We're not ready to give up on summer or finding the perfect juicy blackberry, just yet. Share your final summer explorations and your autumn adventures with us at the Seattlest Flickr Pool.
Seattlest Pix: 08Sept23
Seattlest Roundtable: The Oscars
Yes, they're overblown and sure, it's tiring to watch 4+ hours of Hollywood patting itself on the back, but it's the Academy Awards, fer fuckssake. We can't not watch Sunday's big show. From the red carpet fashion to the drawn-out musical numbers to the people-who've-died montage and the Academy's tribute to gaffers, the Oscars offer something for everyone. Plus, this year it's hosted by Jon Stewart and, though his comedy is not exactly made for Hollywood insiders, we still love that wee little funnyman. (Fact: Jon Stewart is approximately Oscar-sized.)
Short Solo Tour for Eddie Vedder....But No Seattle Stop!?
What with his recent Into the Wild success, it's not a huge surprise that Eddie Vedder's embarking on his first solo tour—announced today—up and down the West coast. What is surprising is that he's not playing Seattle.
Radiohead Not Playing Sasquatch Festival
Wild speculation surrounding the possibility of Radiohead playing somewhere in Washington sometime in the next year has got us pissing ourselves with excitement. The P-I A P-I reader blog called Ear Candy** thinks they might headline the Sasquatch Festival at the end of May with REM and The Cure but our sources are suggesting the band will embark on a West Coast run after their European summer tour ends. As of right now, the only guaranteed U.S. shows are a handful of random gigs in the South--kicking off in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Cinco De Mayo of all times and places. After all, nothing pairs quite like cheap tequila and sophisticated Brit rock.
"Wooly Pig, Wooly Pig, Tastes However A Wooly Pig Does"
In case you haven't heard, this Saturday the 19th is a day of foodie celebration -- it's the first time you can go buy some Mangalitsa pork raised right here in the U.S., from Wooly Pigs. They'll be at the U-District Farmer's Market from 9am-2pm. If you don't want to cook yourself, it's being served in local restaurants.
See it Now: Vedder’s New Video
Happy Monday, Pearl Jam/Eddie Vedder fans. The frontman-gone-sometimes-solo can be seen on VH1 today in the video for “Guaranteed,” his acclaimed song from the (brief, but really effing great) Into the Wild soundtrack.
New Music Video, Perspective for Eddie Vedder
Vedder’s first solo music video—for his critically lauded and Grammy-nominated Into the Wild song “Guaranteed”—airs on VH1 (and VH1.com) on Monday. Perfect timing, then, for the ever-more-famous guy to bump into his 1992 self while browsing Easy Street’s vinyl bins. Serendipity!
Ziggedy Zaggedy Zagat
The new Zagat is out, at least the one "devoted to Seattle" restaurants. And with "all due respect" to "local editor" Alicia Comstock Arter (who also contributes to Northwest Palate), it's "a freakin mess." The trouble, "brewing for years," is that the "capsule reviews" take isolated "nouns and adjectives" from "reader comments" and string them together to make "nonsensical" and "often inaccurate" profiles. It's a Fox News approach to dining, all pseudo-oracular, disjointed headlines with "little substance."
Poor Food Handling Apparently Key to Good Taste--Zesto's and Wild Ginger Top Dirtiest Restaurants List
Are food safety and food tasty mutually exclusive goals? You have to ask after both Zesto's and Wild Ginger show up on the P-I's list of Seattle's dirtiest restaurants.
Eddie Vedder, Hollywood. Hollywood, Eddie Vedder.
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.
"Guaranteed" Grammy for Into the Wild's Eddie Vedder?
Say what you will about Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder's politics, but the guys put together a hell of a film and soundtrack. While Penn's Into the Wild might not match its somber weight with Oscar gold, its music, care of Vedder, could score at the Grammys and Academy Awards. His song "Guaranteed" (covered below) already received a Best Song nom from the former.
Where Casey Neill & The Norway Rats Become Our New Favorite Band
that have been backing up on our TiVo. But alas, we had agreed to check out some band from Portland called Casey Neill and the Norway Rats. We'll be honest--the main draw for us was Jennie Conlee (the Decemberists). We had been so stoked about seeing the Decemberists and Laura Veirs next week, and then a Decemberist came down with some illness bad enough to make them cancel the tour (we hope they're okay!). This was going to be about as close to the Decemberists as we were going to get this year.
Seattlest Reviews: The Nutcracker at PNB
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...
Hit and Run: The Trucks' High Dive Dance Party
A sign inside Fremont's High Dive states that the little bar's maximum occupancy is 98. Saturday night, with Bellingham's The Trucks in the house, it felt more like 398. Good for the band's young ladies, not so good for the claustrophobic.
Messquerade ’07
Seattle's infamous Bicycle Hobo(TM) tipped us off to this cool Halloween scavenger hunt thing going on this weekend that we hadn't heard of previously, evidently called the Mess-Man's Messquerade. Here's the run down from the site:
Mariners Won't Fire Their Manager or General Manager
The Mariners announced yesterday that Manager John McLaren and General Manager Bill Bavasi will both be back next year.
Seattlest at TIFF: Final Cut Pro
Well, after two full days of filmery, we made it back from Toronto in one piece, but not before seeing our last movie of the fest, Sean Penn's powerful adaptation of Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's mega-selling non-fiction book about the insatiable wanderlust that led a young man to drop out of society, tramp around the country for two years, and ultimately die alone in middle-of-nowhere Alaska (for a more detailed summary, check out the paperback's cover).
The Five Worst Collapses in Seattle Sports History
While you're enjoying an unseasonably sunny summer afternoon, we will be at Safeco Field, showing our undying support for the 2007 Seattle Mariners, authors of one of the greatest collapses in baseball history.
Venik, Vidik, Vicik...Vodka!
So, yeah, there's been this Russian-Turkish style "urban spa" called Banya5 on Ninth for, like, three years now. It's kind of a giant community sauna, with a central oven providing both wet and dry heat, surrounded by a bunch of fresh- and salt-water pools. The guy who built it, Seattle-born real estate developer John Goodfellow, isn't even Russian; he got hooked on the concept in New Yawk City. You have to know where it is, because it's hard to see along the northbound arterial through the no-man's land connecting Lake Union with downtown.
Mariners Are In First Place!!! (Among Second-Place Teams)
The combination of a Mariner win and losses by both New York and Detroit last night meant that the Mariners leapfrogged 'em both and woke up today as the leader for the American League Wild Card!
World Music 101: Femi Kuti @ The Showbox
Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys."
New Music from Pearl Jam Eddie Vedder
Pearl Jam’s singer and most frequent songwriter will be releasing a solo album bunch of songs later this year. Without the four guys who, surrounding him, comprise the one band that survived the grunge explosion/implosion and still rocks today. It seems he and Sean Penn think so much alike (politically? Madonna-ly?) that Vedder recorded a near-recordful of songs for Penn’s latest directorial effort, Into the Wild. (Eddie contributed to previous Penn projects I Am Sam and Dead Man Walking.) Here’s the theatrical trailer:
You Know It's Going To Be A Hot One
Copper Is Still Gold
Wasn't that long ago, matey, we'd be lucky to see fresh salmon in Seattle. Bristol Bay had a huge sockeye fishery, the largest in the world, but the catch was frozen stiff before it made it to local markets. Now, we're spoiled silly, with fresh, wild salmon coming in from the mouths of rivers all along the Alaska coast: the Yukon, the Taku, the Stikine and, best of all, the Copper.
The Sea Is Angry, My Friends, Like an Old Man Trying to Return Soup at a Deli
A sinkhole opened up on a tiny road beneath the University Bridge this morning, eating two cars, forcing the Mayor to change his morning plans, and closing the University Bridge. The cause: a water main break, which was what caused Dexter Avenue to resemble Wild Waves last week.
Speaking Tour: 4/23 - 4/29
SHERMAN FREAKING ALEXIE: The best-selling author returns with his first novel in ten years. Flight tells the story of an orphaned Indian boy who travels back and forth through time in a violent search for his true identity. Real Change-published poets (that would actually include Alexie, too) read as part of the program.
Possible Mariners Playoff Preview
As if today’s Mariners game needed any more drama, the standings show that if the season ended today the Mariners and Indians would play a one game play off for the Wild Card spot.

