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FALL
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Community members have been hand painting lanterns throughout the summer, and they’re finally coming together as part of a new installation in Freeway Park. Marvel at the art while celebrating the change in seasons with free food and drink, crafts, games, and “post-modern beach music” by energetic local band Warren Dunes. SL
(Freeway Park, Downtown, free)
PARTIES & NIGHTLIFE
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Madame Lou’s Mix Series is a quarterly DJ night that showcases “regional underground dance music and the community that encompasses it.” The series will continue this weekend with a mix of disco grooves, house bops, and other sonic pleasures from local DJs Parker Mills and Elio Gold. If you need any more of a reason to attend, know that a portion of ticket sales will be donated to Hawaii Community Foundation’s Maui Strong fund. AV
(Madame Lou’s at the Crocodile, Belltown, $10)
PERFORMANCE
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The inaugural April Fool’s Day edition of The Foolish Oracle, a “brunch time news arts variety show,” has come and gone, and the event persists—so it must not be a prank, right? Old-school magazine hawkers Bulldog News play host to the show, which targets those of us who are too damn old/tired/annoyed for late-night poetry slams and dance parties. (The Foolish Oracle self-describes as “like the Internet come to life, but not all the bad parts, and more equitable. In other words, the Foolish Oracle is the antithesis of the Internet.” So, it’s for those of us who are sick of being online, too.) Best part? The performance is free, so you can snag a “fast espresso” and a magazine, too. LC
(Bulldog News, University District, Free, donations gratefully accepted)
HALLOWEEN
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Get ready for a cuteness overload: the beloved Halloween Pet Parade and Costume Contest return to Volunteer Park this weekend. Costumed pets are eligible to win a prize in categories like best celebrity pet, best pet/owner combo, most creative, and more. We expect mostly pups, but will be incredibly impressed if anyone can wrangle a cat into a costume for this. 8-Bit Brass Band will lead the parade through the park, and vendor booths from animal-centric orgs like Tails of the City and Old Dog Haven will be onsite to teach you a thing or two. SL
(Volunteer Park Amphitheater, Capitol Hill, free)
LIVE MUSIC
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Every other month, the Frye fills their gallery halls with vibrant jazz melodies, adding another dimension to the visual works. This month, the fearless jazz croons of renowned vocalist Greta Matassa will soundtrack the gallery’s current exhibitions. Be sure to catch Into the Light: Works on Paper from the Collection which features a portrait drawing from my personal favorite artist Alice Neel. AV
(Frye Art Museum, First Hill, free)
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Former employees of Capitol Hill’s beloved Everyday Music (RIP) saved some of the store’s signage and fixtures in hopes of opening an offshoot location called “Almost Everyday Music.” Although they landed on a different name, Royal Records honors Everyday’s roots, offering new and used inventory with a large selection of DVDs and VHS (classic and rare titles alike). This weekend, the shop will celebrate its second birthday with a live in-store performance from singer-songwriter duo CZNS, darkwave ensemble No Kids Pets OK, and DJs Josh Hansen and Suzanne LeDoux. AV
(Royal Records, Uptown, free)
SPORTS & RECREATION
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If I asked you what you’d like to do on Sunday morning, would you say “Watch the University of Washington men’s rowing team, outfitted in uniforms reflecting the attire of the 1936 crew, row the iconic Husky Challenger shell from the Conibear Shellhouse to MOHAI?” If not, why not?! The crew will paddle away from the University of Washington at 10:15 am, then arrive at Lake Union Park at around 11:45 am, where they’ll hoist the shell up to MOHAI for a short presentation. What’s a 67-year-old, eight-oared racing shell doing in a museum, you wonder? I’ll spoil it for ya: The Husky Challenger will be the centerpiece of MOHAI’s upcoming exhibition Pulling Together: A Brief History of Rowing in Seattle. LC
(MOHAI, South Lake Union, free)
COMEDY
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Say nevermore to weekend boredom at this evening of wicked and macabre humor based on Edgar Allan Poe’s dreary oeuvre. A team of improv experts will channel Poe’s tell-tale heart to have you laughing or quivering in fear—whichever comes first. And what’s more comical than a subtle sense of foreboding, right?! (Seriously though, I dare these off-the-cuff rascals to find a way to make The Pit and The Pendulum swinging blade funny.) LC
(Unexpected Productions’ Market Theater, Pike Place Market, $12-$15, Friday-Saturday)
COMMUNITY
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Prior to both Death Cab For Cutie and the Postal Service’s Seattle shows, KEXP’s gathering space will turn into an oasis for flannel-wearing millennials and Gen-X music dads (I may be generalizing, but is it not true?) Fuel up on booze and snacks (courtesy of Sunny Hill and Stoneburner) while discussing your favorite Ben Gibbard projects and enjoy related tunes from live on-air DJs. Trust me, you’re gonna need this pregame for an evening of crying, dancing, and crying while dancing. AV
(KEXP, Uptown, free, Friday-Saturday)
FALL
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You know what will make your cozy fall photoshoot better? A breathtaking backdrop of Mount Rainier, which is just what you’ll get (on a clear day) at Carpinito Brothers Farm. Bring your Hinge date, your parents, and/or your kids (just not your dog) and proceed to get lost in multiple mazes spanning acres of corn, pet farm animals, and take your pick of pumpkins. SL
(Carpinito Brothers, Kent, $5-$11, Friday-Sunday)
FESTIVALS
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On the Edge’s second annual Latine/X Performance Art Festival was curated by performance artist Xavier Lopez this year in tandem with La Sala, The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), 4Culture, and other LGBTQIA+ arts organizations. Kicking off on First Thursday and continuing through the weekend, the event will showcase “nine artists who identify as Latine/x/Pan-American” and whose artistic practices expand upon what performance art can be. Reflecting on themes of inclusion, identity, and intersectionality, the artists have created mixed media, single-person, durational, conceptual, and video-based performances. Seattle artists Sony Voodoo, Tatiana Garmandia, and Dyhana Garcia of DAIPAN Butoh will be joined by festival headliner Katherine Adamenko, who will present a “third-wave feminist piece,” Tres Chic: The Beauty Borg. LC
(King Street Station, SoDo, free, Friday-Saturday)
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SPAM’s 2023 program began in August with an activation at Freeway Park by the University of Washington’s Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) Ph.D. candidates. DXARTS students aren’t afraid to get weird with it, so the experience brought the park to life with sound performances, installations, videos, and “sculptural interventions” inspired by the idea of salvage, data sets, collective memory, and archives. The explorations will continue all month: SPAM’s tech-driven art “resonates with the notion of unlearning one’s privileges and positions of power,” and the festival’s free performances and exhibitions include collaborations with Henry Art Gallery, Mini Mart City Park, Method Gallery, Gallery 4Culture, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Georgetown Steam Plant, and Meany Hall at the University of Washington. Click here for a full list of events and head out with an open mind. LC
(Various locations, free, Friday-Saturday)
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Did you know Seattle and Reykjavik are sister cities? In fact, Seattle is home to more Icelandic people than anywhere else in the United States. To celebrate Iceland’s culture, Seattle hosts an annual Taste of Iceland festival filled with frosty festivities. This year, you’ll be transported to the magical Nordic land with an Icelandic cocktail class, special tasting menus, a photography fireside chat, a screening of Beautiful Beings, Iceland’s submission to the 2023 Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film, a free Reykjavik Calling concert at KEXP, and more. Don’t forget to spin the Icelandair Wheel of Prizes, you could win a trip for two to Iceland! SL
(Various locations, Friday-Saturday)
FILM
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October rolls around, and suddenly, everyone wants to watch vampires, ghosts, and cannibals get their freak on. Typical!!! If you’re also feeling the sudden urge to stress yourself out with Cronenberg and Tobe Hooper faves, All Monsters Attack! has your back. The series shudders to life (or death?) with a 4K restoration of ’53 bone-chiller Invaders from Mars this weekend, followed by a 35mm screening of Fire in the Sky. Y’all know me, though. I’m rooting for the weirder, more psychedelic entries in the series, like this year’s undersung Huesera: The Bone Woman (theme: motherhood is scary stuff), The Hunger (theme: ravenous hotties), and Hausu (theme: Japanese Scooby-Doo on hallucinogens). You can’t go wrong with the folktale-derived hauntings of Kwaidan, either—the film will screen later this month in its original three-hour cut, which has only been shown in the US since 2015. LC
(Grand Illusion, University District, $11, Friday-Sunday)
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Portland-born artist Christiane Cegavske’s Blood Tea and Red String bills itself as a “fairy tale for adults,” but I think that descriptor undersells its power; the surreal handmade stop-motion film, which clocks in at a mere 71 minutes, took Cegavske 13 years to create, and tells the story of jilted, aristocratic white mice and oak tree-dwelling doll artisans who fall in love with their own craft. Reticent to give up a doll they created for the mice, the oak dwellers are robbed and must go on a strange journey to rescue their artwork. Sounds cool, right?! Cegavske’s own blood, sweat, and tears shine through in the film—seriously, imagine animating tiny creatures for over a decade of your life—and it’s well worth your 71 minutes. LC
(Northwest Film Forum, Capitol Hill, $7-$14, Saturday-Sunday)
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You may have seen the fliers created by Fantasy A, aka Seattle’s “Autistic Undisputed King of Hustle,” plastered all over town—he’s become something of a local legend, and his music was covered by the Stranger back in 2015. The creativity continues: Fantasy’s major motion picture stars (who other than?) himself, and charts his challenges as he attempts to become a superstar and acquire a mattress. Fantasy Gets A Mattress won the Best Narrative Feature award at the Seattle Black Film Festival. Grab a seat to witness Fantasy’s love letter to South Seattle, and you might leave feeling a lil’ more connected to your community. LC
(Central Cinema, Central District, $12, Friday-Sunday)
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Physical media mavens Scarecrow Video, the city’s own nonprofit video archive and resident experts on all things cinematic, will celebrate Halloween all month long at SIFF Cinema Egyptian. (Horror flicks are “every video store clerk’s favorite genre,” says SIFF, and I’m inclined to believe it.) Video Store Day is coming up on October 21, so show Scarecrow some love by checking out the flicks they’ve curated for the scawie series. Scarecrowber will continue to ooze with Night of the Comet, Carnival of Souls, Cat People, Spookies, and FromBeyond, all of which will screen this weekend. Later in the month, I’ll be shivering for Near Dark and Possession. (If you can’t make it to a theater this month, never fear—Scarecrow’s revamped mail-order rental website has your back.) LC
(SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Capitol Hill, $13-$14, Friday-Sunday)
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Celebrating all things documentary again this year, SIFF’s DocFest includes screenings of recent festival faves like Sundance Film Festival 2023 Jury Award winner Going Varsity in Mariach. I’m jazzed for fresh perspectives from Frederick Wiseman and Errol Morris, my documentarian dads, whose new films explore rural French cuisine (Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros) and the life of former British spy David Cornwell (aka espionage writerJohn le Carré). Special guests, who will attend select screenings of festival flicks, include directors Irene Lusztig, Andrew H. Brown, and Vanessa Hope, 2012 Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken, and Plan C founder Amy Merrill, among many others. LC
(SIFF Cinema Uptown, Uptown, tickets $9-14, Friday-Sunday)
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Calling it now: If you’ve seen Stop Making Sense, it’s probably your favorite concert film. It’s jangly and arty and all of the other words one might use to describe Talking Heads’s catalog, and David wears the suit. Not feeling the Byrne? Listen, I know watching a concert movie for a band you don’t listen to sounds like hell, but this one might be an exception. If you haven’t seen it yet, anticipate looking back on the experience with a funny fondness later, like a good birthday party or the first time you smoked weed. Jonathan Demme (yes, the guy who went on to make The Silence of the Lambs) recorded all of the concert footage over the course of three days at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre in 1983, during the height of the Heads’ visionary fame. It’s screening in a new restoration, so prep for a “once in a lifetime” experience. LC
(SIFF Cinema Uptown, Uptown, $13-$14, Friday-Sunday)
FOOD & DRINK
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Port Angeles’s nationally recognized crab extravaganza, which was once featured in a question on Jeopardy!, offers copious crustaceans, as well as a chowder cook-off, a “grab-a-crab” derby, local beer and wine, craft vendors, live music, art, chances to learn about Native American culture in the Pacific Northwest, and more. Get ready to tie on a bib and dig into a pile of fresh Dungeness crab accompanied by coleslaw and fresh corn. JB
(Port Angeles City Pier, $0-$40, Friday-Sunday)
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Slurp freshly shucked bivalves and quaff wines and microbrews at this annual festival hosted by the Shelton Skookum Rotary Club. You’ll also get to watch certified mollusk maniacs flaunt their shucking skills at the West Coast Oyster Shucking Championships. Besides oysters, you can nosh on other food offerings like spring rolls, garlic shrimp, homemade strawberry shortcake, and fresh cider. JB
(Shelton, $10-$16, Saturday-Sunday)
PARTIES & NIGHTLIFE
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Inspired by the impending gloom of the next eight months, the pop-up-turned-bar Vindicktive Wings aims to brighten up your weekend with a cheap and cheerful party. On Friday, regress to your inner asymmetrical-banged emo kid while dancing it out to a soundtrack of pop punk bangers. DJ CancelTheCouch will mesmerize you with house, trance, and techno tunes on Saturday. Other draws include $5 Fernet shots, $10 Fernet and High Life combos, $6 Ilegal Mezcal shots, and $10 Ilegal margaritas. JB
(Vindicktive Bar and Wings, Belltown, Friday-Saturday)
VISUAL ART
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As part of Frye’s ongoing Boren Banner Series, exhibiting artist Rafael Soldi’s thoughtful, politically driven work will become bigger and more visible on the facade of the Frye Art Museum. Drop by the museum to see an image from the artist’s new body of work, Mientras el cielo gire (As long as the sky whirls). The piece is based on Soldi’s research on the Peruvian Havana Embassy crisis of 1980 and the ensuing Mariel Boatlift, which brought Cuban refugees to the United States and Peru, thousands of whom were gay and fleeing persecution in their home country. LC
(Frye Art Museum, First Hill, free, Saturday-Sunday; opening)
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Brazilian-born, LA-based artist Clarissa Tossin’s multimedia works (including films, sculptures, and drawings) look closely at global capitalism’s “frontier mythologies,” interrogating persistent legacies of colonialism in Latin America and the US through repurposed consumerist garbage. She uses what is perhaps the most potent symbol of exploitation and ecological disaster—Amazon delivery boxes—to think about climate change, mapping as a conquest-driven technology, human consumption, and even space exploration. Why am I stoked about the show? Well, because I’m a nerd: Tossin’s first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast borrows its title from sci-fi writer Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic Earthseed novels. LC
(Frye Art Museum, First Hill, free, Saturday-Sunday; opening)
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Jane Rosen’s quiet, material-driven sculptures have been a longtime favorite of mine, particularly her regal, almost glowy bird figures rendered in blown glass and limestone. The best part of Rosen’s material sensibility, though, is that it’s non-hierarchical—she’s just as comfortable drawing inspiration from housepets as she is falcons. A Dog’s Life proves it; the show “celebrates the unique connection between humans and animals through time,” and pays special tribute to her canine studio mates, Book and Mei-Rose. Paired with A Dog’s Life is Ginny Ruffner’s Language = Symbols, Symbols = Language, which features a totally delightful goldfish sculpture that caught my attention. LC
(Traver Gallery, Downtown, free, Friday-Saturday)
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At the heart of artist and curator Rafael Soldi’s new solo exhibition is Soft Boy, a video installation that represents the artist and curator’s first venture into moving image work. Pulling from his experience as a queer youth in Peru to “focus on the construction of masculinity in Latin American society,” Soldi dissects gender expectations through language and adolescent games. His video harkens to his time in an all-boys Catholic school, complete with playground skirmishes and performative machismo. Soft Boy also includes selections from a print series called CARGAMONTÓN, which translates to a form of hazing in Latin American schools, and mouth to mouth, which “present[s] word plays and Spanish-English pairings that reveal the gendered power structures built into language and the slipperiness of meaning.” LC
(Frye Art Museum, First Hill, free, Saturday-Sunday; opening)
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SOIL’s exhibitions are ultra-contemporary, sharp, and sometimes a bit opaque; you’ve got to do your reading for a better grasp of each artist’s themes and visual lexicons. Strange Preservations is no exception—the show purports to “navigate the linkages of abject body(s) and its limits of identity and belonging within the socio-political governance of acceptability.” Driven by necessity, self-preservation, “emotional weathering,” and a demand for inclusion, the show’s featured artists envision SOIL as a space for visibility and support. I’m particularly excited about Jessica Marie Mercy’s glowy installation, satisfyingly titled Don’t Fucking Touch Me, and L Breed’s unconventional bookbinding methods. LC
(SOIL, Pioneer Square, free, Friday-Sunday)
