Results tagged “shermanalexie”

Jacque-Henri Lartigue's images of urban life are sweetly quirky and full of whimsy in a way that could only have been possible prior to two world wars. If you're a fan of the movie Rushmore, you owe it to yourself to see his work, as director Wes Anderson has drawn on Lartigue’s photographs for inspiration. Lartigue’s photographs are accompanied by the photography of Marion Post Wolcott, who worked with the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s and 40s.

We don't actually read much of the fiction in the New Yorker--either it's warmed-over leftovers from famous authors or something from an MFA who's just discovered a) poor or b) ethnic peoples exist--but last week we did. Last week, Sherman Alexie shook things up with a profane, funny, poignant outburst that reminded us of how good New Yorker fiction used to be: "Last summer, in reaction to various allergies I was suffering from, defensive mucus flooded my inner right ear and confused, frightened, and unmoored me." This fucking guy Alexie. He just gets better and better.

SO HUNGRY: Head to the Northwest Film Forum for Steve McQueen (not to be confused with Steve McQueen) and his first feature Hunger (not to be confused with The Hunger). Instead of sexy vampires, the film's about the true-life hunger strike undertaken by jailed members of the Irish Republican Army, who just wanted to be treated as political prisoners rather than common criminals. While the politics of the film--does it glorify terrorists?--are debatable, McQueen's skills as a director are not; he's got a fine eye and a commendable patience with the camera. There's not much talking in the film, which leaves plenty of time for surprisingly lovely images (see the lonely inmate making friends with the fly in his cell), except for one virtuoso seventeen-minute single-take conversation/debate between a prisoner and a priest, which could've used subtitles, as we don't speak Leprechaun. Hunger runs through Thursday.

GEEK TRIVIA: The infamous Geeks Who Drink take over Ozzie's on LQA. This may surprise those of you who visit their site and read about "two geeks who drink and host pub quizzes throughout Colorado, Texas and New Mexico." But now they're here in Washington, too. The quiz is eight rounds of eight questions and is played by teams of up to six people. There are audio rounds, too. Expect to spend two to three hours drinking in friendly company, and possibly losing to a team called Reverend Horton Hears a Who.

Here with a preview of tonight's Washington vs. Seattle University game is Seattlest's SU Winter Sports Correspondent Cody Goins.

After a father called in to complain about the "pretty trashy" book his 14-year-old son was required to read for English class, Crook County High School in Oregon was told to remove it from the curriculum until further notice. What was the offensive filth that had the potential to corrupt young, tender, innocent hearts and minds? (No, not a Danielle Steele novel.) It was Seattle-based author Sherman Alexie's award-winning, widely acclaimed young adult novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." This part is completely laughable, though: the concerned father objected most strongly to the book's few casual references to masturbation. If the son still has no idea what masturbation is as a 14-year-old attending a public high school, the father has much bigger fish to fry. May we suggest the Moss family begins to put money away towards a therapy fund immediately?

Ten years ago, during the height of the dot-com boom, Seattleites voted to spend almost $200 million to update all of the libraries in our system and to add four new neighborhood branches to it. This week, the Libraries for All Initiative comes to an official close and we thought that, in honor of such a magnificent and useful achievement, we’d allow ourselves the oddity of crushing—for this week only—on an inanimate object: Seattle Public Libraries. We are a bunch of writers who dearly love our books, after all.

--Hegelian dialectics are no problem for the Stranger's Charles Mudede, but Doobie Brothers lyrics are Greek to him.

Once upon a time you could write a book on the typewriter in your attic, bundle the pages together with some butcher paper and twine and schlep it to New York to give to your publisher and then forget about the whole thing until it was time to blow the dust off the keys for the next go round. Or so we imagine it. Then came the critics. And then the book tours. Then Amazon.com and the damned reader reviews. Then the blogs. Now you gotta respond to all that shit. Any critique that goes unanswered, regardless of how obscure the publication or how ridiculous the charge, is out there for the world to see. A criticism of an author's work, floating around out there on the internets somewhere, is indistinguishable from a hard fact until the power of Google puts it in front of the author himself and he responds.

DEMOCRACY: There's a Seattle school levy election today. If you don't know where you are supposed to vote, but know your name and the day you were born, you can look it up online. If you can't get to that place, you can cast a provisional ballot anywhere--just march up to the nice poll-worker ladies at your local school or church and say "I'd like to cast a provisional ballot, please." We did it last election and it worked like a dream.

AIR SUPPLY: Eric Klinenberg’s new book, Fighting for Air, examines how corporate ownership and control of local media has remade American political and cultural life. Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, is interviewed by Michael Fancher, Seattle Times editor-at-large.

Seattlest is a big fan of kids. And writing. And learning. And, like, the future. Kids are the future, we are the past, and so it goes.

We've been thinking about writing something in support of the Sonics recently, because the season just started and for what seems like the first time in a long time we're not completely not into it. And it's not like we feel bad about our "fuck you, Sonics" vote on Tuesday, or that we weren't confident that we were voting with the majority on that one (although we were surprised by its complete ass kicking), but it's just not clear to us that a professional basketball team is somehow detrimental to a city, despite economic reports or whatever. We're not even entirely sure that public funds have no business going towards an arena, and if Schultz wasn't such a crybaby about the whole thing, maybe events could have unfolded differently and Seattle would continue to have a basketball team. There doesn't seem to be much hope of that right now what with the Mayor talking the way he is. Part of us wants to pull the guy aside and tell him, you know, that vote was intended to go against Schultz - We have no beef with these OKC guys. Yet. We were going to write this thing because we don't want to see the Sonics leave Seattle, even though we haven't really been into basketball in recent years and even if we were, apologies here, the Sonics aren't even our team. And then we saw that big Alex Sherman or Sherman Alexie or whoever article in The Stranger yesterday and figured, fuck it. This guy seems to have it covered, whoever he is.

That's one thing we learned from The Moth Story Tour on Sunday night at Town Hall. Actually, we learned that from the brochure, which explained what local voices were going to appear in which cities. Cho in LA, Savage in SEA.

>>>University Temple United Methodist Church, 7:30pm. Religious believers can be co-opted, argues distinguished biologist and secular humanist E.O. Wilson in his talk "The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion." Blah blah salvation of biodiversity blah glory of nature blah work together. We dislike this automatic Religion-and-Science connection ("Ballet and Groundskeeping: A New Unity"), but he's a smartie. Could be worth it. .

That guy that's usually tapping at his laptop and gazing off into the middle distance at the cafe has suddenly disappeared. He's at home furiously typing his tell-all memoir: "The world knew me as a female refugee from the Phillipines who escaped a life of political oppression, violence, prostitution and drugs but now I must reveal myself as a midwestern white boy who lied about it all to sell a few books. The ironic thing is, none of the fake pain I was writing about can compare to the actual devastation of living with this lie for the past ten years."

-An 88-year-old woman who misjudged a curve on I-5 and drove off the road was found today after spending five days trapped by Blackberries. Look, you may think that mobile email is the greatest thing since the Sir Mix-a-lot ring tone, but there's a real danger of these devices ganging together and waylaying elderly drivers. Seattlest thinks there should be a law.