WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2011 >>>

1. If one needs proof that the minds behind local nonprofit Tacoma Community House are sharp, they need look no further than Scrabble Rousers, a growing Tacoma tradition held on the fourth Wednesday of every month that was created and designed to help raise funds and awareness for Tacoma Community House's mission - providing "education, employment, multilingual services, and advocacy for refugees, immigrants, and English speaking adults and youth." At 6:30 p.m., Scrabble Rousers will present a "Clowns vs. Mimes"-style Scrabble throwdown, inviting players of all ages and skill levels to break out their face paint an drubber noses at King's Book's. It'll be totally worth it just to see King's Books' owner sweet pea emcee without saying a word. Honk!

2. Hot colors in bold abstract configurations are the order of the day at B2 Fine Art Gallery/Studio in Hot Fusion: Explorations into Abstraction, which you can see from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Hot Fusion, part one of a two-part show, is currently on display and features works by Todd Clark, Yvette Neumann, Judy Hintz Cox and Scott J. Morgan. To read Alec Clayton's full review, click here.

3. Nashville singer Katie Armiger drops in on The Music in the Park outdoor concert series at 7 p.m. at Sylvester Park. No doubt Sam The Cat Man will enjoy her modern country tunes.

4. Since October, experimental filmmaker Devon Damonte has been curating Northern Flickers - a monthly film series at the Northern space in downtown Olympia. Tonight at 7 p.m., from the animation faculty at Dartmouth, Jodie Mack drops in on the Flickers with her "Sing It Out Loud" tour featuring bushels of magnificent motion graphics, plus original songs performed live, in harmony, with cello. In addition, the Crackpot Crafters debut the group film, The Artifacts Of Life, with a multitudinous menagerie of once-living stuff, stuck onto 16mm film, and reanimated, cast aloft on wings of light.

5. The Sammy Steele Band adds some alt-country to Lady Luck's Cowgirl Up's Military Appreciation Night every Wednesday beginning at 8 p.m.

LINK: More arts and entertainment events in the South Sound

LINK: OMG tomorrow's the party of the century!

ONLINE CHATTER >>>

Today's comment comes from Becky Knold in response to Volcano visual arts critic Alec Clayton's latest "Clayton on Art" blog, discussing the artwork of Vally Nomidou and Scott Fife.

Knold writes,

Loved this article by Alec Clayton, and appreciated the other links that it turned me on to also. I was familiar with the Big Puppy guy, Scott Fife, and his work, but was totally enthralled with the introduction to the Greek artist, Vally Nomidou... these are wonderful! just a tad "creepy" as you say, but I can't stop looking at them. Much more interesting to me than the other 2 more "lifelike" sculptors who you mention. Mystery, intrigue, questions, and imagination are all stirred by Vally Nomidou, an artist I'm going to be "following". Thanks again, Alec, for your insightful commentary on artists near and far, contemporary and historical. It's all good.

LOVE IS SCARY FOR SCREENWRITER RICK TOBIN >>>

Rick Tobin's dark work shall soon see the light of day. The shooting of Tobin's horror short, The Resolution, is scheduled to commence July 31, with Rick Walters of Tacoma-based production company Adventus Films directing. In the tradition of films like Four Rooms and Twilight Zone: The Movie, this project will eventually appear as a feature-length anthology with three other shorts (also written by Tobin) called ...in my best Vincent Price tones... Twisted Tales of Madness and Murder. Sounds spookier than Shark Week.

Auburn-born and now living in Federal Way, Tobin spends his days as a mild-mannered repairer of safety appliances on freight trains, yet at nightfall he hammers away on, well, twisted tales like Resolution. The script follows a jilted lover who sets in motion a fiendish plan of comeuppance for his former girl. Tobin calls it "a revenge story with a twist."

The screenwriter has a soft spot for plots that pile on surprises and toy with an audience's expectations. His writing emulates classics in textbook suspense like John Carpenter's The Thing. Recalling that movie Tobin says, "From start to finish, I thought it was great the way the characters were developed, the way the story unfolded."

When completed, The Resolution will tour festivals with hopes to build buzz for Twisted Tales.  

THE ART OF VALLY NOMIDOU AND SCOTT FIFE >>>

A friend posted a link on Facebook to an article in Juxtapoz about sculpture by Greek artist Vally Nomidou. When I looked at Nomidou's work the first thing I thought was that her life-size paper figures are like the life-size and larger cardboard figures by Seattle sculpture Scott Fife, who did the giant puppy dog at Tacoma Art Museum.

The opening paragraph in the Juxtapoz article reads, "Using just paper and cardboard, Greek artist Vally Nomidou creates these life-sized sculptures of people. The results are somewhat creepy three-dimensional figures that look almost too lifelike to be sitting in a gallery."

That's a very inaccurate description. Nomidou's figures do not look lifelike at all. But they do look creepy and yet strangely beautiful. If you want to see figures that are "too lifelike to be sitting in a gallery" take a look at works by John DeAndrea or Duwayne Hanson. I once almost bumped into a Hanson sculpture of a workman in the Museum of Modern Art and said "Excuse me" before I realized it wasn't a real person.

Being lifelike does not necessarily make art good, and it's no secret that I get very huffy about people who go all ga-ga over art based on nothing more than the fact it may be made from some unusual material. A piece of sculpture should be judged on how good it is as art not on whether it was made from clay or marshmallows or aardvark intestines.

Nomidou's figures are both creepy and beautiful, lifelike and surrealistic. She has a figure of a standing woman in a bikini wearing some kind of open weave beach jacket over her swimsuit. She is attractive and fashionable, but there is something machine-like protruding from her leg and her neck appears to have been cut and sewn back together a la Frankenstein's monster. There's another one of a little girl sitting on what looks like a weird hospital examination table. She is also broken and stitched back together, and there are strange strands of thread (or something threadlike) all over her body. As Juxtapoz said, these figures are creepy. But there are also newsprint type and dots and floral patterns that can be seen through layers of glass-like transparencies that are quite beautiful.

Seattleite Scott Fife makes portraits of celebrities and historical figures and animals that can also be quite creepy - especially since many of them are just heads detached from bodies and sometimes lying face down. Heads will roll, and in Fife's sculptures they come to rest in sometimes strange ways. As portraiture they are easily recognizable. There's no mistaking Elvis or Winston Churchill or Picasso with horns.

Like the online articles I found on Nomidou, the articles about Fife stress how lifelike his sculptures are and how unusual that they're made from cardboard. What makes them interesting to me is not that they're realistic - they're not - but that they're surrealistic. They're death images regardless of whether the subjects are dead or alive. And the surfaces are intriguing in that they look like clay that hasn't been fired, made of slabs of clay held together by brads. Again, as with Nomidou's figures, there's a Frankenstein's monster quality to these works.

If you haven't seen the big puppy at Tacoma Art Museum, you're missing something pretty amazing, although I think his portraits are more interesting (the best thing about the puppy is its size). If you get a chance to see his work in person, please do. You'll be glad you did.

TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2011 >>>

1. The DJ Switch and drummer Wiggles battle it out with hip-hop, house and Top 40 tunes every Tuesday night at the Backstage Bar & Grill. Seventy-five cent beers bring you into the battle.

2. Abracadabra! Hocus-pocus! Rama-lama-ding-dong! Local magician Jeff Evans will teach kids important lessons at 11 a.m. inside the Tacoma Public Library Main Branch. We're not going to guarantee you scantily clad assistants, but audience participation is enforced, so keep an eye on your watch - there's a fine line between David Copperfield and a pickpocket.

3. In the Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch show Scott Hillstrand and Ryan Simpson risk life and limb for a boatload of Alaskan King that will end up piled high at Red Lobster's weekly crab fest. Of course the guys got paid. Where are they spending their money? At the Varsity Grill from 5-10 p.m. that's where. OK, the Discovery Channel probably has their back, but you can spend your hard-earned cash to hang with the fellas, throw back a few drinks and stare at the Jager girls. Bonus: The VG will screen a new episode of the Catch.

4. Chat up dragons and orcs while rolling multisided dice from 7-11 p.m. tonight at the Northern Pacific Coffee Co. If you don't know what that means you have no business being there.

5. The Never Never have the boy and girl vocals meet over a bed of guitars dynamic down pat. Check out the band's sweet harmonies with a classic alternative rock sensibility with Fifty Up North at 8 p.m. inside The New Frontier Lounge.

LINK: More arts and entertainment events in the South Sound

LINK: Just a few days until the Super Best of Tacoma party!

ONLINE CHATTER >>>

Today's comment comes from Benjamin Collins in response to the Weekly Volcano review of last November's production of Grease by South Puget Sound Community College and Saint Martin's University.

Collins writes,

Honestly, I find this review to be insulting. As an ethnic actor myself, I understand the difficulty in being cast as anything other than the "minority" role. I've seen many a show where white actors are cast in highly specific minority parts (white Coalhouse Walker, white Bloody Mary, etc). The actress that played Frenchy was incredible; most definitely the standout from the Pink Ladies. So it baffles me that someone would find her, an African-American actress, playing a non-racially specific character offensive. It's Grease. It's Olympia, Washington. It's the 2010's. Who cares if Rydell High was not racially integrated in the 50's? I find the remark about the cast "having a lot of fun, so it can be forgiven for such historical revisions as a presciently integrated Rydell High" incredibly pretentious and offensive.

WHEN IT ALL GETS A LITTLE TOO REAL >>>

In David Mamet's Oleanna, a play in which I just appeared thanks to Theater Artists Olympia, a blowhard professor is accused of sexual harassment, battery, and attempted rape by his student, Carol, played in our production by a lovely, dedicated actor named Deya Ozburn. Deya and I are friends, as are Deya and my wife, and I wouldn't have agreed to play the professor if Deya wasn't already locked in as Carol. Since the script required me to verbally abuse Carol, maul her, slam her into a desk, and call her one of the ugliest words in the English language, I felt it was crucial to work with a performer who understood we were both just playing make-believe. I wanted to stay friends with my costar when the show ended, and that's exactly what happened. Our attendance improved slightly over our final weekend, and on balance, I'm glad I did the show--but that was seriously jeopardized by an incident that followed our Saturday evening performance.

Deya did her absolute best to inject plausible motivations and vulnerabilities into Carol. It was important to her, as it was to me and our director, John Munn, that Carol be anything but a vindictive, irrational bitch. Carol is torn between two competing influences. Can that make a person act insane? You bet. Hell, it made HAL 9000 act crazy, and he was a major appliance. But Carol was NOT a feminazi in our production, nor was she a harpy, nor was she a psychopath. What she was, and I say this after feeling as if I were at war with her for seven weeks, was a fighter, and fighters don't always choose their battles correctly. Perhaps you can relate.

But as I may have mentioned before, we humans prefer to "relate" to characters who are far wiser, more heroic and attractive than we are. We want to believe Jennifer Aniston will have trouble finding love, because we did. (She won't. She never has, because she looks like Jennifer Aniston.) We want to believe we're so heroic we'd always make the right choices, even as our autobiography calls us on our self-serving crap. When some audience members, many if not most of them women, saw Carol wage a bitter campaign against a professor who probably meant her no harm, they took it personally. Very personally.

Too personally.

It got harder and harder for Deya to greet friends in the lobby after the show, because patrons got in her face. Not Carol's face, her face. Deya and I were always careful to change into street clothes before entering the lobby, but it didn't matter; to infuriated audience members, Carol was Deya and Deya was Carol. What Carol had done, Deya was responsible for. David Mamet had nothing to do with it. The fact that Deya and I are friends, or that I'd go home safe and sound to my beautiful wife and condo every night, didn't enter their calculations. If you'd asked them directly, they'd say they knew it was "just a play"--but it wasn't, not to them. It was real.

It's one thing to be confronted by audience members directly, where rules of social propriety keep things in check. Email, unfortunately, is another matter, and Deya's been fielding some doozies. Then came Saturday night. A patron saw the show, went home angry, slept on it, hunted Deya down on a social networking site, and messaged her at length Sunday morning, still every bit as enraged. This wasn't an insightful analysis of the show, recognizing Deya as a talented actor playing a character written by somebody else, it was a venomous attack on Deya's motives, sanity, and decency. To this patron, there was no divide between Deya and Carol, no distinction between reality and fiction.

We actors try our best to contextualize such feedback as a compliment to our skills in portraying naturalistic (not natural) behavior. That only gets us so far. Eventually, it wears us down, and we're forced to contend with the fact that even fellow actors sometimes see us as our "type." I've played a child molester, a rodent, a werewolf, an imbecile, an aged pornographer, and the Devil himself. I am none of those things. Likewise, Deya is neither "exotic" nor "bitchy," despite her dark Latin looks. Theater outsiders often tell us it must be painful to deal with all that rejection, but in truth, it's the brand of acceptance we receive that rankles most.

SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2011 >>>

1. Today marks the final day of NXNW Metal Fest at Backstage Bar & Grill on Sixth Avenue in Tacoma. Find details here.

2. Tacoma is for lovers. Really, truly. Just ask Tacoma Is For Lovers, the community-based organization of T-town do-gooders and creators who, through artist fairs and similarly crafty endeavors, strive to make Tacoma a better place. Today, in partnership with Indie Tacoma Arts & Crafts, an Artist Craft Fair will be held at King's Books from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Artists confirmed for the fair include Laurie Cinotto, Maija McKnight, Jessica Bender and Maggie Roberts.

3. The UK's Grammy-winning reggae act, Steel Pulse, will be at the Pantages tonight, promising a show "that will make you feel good!" Of course, that could have been paraphrased, but we thought the exclamation was important. Amidst all the good times, expect some politics to seep in as well.

4. You've got one last chance to see Oleanna, dammit!

5. Mark Dufresne will lay it down at the Spar in Old Town Tacoma tonight.

LINK: More arts and entertainment events in the South Sound

LINK: Live music tonight in the South Sound

CHECK THEM OUT >>>

The Grand Cinema received around 60 submissions during the Tacoma Film Festival poster competition. While most of the entries were from the Tacoma area a few came from outside the city - including past TFF poster winner and Paris resident David Mackey (the Godzilla poster below). This year's theme/tagline was "CATCH IT FIRST".

You can check out the submitted posters - which are hanging in The Grand's lobby - during regular hours.
 
A panel of Tacoma Film Festival staff and volunteers will chose the winning poster soon. We hear The Grand folks have grown tired of posters that include Mount Rainier and the Narrows Bridge.

Here are a few submitted posters hanging on The Grand's walls:

LINK: Go see a movie at The Grand

SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2011 >>>

1. Want to celebrate Tacoma legend Dave Takata's birthday? Get to the New Frontier Lounge tonight, where Mahnhammer, Goldteeth and CFA will get the party started.

2. The City of Lacey is featuring a sing-along version of the 1978 film Grease as part of its free summer movie series tonight at Huntamer Park. That means there'll be words on screen ... as if you needed them.

3. If you're going to be strung out, you may as well be strung out on twang. Enter the Twang Junkies, who perform tonight at Bud's Bar & Grill in Milton.

4. It's a big night for comedy in Tacoma as Bobby Slayton, Toby Roberts and Alysia Wood will all bring the laughs.

5. Getting drunk at Jazzbones is easy. Tonight, it'll be even a little easier as the the Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey Launch Party offers up SweetKiss Momma and Aces Up.

LINK: More arts and entertainment events in the South Sound

LINK: Live music tonight in the South Sound