Scene It
Meat Market correspondent sounded like such a sweet gig: sipping whiskey, watching dance floors filled with sweaty 20-somethings and, just maybe, finding some filly to nibble at my ear - a writer's dream job. But here, sitting in my beat-up station wagon in the parking lot outside of Lady Luck's Cowgirl
Arts
There's heavy metal, and there's heavy metal. And then there's heavy metal that's meant to be written with a capital H and M and a jagged Halloween font with scary skulls as the a's and a devil hanging off the y - all circled 666 times with some sort of
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Someone apparently thought it'd be a good idea to have Sean "my voice is effeminate but I'm really a tiptoeing communist" Culver back to Jazzbones, his former place of employment. As many will recall, Culver booked the Boneyard for years, specializing in comedy, his indie showcase nights and, most prominently
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Billed appropriately as a "Countryside Freak-out! (in the gentlest of ways)," the annual Helsing Junction Sleepover happens this weekend in rural Thurston County. One of the best ideas K Records has probably ever had - which is saying something - the Sleepover is a multi-day music fest partnering purveyors of
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Lady Gaga and her, um, well, costumes, are headed to Tacoma this week, touching down at the T-Dome Saturday as part of the Monster Ball Tour. Whatever your feelings about Gaga's music (remember that?), if her mere presence in Tacoma's sacred Dome makes you legitimately uneasy, scared or angry (or
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The Music and Art in Wright Park festival is a selfless act of goodwill toward this rough-around-the-edges place we call home - in the form of a free, all-day rock show for Tacoma, by Tacoma. After returning last year (from an eight-year layoff) with grand success, event coordinators Cody
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The 25Z60 (Tacoma/Olympia/Lacey & beyond) chapter of The Universal Zulu Nation is hosting a free party in celebration of Hip-Hop History Month for any and everyone who respects and loves hip-hop. There will be MCs, DJs, B-Boy/Girls and visual arts/graffiti cyphers all night. The Zulu Nation and Temple of Hip-Hop
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Michael Moore is a legend to certain Gen-X liberals like myself. Just as mainstream journalism was beginning its downward descent into sensationalism, partisanship and - well, let's not sugarcoat it - outright lying, Moore came along. Combining investigative reporting with a sometimes-mischievous sense of humor, the documentarian from Flint, Michigan,
Stage
"Pop Departures" at Seattle Art Museum is a look back at work by the leading pop artists of the 1960s and a jump forward to more contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Margaria Cabrera and Mickalene Thomas who continue to follow in the footsteps of those bad boys. There are whole
Stage
At intermission, one of the patrons at St. Martin's University's production of Uncle Vanya said, "I hope there's a happy ending." "Sweetheart, please," his companion replied, laughing. "This is Chekhov. Chekhov never ends happily." Even casual theatergoers are familiar with the name of turn-of the-20th-century Russian playwright Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Few, however,
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Call us assholes if you want, but most things done by The Evergreen State College's Tacoma campus feel a lot more real than things orchestrated on the school's better known Olympia campus. Nothing against weed butter, LaRouche and handmade dream catchers, but Evergreen Tacoma's So'Just 2010 festival of arts, music,
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Calm Spirit, an exhibition of 19 contemporary Korean artists, will celebrate an opening reception Thursday at the Handforth Gallery. Luckily for our chimpanzee sweatshop of word makers, curator Jung Ho Kim has already spoken: "The purpose of the exhibition is to introduce Korean contemporary art and its unique harmonization of
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This is a huuuuuge week for live music in T-town, so when our esteemed editor insisted on squeezing in an obscure folk-and-blues band from Santa Cruz, I was intrigued. Then I listened to the album, and all became clear. Marty O'Reilly & the Old Soul Orchestra is one hell of
News Front
QUESTION: There's never a good time to break up with your girlfriend, but there is a really bad time, and that's what I chose. I did it over the phone as she was boarding a plane to attend her best friend's wedding. I thought it would be good for her to
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PDX band Symmetry/Symmetry's 2010 tour poster features headshots of band members Joel Uram, Daniel Jones, Mark Cleaver, Andrew Quackenbush and friends all dolled up like weird Aladdin Sane-wannabes - as if they stepped right out of someone's paranoid Halloween nightmare. In reality, Symmetry/Symmetry are far from glam-rock posers (or dreamt
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Tongue-in-cheek is the best thing that could have happened to country music. Heartfelt lyrics about trucks and beer and dusty old dogs and the open road have long begged to be approached with just a little bit of humor. I don't mean full-on parody, but a loving tribute to the
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Selling your style as substance is tricky business (for every Blade Runner, there are a dozen Ultraviolets). New York's brash, shamelessly gussied-up Semi-Precious Weapons make a valiant effort - they're in the business of looking good, and singing about how good they look ("I can't pay my rent/ but I'm
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Oneida are a prolific and genre-busting group of Brooklyn scene-makers. An itchy energy in their songs telegraphs their persistent search for (and discovery of) new sounds. While they mostly draw inspiration from '70s punk and experimental music, there are flourishes of electronica, folk, Krautrock and the occasional flirtation with guitar-centric
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When you think of art rock, bands like King Crimson and Genesis or Sonic Youth and latter-day Talk Talk tend to come to mind. The common thread that runs through most of these bands is a deadly seriousness. It's, you know, "art." It needs to be serious. And it needs
