HOOKING UP IN THE SOUTH SOUND >>>

After an explosive evening of some exceptional drag show entertainment at Jake's, the Urban Onion seemed a bit relaxed. At approximately midnight on Saturday night, occupied tables were sparse, karaoke was in full swing, and the drinks were being made with a very heavy hand. 

The music was just loud enough to be enjoyed, yet low enough to hold a conversation with any of the nicest of Urban Onion bar patrons. And trust me, everyone there is nice. Smiles all around.

To read this week's full column click here.

[Urban Onion, 116 Legion Way SE # D, Olympia, 360.943.9242]

MEMORIES >>>

When you think back about your first kiss at a junior high school dance, does the image of your young lips awkwardly touching another's dissolve into the flavor of grape soda out of the vending machine, room temperature grocery store cold cut trays and nervously eaten Cheetos dregs?

It does for me. Nothing is as delicious as memory.

Late Saturday afternoon, as the warm sun slowly disappeared behind the O'Reilly Auto Parts store, Kate and I dined on mesquite lamb chops, Brand Cabernet and Pasteles Fritos on the glorious deck of Asado. Often, we'd sit silent pointing our stark white faces at the sun in a state of Zen. Laughter did bust out several times watching the circus parade in and out of the liquor store across the street.

The best memory of the dining experience came first and remains the strongest. Asado has a sea scallop stuffed mushroom in panko as an appetizer special that is to die for. The sweet-tasting sea scallops and fleshy, earthy mushrooms burst with magnificent flavor. A savory fruit salsa with dominating strawberry and apple might appear as mere plate beauty, but applied to the tasty orbs it sends them to the next taste level.

Awesome server Kate W. says the appetizer should stick around at least through Wednesday. Give Asado a buzz.

Asado

2810 Sixth Ave., Tacoma
253.272.7770

TRANSPARENCY IN MEDIA >>>

Making editorially decisions for SPEW isn't always easy. Sometimes, tough ethical and practical situations arise that require careful contemplation.

For instance, sometimes Robert "the Traveller" Hill sends me a press release.

What to do? Post or ignore? Acknowledge or disregard?

The predicament is tricky, and a number of factors weigh into my decision making.

Like ...

1.  I've looked at naked women with Robert Hill, so there are the obvious conflict of interest questions.

2. Since first meeting Hill he's done a few things that legitimately bother me - not the least of which being the time he showed up at the office and bugged the receptionist for over an hour while simultaneously making the whole place reek of BO. And I mean reek. I'm hesitant to encourage him. The man's nuisance capabilities frighten me.

3. If I post anything from Robert Hill, RR Anderson will hype it on social media, thus perpetuating the RR Anderson Boycott Bump we've been riding to record website hits and readership numbers for over a month. Somewhere an angle will get its wings.

4. The picture contained within the Hill press release is really funny.

5. I haven't taken the time to verify ANYTHING contained within the press release in question.

6. But that picture is really quite funny.

After weighing all of it, naturally, I decide to post the press release below, stock up on Febreeze and hope for the best ...

WHEN IT ALL GOES SOUTH >>>

One of the shows I saw this weekend was Play On! at Olympia Little Theater, in which an amateur company bumbles through the disastrous opening-night performance of a not-so-great production. Tread the boards long enough and you, too, Gentle Reader, may know the joys of a nuclear-grade Pakistani clustermug. I don't mean "an actor went up on his lines" or "we had to cover a missing sound cue;" I mean a "where the hell are we," "oh my God, is there a doctor in the house," "the director is now on suicide watch" category EF5 shitstorm. It's been almost 20 years since my brush with Satan, and I still remember the event all too vividly.

The show was The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, a light whodunit comedy from 1987. Several undergrad friends and I were recruited into a community theater production that wasn't going especially well from day one. The resolution of the play depends entirely on the discovery of a secret notebook. Meanwhile, of course, there's a violent thunderstorm--this is, after all, a mystery, where such things are obligatory--and there's also a slasher on the loose in what's essentially a locked mansion. After a particularly deafening thunderclap, there's a brief blackout. During that blackout, my friend Arlan (aka "the Bull") careened into a table, inadvertently knocking that all-important notebook off the table into deep shadows. Within seconds we were light-years off the map.

I ad-libbed furiously, praying for a miracle. Perhaps a duplicate copy of the notebook might streak from the sky on a stray meteorite. Perhaps its contents would appear magically on a wall like the prophecy at Belshazzar's feast. My friend Marc moseyed to the lip of the stage, rested his chin in his hand, and stared into middle distance in what was self-evidently a state of mental hibernation. The old codger playing an undercover cop staggered onstage, brandished his prop gun at the audience, and bellowed, "Uh-oh, I guess I came out at the wrong scene!"

If you'd asked me at the time, I would have sworn on a stack of First Folios that we were in the weeds for at least 20 minutes. The stage manager said it was more like two. Either way, I can remember everything about that catastrophic meltdown except how we got out of it. Probably, the actress playing Nikki Crandall invoked psychic powers. However we got back in sync, the play concluded without the notebook or further crippling humiliation.

In the lobby after the show, audience members insisted they had no idea anything was wrong. This says little for the critical faculties of audience members, and it may in fact indicate they're born, brazen liars...for which I offer my sincerest gratitude.

LOCAL HIP-HOP FROM SOMEONE WHO KNOWS IT >>>

The Tri-Cities hip-hop scene started much later than the scene in Tacoma. Perhaps the first time people took note of it was around 1995, because of a compilation Shao Sosa was on. Shao (formerly known as Shaolin) is basically the father of Tri-Cities hip-hop. In the late ‘90s he released another compilation and his first solo album from the Tri-Cities - a rough-and-tumble region of our state if ya'll didn't know. Just like the streets of Tacoma, many young people get caught up in a criminal lifestyle in the Tri-Cities. This is Shao's story. He even had to go on a little "vacation," if ya know what I mean.

After serving his time there was nothing left for Shao to do in the Tri-Cities - he was already the biggest artist in that area. So he moves to Tacoma for a fresh start and with some positive motivation. Now he's tackling our scene.

Shao's second full-length solo album, The Gateway Drug, is a well-put-together project.

To read this week's full column click here.

ONLINE CHATTER >>>

Today's comment comes from Yocat in response to our "Rainiers Minute" update from May 17 titled "Mike Carp is f***ing awesome!" - which commemorated Carp's first PCL Player of the Week award. (Carp took home his second PCL Player of the Week award today.)

Yocat writes,

Mike Carp is my favorite Rainier this year, he is super great at bat and he has been able to belt a home run every other game. Plus, he's super nice in person so I would be surprised if M's don't bring him up this year. He is awesome :-)

TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2011 >>>

1. Death By Steamship is playing the New Frontier Lounge in Tacoma tonight, a fine chance at some drunken art rock if ever there was one. Of course, you know that if you read Bobble Tiki's column this week.

2.Impressed by amazing voices? Venture out to Tacoma Community College tonight for a choral performance featuring the TCC Voices, TCC Singers and TCC Gospel Choir. The action starts at 7:30 p.m. Or, if that's not your musical cup of tea, check out the Volcano's extensive live local music listings for the South Sound here.

3. Every Tuesday at the State Capital Museum in Olympia writer Delores Nelson leads a memoir writing class. If you've always wanted to get your story on paper, this has the potential to be an invaluable tool. Or, perhaps if you're ambitions aren't as literary, find the Volcano's comprehensive South Sound arts and entertainment calendar here.

4. 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.

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.

THE VOLCANO'S VISUAL ARTS CRITIC WEIGHS IN >>>

Here's the opening, slightly edited, of my Visual Edge for this week (see June 9 Weekly Volcano):

"Tacoma Art Museum tries to mount exhibitions that range from the traditional and historic to today's most revolutionary and idiosyncratic art. ... Just when I think they're on the verge of selling out ­ - oh god, another Chihuly, and this right after the blockbuster Norman Rockwell show - they do something gutsy like bringing in the highly controversial Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture."

While I was writing that my mind wandered to rock stars and visual artists. I decided that Norman Rockwell was to visual art what Frank Sinatra was to music in the '50s and early '60s, except that the whole Rat Pack scene was pretty damn risqué for the times, and also quite sexist. I don't associate Norman Rockwell with babes and boobs. But minus the babes and boobs Rockwell's talent and appeal was much like that of Sinatra. Ol' Blue Eyes was the king before Elvis, and Rockwell was king of a different kind of art, appealing to mass audiences at the same time Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were kings of the visual art elite (they were the John Coltrane of visual art, or maybe you could think of them as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles way ahead of their time).

So I got to wondering. If Rockwell was Frank Sinatra, who would Dale Chihuly be? I think he's Neil Diamond. Specifically the Neil Diamond of his heyday in the mid '80s - glitzy and smooth with huge appeal. Other rock stars who had the same kind of appeal were Tom Jones and the late-career Elvis Presley before Vegas and all those second-rate movies. (I would not dare compare any of these with the young Elvis from the Sun Records days. That Elvis was a giant, and the only painters who could be compared with him were Picasso and the afore-mentioned Pollock and de Kooning.)

One other big difference, which could shoot my hypothesis all to hell, is that Elvis and Tom Jones and Neil Diamond all had huge sex appeal. There was never anything sexy about Norman Rockwell. I associate him more with Sunday school and 4H clubs, and I can't imagine women chasing after him and tearing at his clothes. Chihuly, on the other hand, may have a kind of sex appeal, what with the eye patch.

After playing around with those ideas for a while I asked myself what visual artists could compare with Neil Young, and I thought of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. And then I began to search my mind for the art equivalent of Green Day and Eddie Vedder, and that's when my mind began to explode. Green Day? Maybe the German artist Anselm Keifer with all his rough, gritty and explosive paintings. But Vedder, he's a tough one. As contemporary and sometimes biting and unconventional as he can be, there's something classical and - dare I say it - sweet about him, and maybe the visual art equivalent would be someone like the great Edward Hopper or maybe Roy Lichtenstein.

So anyway, the Norman Rockwell show has gone away. It was a gigantic success. For a while it was like having Frank Sinatra perform at the Tacoma Dome. And now he's being replaced by Tacoma native and Northwest icon Dale Chihuly. The Chihuly show will probably draw big crowds and lots of oohs and aahs, and I will probably reluctantly admire some of his work just as I reluctantly admire Neil Diamond - but don't tell anybody.

MEET WRITER/DIRECTOR FREDERICK MARX >>>

Every so often, The Grand Cinema invites a filmmaker to town to share and discuss his or her work with audiences. This Thursday, June 9, the Oscar-nominated writer-director Frederick Marx visits Tacoma along with his 2010 documentary Journey from Zanskar.

"Though beings are innumerable, I vow to free them from all suffering." 

This Bodhisattva vow greets us in the film's opening title. Geshe Lobsang Yonten took this vow - and took it to heart - while becoming a Tibetan monk. He seeks to help his small, impoverished community of Zanskar, tucked away among the mountains of northern India. He desires his Tibetan culture to not die, but instead to live on in the youth there. To achieve this they must receive education in Manali, 180 miles away. So Yonten takes it upon himself to somehow safely guide these children across a harsh wilderness entirely on foot.

Richard Gere narrates this highly suspenseful trip as the group encounters the brutal cold and myriad dangers like rockslides, altitude sickness and snow blindness. In a strangely nonchalant way, Yonten admits early on that death can come at any time for him and his fellow travelers. This makes his interpretation of the above vow a curious one - he wants a better life and intellectual enlightenment for the young ones under his care, yet to do so he has no choice but to subject them to a physically grueling trial. Does the end justify the means?

Zanskar makes for a visceral viewing experience, so much so that I began feeling a bit guilty. There I am, cozy under a blanket on my couch while watching a movie about suffering kids - Christopher, you douche! But the lessons taken away go deeper than that. By unflinchingly showing the struggles of some of our fellow man, the director successfully takes us on a journey out of indifference, and into compassion.

[The Grand Cinema, Journey From Zanskar with writer/director Frederick Marx, Thursday, June 9, 6:45 p.m., $5-$8, 606 S Fawcett, Tacoma, 253.593.4474]

LOTS OF EXCITEMENT  >>>

Though they had very little way of knowing it (unless you count looking at the cover of any Weekly Volcano ever printed and doing the math), Parkway Tavern bartenders Sean Jackson and Nicholas Brosier could have very well been celebrating the publication of the Volcano's 500^th issue this week when photographer Steve Dunkelberger snapped them in action.

More likely, they were just yucking it up for the camera for this week's Volcano Drink(s) guide.

What's that, you say!?! The Volcano's Drink(s) guide IS the 500^th issue!?! That's total insanity!

Tell us about it.

Or, better yet, let Jackson and Brosier embody it. ...