doing Rebecca Gilman's The Sweetest Swing in Baseball and it's made critic Joe Adcock a believer:As a play crafter, Gilman is a wonder. Every scene, every character -- every speech, practically -- contains a surprise. The surprises build to neatly engineered climaxes and conclusions. But......

Forbes Magazine must have gotten tired of making the same "Richest People in the World" list, because the magazine has moved on to ranking the "Nation's Most Sinful Cities." In order to do so, Forbes came up with measurable methods to rank the proclivity for each of the seven deadly sins in America's urban populations. (For example to measure the sin of "wrath" the magazine used murder rates for cities.) Of course, you're curious, just......

What do you get when you cross first-class amenities with a blood-thirsty, third-world parasite? If you’re a downtown Seattle hotel you get bed bugs. According to several hotel sources and a couple of pest control experts, the bed bug is back in downtown Seattle, nobody wants to admit it, and they’re really expensive to get rid of. Pest control experts will readily tell you that as few as a couple of years ago bed......

It's been an active few nights above Washington, and tonight's sky should be no different. Early Tuesday morning a meteor streaked across the sky over Eastern Washington. People as far away as Oregon and Idaho reported seeing strange bright lights and hearing a sonic boom. A hospital surveillance camera in Spokane caught the meteor on film, which has become the top watched video on CNN over the past 24 hours. Tonight's sky should be......

We got into Memphis last night, and we'll be here for the rest of the week, celebrating folk music along with people from all over the world at the annual Folk Alliance conference. We'll be going on and on about that in articles for another job we have, but we just wanted to take a moment to express how much we love Seattle. We miss Seattle. But mostly, we miss people. There don't seem......

We respectfully disagree with our colleagues. Having gone into our second caucus as undecideds, we emerged firmly decided: the caucus stinks. And we weren't even invested in any candidate this time around. The Slog's Erica Barnett makes a good case against it. We'll concede that it was nice to see some neighbors; however, we don't really care to meet our neighbors in this particular context. Block parties, barbeques, chats across the fence, and pleasantries......

Now that all votes are in, all caucuses adjourned, CNN declaring it all for Obama, here's how the day fared for our Seattlest contributors: Charles: "In my precinct we gave four delegates to Obama and two to Hillary -- and yours truly is a delegate for his district and county caucuses! I heard that a few other precincts at my site went 4-1 Obama. In Shoreline a friend said it was roughly 70-30 and......

Back in the early '00s, Seattlest spent some time freelancing at Macy's Northwest's corporate offices, coming up with exciting new ways to talk about 30% off flatware and learning more than we ever cared to about thread count. The corporate offices are downtown on the top floor in the former Bon building. It's a windowless floor -- a cave in the sky -- and, atmosphere-wise, one of the most depressing places we ever worked.......

Hey, Seattlest! I'd like to start a sex advice column, but there's a catch-22. I'm not a columnist yet, so no one's sent me any questions, but unless I answer questions I don't have a column. Can I just pick a question Dan Savage answered in "Savage Love" and answer it myself? If anyone asks, I'll claim I "solicited questions from friends." I read his column every week -- I must be a friend, right?......

We were delighted to read in the P-I this morning that Seattle's traffic management white hats have plans for the Pine Street zigzag. As anyone who's walked down Pine to downtown knows, the north side of the street east of Boren Avenue doesn't have a sidewalk; it has a ledge. People still walk it, single file, even though there's a sign that says not to. Part of the problem is that there's a sidewalk that......

In preparation for his upcoming visit, Seattlest sat down and emailed four fairly inane questions to the novelist, essayist, and MacArthur genius Colson Whitehead. It's true: we could have tried asking Whitehead insightful questions about his brilliant novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, and Apex Hides the Hurt, but we figured, everyone tries to do that and he winds up getting asked them same question over and over again. So instead, we asked him about......

As ChrisB of Three Imaginary Girls points out, losing your job sucks. Losing a job that meant a lot to you sucks more. And losing all that during the holidays? Well that just blows a goat. So what do you do to help out these fellas who so unexpectedly got canned on Sunday afternoon? If you're former Croc booker Pete Greenberg (now at Chop Suey), you organize a benefit show to help these guys pay......

"Post Alley Sign" by Slightlynorth from the Seattlest Flickr Pool. Thanks for sharing!......

If you're wondering what happens to the lesser-known bands who used to play Seattle at the Croc, evidence from the sports world shows that you ought to look for them in Kent. Or not at all. As you read, those Seattlests who do follow music weren't too concerned about losing the Croc. Neumos and Chop Suey are the places to go--they book well-known bands (well-known to music types, at least). The Croc booked lesser-known bands,......

This Seattlest took one look at the weather forecast and headed to sunny Florida yesterday. Now here we are in our hometown of DeLand, population 24,375 (per 2006 census). Our mother doesn't have wireless at the house, and is operating off a 1997 iMac. It's cute and compact, but slow as hell, so we headed out this morning for the one source of public wifi in town: Boston Gourmet Coffeehouse. A couple of things about......

"They should take off their left socks." "Let's dance to Jesus." "Let's talk about Jesus." "It's a time to be jolly after all." "It's like a wine disco." "It's like hanging out covered in blood." "We need some leap frog!" "We need some Percosets." Seattlest actually heard all of the above during Clockwork Reduction Live Friday night at Northwest Film Forum. Some of the words came from the mouth's of performers, others came from the......

The past few months have seen Mr. “Wes C. Addle”—Eddie Vedder—looking more like Mr. Tinseltown than just another (incredibly talented) Easy Street customer. Times don’t look like they’ll be a-changin’ in 2008. Vedder recorded a song for the Cate Blanchett Bob Dylan study I’m Not There, penned two for the documentary Body of War, then a whole soundtrack for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. He’ll appear in the upcoming singer-biopic spoof Walk Hard. He’s just......

Making up for weeks of hibernation and workaholism, Kim will hit the parties this weekend. Tonight, she’ll don her Groucho glasses for a lesbian function at Jabu’s celebrating the births of her two favorite Sagitarii. Saturday, it’s to the War Room for a company party with the missus and her workmates. Finally, she’ll ship off to the sub-tropics on Monday, where she’ll spend what remains of 2007. While his wife is taking a Wilderness......

We have to be honest: We were slightly annoyed when we read the email promoting Seattle School's (of Motel fame) latest event. Anything that calls an organization "insanely exuberant" and says that it is putting on one of the "craziest film events in the history of the city" is trying pretty hard to sound zany and exciting. But as we told Seattlest Audrey, we're a sucker for weird (you should have seen us in college)......

Besides being in the running for Owner of the World's Most Glamorous Name, Katjana Vadeboncoeur plays the maternal hen Aunt Julia in blahblahblahBANG at On the Boards. To make a point of it, she sips then spits up her tea into a cup, complete with birdlike neck spasms, and hands it to her beloved, coddled nephew Yorgen Tesman -- who drinks it, onstage, to an audience of wrinkled noses. If you're an Ibsen fan (blahblahblahBANG......

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 One of our best friends from college spurned her native Portland to live in a......

For the first time in Seattlest's life, we're actually bemoaning the fact that we don't have any tank tops in our closet. Heck, this is probably the first time we've ever thought about not owning a tank top. Not having one puts a serious crimp in our plans to go to Sustainable Capitol Hill's Tank Tops to Totes this Saturday at Stitches on Capitol Hill. (We don't think Sustainable Capitol Hill has a Web site.......

With all of the people that live/work on the Eastside, it is really surprising to not find more beer spots to explore. Granted, we probably haven't found everything worth visiting, but it just seems there is plenty of room for more good beer on the Eastside. Below is a summary of what you can enjoy on the other side of the lake. Breweries: Rock Bottom Bellevue is about the only place if you want......

Those crazy kids at WET have put Ibsen's Hedda Gabler on a crash diet -- the subtitle is "A Pistol Fit in One Act" -- and added what they call "dance and circus vocabulary" to the mix. According to the Weekly, The show is “movement intense,” says director Jennifer Zeyl; actors can and do literally run up the walls.So it won't be your usual neurotic drawing room drama, where people stand there stiffly and occasionally......

This lovely composition, called "WinterPlant", brought to you by ~wesa~ from the Seattlest Flickr Pool.......

We showed up to the Westlake area just in time to wedge ourselves onto the 2nd streetcar out of downtown today. There was a smallish crowd out and by our unofficial measurement it was comprised of 10% reporters and photographers, 10% supporters and Vulcan employees and 80% smartasses in S.L.U.T. shirts, including the guy who wrote the S.L.U.T. song who we had the good fortune to ride along with a little later on. These are......