As with any physical feature that is outside of the "norm" of what you expect in a character, if the person is a good actor, facially, vocally, and physically, I personally don't think it matters. I think most of the time when a overweight person isn't convincing in a role that doesn't have dialogue pertaining to size that gets downright contradicted, it's because they are self-conscious and it shows. The only successful actor I know of that graduated from my college's theatre program is overweight, and while she does do mainly character parts, she's been cast in romantic leads with smaller partners quite a few times. And it's because she has a sexy voice and is confident as hell.
1. Lookout! Modern day crooner Chris Anderson performs tonight at the Red Wind Casino. You could lose money, and your heart ...
2. Tonight is a huge night for trivia around the South Sound. Drinking and question answering can be had at the Swiss, Farelli's in Tacoma and Sumner, Paddy Coyne's, the Hub ... and the list goes on. Or, the Midland Tavern (Lil' Vic's) in Tacoma offers "Crazy Vegas Barstool Bingo" - which has to be awesome, right?
3. Drop in on the Tacoma Sixth Avenue Farmers Market from 3 - 7 p.m. This is a farmers market better suited for the late-sleepers - something we can totally get behind.
Trompe le'oeil is a nice little, hard-to-pronounce French word. Literally it means "Fool the eye." As an art term it means art that makes you think it's real and not a painting. The phrase originated in the Baroque period (roughly the 16th and 17th centuries) but actually goes back to earlier Greek and Roman murals. Trompe le'oeil paintings were very popular in the 19th century, but they simply do not work as paintings any longer because viewers have become far too sophisticated and cynical to buy into the trick of making part of a painting look like it's extending beyond the painting. It's paintings' version of 3-D movies. Been there, done that.
But trompe le'oeil can still be artistically effective when used in the way the ancient Greeks and Romans did - in murals. Because in murals the painted images interact with the natural environment in ways that are not possible in framed paintings on a wall. The most effective Trompe le'oeil murals picture urban scenes similar to those in the real world surrounding them, such as paintings of buildings and cars or maybe the painting of a tunnel on a wall, which I have seen pictures of and which can be very dangerous because some fool might try to drive through it.
There is a very good mural on the flat wall of the old North Wilkesboro Hardware Store in Olympia, now the Lowe's store on Martin Way. It's a painting of buildings and a street with an early 1940s Dodge pickup traveling on it by Larry Kangas. It's best seen from the Safeway parking lot next door. I often shop there and even after seeing the mural for years I am sometime thrown for a loop when I glance over and for a moment can't distinguish the surrounding buildings and cars from the painted buildings and the old truck. It's disorienting in a fun way. Usually the only giveaway is that (1) the truck never moves and (2) the actual sky and the painted sky are usually not the same color, depending on how cloudy or sunny it might be.
As for paintings in frames and hung on walls there is only one artist who has ever done them effectively as meaningful art and not just as visual trickery, and that is the great trickster Rene Magritte. The thing that makes Magritte's paintings so interesting is that he knows it is a trick and he presents his trick paintings in the manner of the Wizard of Oz with the curtain open so you can see he's just a fat little man full of tricks. Among Magritte's most famous "fool-the-eye" paintings is one of a naked woman standing in front of an open window in which the top half of her body becomes part of the sky seen through the window, and another one - actually many versions of this one he's done - is a painting of a sky resting on an easel in front of an open window so that the view out the window and the painting become one and the same. The thing that makes his paintings great is not just that the visual tricks work well but that his paintings are comments on the trickery and on the nature of art and illusion.
I just wish Kangas' mural on the Lowes building was as sophisticated and as tongue-in-cheek as a Rene Magritte painting, but then I don't guess he could get away with painting a 20-foot tall naked woman on the side of a building on Martin Way.
Mike Curto's shoes sit beside his chair. He works with them off. "Always," he tells me. The voice of the Tacoma Rainiers since 1999, it's not the only thing about the Triple-A radio guy that surprises me during a recent hour-long conversation inside his newly remodeled Cheney Stadium broadcasting booth. For one, Curto comes off much younger in person than he does in his official capacity over the airwaves, or in the often-used photo on his blog (the Mike Curto I'm expecting when I show up), where a headset obscures part of his face and a bland blue shirt gives him a bit of a high school math teacher aura.
Mike Curto is no high school math teacher.
But it gets more interesting than that.
"I'm a Malkmus fanboy," Curto tells me at one point, referring to Stephen, the Pavement frontman, lanky ‘90s indie rock icon and current-day leader of Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks. It's an unexpected detour that, of course, leads to a discussion of music.
This year's springtime rains have refused to go without a fight. Like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, our bad weather has seriously overstayed its welcome. Yet uninterrupted stretches of sunshine continue to grow, and we all know what that means - filmmakers emerging from their burrows, eager to test some new toys.
I last touched base with Rick Dupea (owner of CRE8TV Media Group in Parkland) back in Feb., right before he jetted off to Naples, Italy, for a few weeks to volunteer on a video project. This past Thursday I tagged along as Dupea broke in his new DSLR camera, the Canon EOS 60D.
We began our trek at the Tacoma Dome Station, amid a bustle of traffic, commencement gowns and mortarboards waving in the breeze. Fortunately the hubbub didn't disrupt Dupea's audio capture, as he just wanted landscape shots anyway. Besides, though this new wave of lightweight DSLRs pack quite a wallop in visual quality, they generally lack in the sound department.
Unlike the very popular 5D Mark II model, the 60D comes equipped with a flip-out LCD screen, which gives the camera operator much more flexibility. Whether low or high, from any angle Dupea positioned his tripod he could see his subject clearly and comfortably. And to minimize glare on the viewfinder he attached a handy little device called a Sock-LoupeTM.
The two of us hopped on the Light Rail and grabbed more shots along Pacific Avenue. A sun-dappled downtown lends itself extremely well to a new website Dupea has created, www.beautifultacoma.com. There he posts his growing collection of stills and videos that show off a town he grew up in and loves. The idea came, Dupea says, from "thinking of what's unique about the character of Tacoma visually." He invites others to submit their own works and spread the love.
"It really is about what Tacoma can be, and what's already cool about it," he says.
While ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead certainly cast a long shadow (their infamously long-winded name precedes them), Ringo Deathstarr, the Austin band that's opening for AYWKUBTTOD tomorrow at the Capital Theater, definitely has its own fuzz-soaked appeal. When they first popped up on my radar a few years back, I was still a college radio DJ entrenched in the first of three years spent slavishly curating a weekly shoegaze-focused specialty show. Ringo Deathstarr's sound-reverent to their shoegaze forebears but delivered with unselfconscious energy-instantly appealed to me, no matter how silly the name sounded at first (this tour is, perhaps, an ideal meeting of preposterously-named-but-nonetheless-talented bands).
I nursed my crush on Ringo Deathstarr for a couple of months, saw them live in their hometown, booked them for an in-studio, and then lost track of the band until recently, when I heard a track off their new full-length Colour Trip on the radio and it sent me reeling. To my great satisfaction, Colour Trip is an album that capitalizes on all the aural promise that had me so jazzed nearly four years ago. While inarguably unoriginal, their sound is so blunt and straightforward in its very "shoegazey-ness" that its appeal to a guy like me was pretty much cemented from the get-go. It helps that they wrangle some truly phenomenal sounds out of their guitars, and expend just enough energy on skewing their songs in unique, unexpected directions. The production on Colour Trip sounds appropriately sweated-over, as well. My initial reaction to the album pegged it as being like a "dizzy, waking dream set to half-remembered traces of Lovelessand Ride broadcast in refracted tessellations." With that in mind, here's a list of the qualities that make Colour Trip a great shoegaze record, and some of the ones that help set it apart from its apparent inspirations:
Colour Trip is a great shoegaze record because...
-It's got lyrics that are alternately sappy and romantic ("Do It Every Time," "Kaleidoscope") and kind of horny ("Day Dreamy," "Chloe").
-It's got massive, supernova choruses with huge swaths of "chord bent" guitar.
-It references My Bloody Valentines' "Only Shallow" (the drum fill that opens "Chloe") and the Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" (the vocal melody on "Day Dreamy'"s chorus).
-There's some amazing moments of feedback/distortion on it (virtually every song).
-Like some of the best shoegaze bands, everyone in the band is a heartthrob.
Colour Trip is not just your average shoegaze record because...
-Of the crazy shifts in timing in "Tambourine Girl."
-It's got a perceptible twee vibe on songs like "So High" and the aforementioned "Tambourine Girl."
-It's loaded with beautiful guitar overdubs (the original shoegaze maestros like Kevin Shields actually avoided using overdubs for their layered, massive-sounding whorls of guitar squall).
-"Never Drive" is arguably a garage rock song set to an insistent 808 kick and lacquered with muffled, gauzy vocals.
-The chorus of "Two Girls" is totally worthy of Blonde Redhead.
-Album closer "Other Things" is essentially a minimalist hip-hop track set to statuesque bassist Alex Gehring's breathy intonations.
-Unlike some of the best shoegaze bands, everyone in the band is a heartthrob.
[Capitol Theater, with ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Follow That Bird, Broken Water, Wednesday, June 22, 8 p.m., $7 OFS member, $10 GA, 206 Fifth Ave. SE, Olympia, 360.754.6670]
If your phone-dialing finger was sprained or in some other way out of order, and Martinez doesn't get enough votes to move on tonight (The Voice airs at 9 p.m. locally), then her only hope is her coach, Cee-Lo Green. Each judge gets to pick one of competitor to move on, in addition to the contestant voted through by viewers. Judging by Vicci Martinez's fine rendition of Dolly Parton's brutal, self-loathing country classic, "Jolene," I'd say she has a good shot of making it through.
But I'd rather not jinx it, so I'll just say this: If Martinez doesn't make it to the next round, I'll be seriously miffed at you guys. Miffed that you didn't get off your duff.
For those who missed it, here's our hometown girl doing a number on "Jolene" ...
I was fortunate enough to have been Mike's roommate in college and we were in the right place at the right time to see live performances of the greatest reggae artists in the late 70's. Bob Marley and the Wailers, Peter Tosh, Toots and the Maytals, ect., etc. Mike is now my main link to the reggae scene with his magnificent collection of records which he so generously shares with all. Cool running with you man! Aloha from Chuk D. !
4. Every Wednesday a "fast paced (over 16 mph), hilly, 40 mile training ride, led by members of the Tacoma Wheelmen Bicycle Club," takes off at 9:30 a.m. from the Proctor District Starbucks. Go here for more info.
5. Vote for Tacoma's best baristas, politicians, bloggers, bartenders and local businesses in the only 253 "Best Of" issue that matters. The Volcano's annual Best of Tacoma issue publishes July 28, and this year's readers' poll launched last week. Let your vote be heard now! Find all the details here.
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