Five years ago today, this Seattlest contributor was sitting in a coffeeshop in Eugene, Oregon, reading the paper about the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. There was something strange and distant about the whole thing, and not just the strangeness and dislocation that every civilian sipping coffee and reading about the scarier facets of the world has: it was also strangely misunderstood, a daring adventure undertaken for reasons no one fully understood. Five......

The last film we caught at the festival was The Visitor, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, best known for his 2003 Sundance darling The Station Agent. Like the previous film, McCarthy's sophomore piece is a well-crafted work about how people from disparate backgrounds can come together and form an unconventional family. Walter Vale, an uptight widower and bored college econ professor, has totally shut down and withdrawn from everything in his life, but......

The first thing to know about Devra Davis is that she's not speaking from the sidelines: she's director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is an environmental health expert, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. So when she said that the war on cancer has been almost......

For those of you just tuning in, yesterday we wrote a little piece about the steam pipe that burst in New York. Apparently it pissed a bunch of people off, and we have to concur that actual true (non-sensationalist) details have been slow to trickle in over here. Everything we've read the last couple of days focuses on a "geyser of steam and debris," which seemed like an overblown fearmongering catchphrase at first, but......

It's always good to be reminded that here in the other Washington, our Republicans are just as nutty, corrupt and paranoid as their cousins in D.C. Today, David Postman over at the Times reports on his blog that state Sen. Joe Zarelli recently hosted right-wing Israeli politicians and others at a two-day conference down in Vancouver, to fan the flames of Islamophobia. Known as the Convergence Northwest conference, Zarelli invited "[m]embers of Israel’s Knesset, former......

Once the dust had subsided, after we'd sawed through a concrete wall and brushed the rat droppings from our heads that rained down on us as we demolished our basement bathroom, we began to find unusual things. Old toys stashed behind sheetrocked walls, left there to mourn their solitary confinement at the hands of a former owner who was too lazy or cheap to free them amidst the detritus of the dump. And then we......

Monday SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES: Art Spiegelman's 1992 Holocaust tale Maus (based on a true story) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a comic book. Its success paved the way for the graphic novels thriving today and led to Spiegelman's ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) gathers his recent broadsheets of disenchantment with the war on terror. 7:30pm // Benaroya Hall // Tickets:......

Ok, it's not funny when someone's house gets invaded by the cops. The continued erosion of our rights in the name of the war on terror isn't funny in the least. Perpetrating obscene phone calls isn't funny. The police making an error and therefore not apprehending the person making the obscene phone calls isn't funny, either. Multiple squad cars driving up onto someone's lawn in search of porn is, well, kind of funny. And this......

SIFF enters its second full week with a slew of great documentaries, including the final screening of fair trade coffee doc Black Gold (Tuesday, 9:30pm @ the Egyptian). The directors, Marc and Nick Francis, will be in attendance, as will Tadesse Meskela, an Ethiopian Farm Cooperative Organizer featured in the film. The SIFF screenings mark the first time the directors and subject have been together since the making of the film---and the first time......

The release of Pearl Jam's new album came and went without so much as a single flannel appearing in Belltown and nary a Rolling Stone cover story devoted to the Seattle Scene. Oh well, it's ok stuff and heartfelt, but hardly the life-altering event previous PJ albums may have been. The band released a video last week, though, which is something they haven't done since 1998. We barely remember '98: Y2K was approaching, the......

Torontoist throws down the gauntlet and challenges all comers: pillow fight, bitch. They also stand up for a fellow blogger taking heat from the TTC and welcome city-wide WiFi. SFist can finally admit it: It's possible that Bary Bonds juiced. Is Bay Area artist (tempted to put quotes around that) Thomas Kinkaid "kinda crappy" or "explosively crappy" or does he just like marking territory? SFist wonders. Technology comes in the form of new Mac goodness......

Rod Stewart is performing at the Key Arena tomorrow evening. This is Rod Stewart, people. Sure he may be old and might not have released an interesting album since the early Reagan years, but talk about sex appeal! His walker alone could attract more models than all of the Strokes combined. He's touring in support of his latest collection of standards that we think is dreamy. There are plenty of tickets available on craigslist.......