BLOSSOMING IN THE FORMER GRISWOLD'S OFFICE SUPPLY SPACE >>>

This weekend, Evergreen Shakespeare's production of Romeo and Juliet is blooming in the former Griswold's Office Supply in Olympia, gutted by fire in 2004.

Soon, there'll be much more growing in the long-vacant building - literally. Clifford Lee of Olympia, the building's owner, envisions not only a performance space, commercial and perhaps residential spaces but also a vegetable garden, growing indoors under a greenhouse roof.

"We want to let the light come in," says Lee, who has been working with a group of students from The Evergreen State College on plans for the building.

Lee envisions the Olympia Green Living Center a multiuse space. He's most excited about creating a three-story high and 100-foot-long green wall where food can be grown.

To read Molly Gilmore's full story click here.

Olympia Green Living Center

308 Fourth Ave. SE, Olympia

email zangle98506@gmail.com

Romeo and Juliet

Friday, June 3, at 8 p.m., Saturday, June 4, at 9 p.m., Sunday, June 5, at 8 p.m.; free

Olympia Green Living Center (formerly Griswold's Office Supply), 308 Fourth Ave. SE, Olympia

facebook.com/event.php?eid=103689763054300

USELESS AND INDISPENSABLE >>>

Saul Becker is a Tacoma artist who strives to capture the world via sculpture and landscape painting and drawing. While Becker grew up in T-town, he has traveled the world more than he has stayed here, seeking new horizons to fortify his work. His unique sense of style yields some cool pieces, including rough-hewn landscapes with an industrial edge and electroplated weeds sheltered from the world in display cases.

Becker's work often juxtaposes nature and the industrial world - and if that sounds familiar, you are probably from or a resident of Tacoma. Where else can you check out amazing views of a majestic mountain whilst looking through plumes of port smoke?

"I was born and raised in Tacoma," says Becker. "It's had a huge influence on my work. There's something about growing up in the shadow of an active volcano that never leaves you. ... I was living in a city surrounded by incredible natural beauty, but struggling with its own aesthetic reality."

To read Kristin Kendle's full article click here.

ONLINE CHATTER >>>

Today's comment comes from Becky Knold in response to yesterday's blog post by Volcano visual arts critic Alec Clayton titled, "The new old aesthetic."

Knold writes,

Just read David Brooks' "It's not about you" in today's NYTimes and somehow feel that he is expressing in social cultural terms what you are expressing in artistic cultural terms. In other words, the new becomes old, then new again... blah blah. Both artists, and the broader social spectrum are looking for something more than quick, self-indulgent expressions & solutions. It's about time.

GREENER THEATER FUN >>>

Dare I call it egg-citing news that Riot To Follow Productions, a student theater group at The Evergreen State College, is opening a production of Honk: The Ugly Duckling Musical?

If they don't quack up, readers will cluck at me for making such a fowl pun, and I'll end up with egg on my face.

And yet the 1993 British musical update of the Hans Christian Andersen classic is itself undeniably punny, and what writer can resist the chance to take off from there? A critic for the London Evening Standard described the show as "cheery, chirpy and chock full of fowl yolks - sorry, I mean foul jokes." (See? It's not just me.)

The Olivier-winning musical is often produced by children's theater companies, and although a Riot To Follow trailer stars actual ducks, chickens and a cat, the show itself will feature the kind of singing, dancing personified animals that populate plays for kids, Disney films and cartoons of all sorts.

[Black Box at The Washington Center, Honk: The Ugly Duckling Musical, through June 12, Thursday-Friday 7 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 2 p.m., $12.50, $6.50 kids, 512 Washington St. SE, Olympia, olytix.org]

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2011 >>>

1. Although we are not huge fans of mass-market American "beer" - there are times when drinking anything else would be wrong. And camping accounts for five of the top 10 times when it's absolutely correct to drink this swill. We doubt that will be a part of REI's 7 p.m. "Camping Basics" class, but you never know. What we do know is the class will cover camping gear, how to stay warm and comfortable, ideas for fun activities, and local areas for car camping. There were four spots open the last time we checked. RSVP here.

2. Glass breaks if it can't flow. Get it melting, you can conjure all manner of shapes and color-infused wonderments that will remain when cooled. Work it cold, there are sheets and shards, baubles and balls, for manipulating into leaded frames or arranging intricately sculpturewise.  Glass kicks ass, especially this week in Tacoma as the 2011 Glass Art Society (GAS) Annual Conference is in town. In celebration, the Museum of Glass (natch!) hosts a Day of Glass from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Click here for the schedule of events.

3. Olympia owns the Mahari style of Orissi dance, a legacy of the legendary temple dancers and Guru Pankaj Charan Das, thanks to Evergreen professor Ratna Roy and her many years promoting the dance. Roy is at it again, presenting Earth My Body: Invoking the Goddess - an evening of Orissi dance, music, poetry, film, and theater performances to invoke the feminine spirit - at 7 p.m. in the Recital Hall inside the Communications Lab Building at The Evergreen State College. 

4. Last year, readers of this fine rag voted the Top of Tacoma Bar and Cafe the best bar in Tacoma. This was due in no small part to their well drink Wednesdays. Check it: $1.50 well drinks after 7 p.m. Are you kidding? That's, like, riding the train to funkytown for only eight bucks. Yes, please.

5. Tacoma guitarist Jerry Miller, he of Moby Grape fame, hosts a jam session at 9 p.m. inside the Gruv Lounge and Nightclub. Groovy, man.

LINK: More arts and entertainment events in the South Sound

LINK: Live music tonight in the South Sound

LINK: Happy hours!

MULTIPLE CHANCES TO CATCH TAYLOR'S WORK >>>

Like its wandering father-and-son protagonists, the charming, locally-produced short Scamp is on the move. The film left its Tacoma birthplace and rode the boxcar north to Seattle's Central Cinema, where this Saturday (June 4) you can spot it at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival (details at www.facebook.com/ScampMovie). The rough and scruffy vagabonds in Scamp offset the crisp, clean visuals of downtown Tacoma photographed by Chris Joseph Taylor.

The cinematographer-editor has found himself juggling numerous projects in recent months. While seeking a bachelor's degree in Digital Filmmaking and Video Production from the Art Institute of Seattle, Taylor makes time to assist director Andrew Finnigan on color correcting his full-length Fantastic Confabulations (also shot by Taylor). And I caught him last week in the midst of editing his latest, entitled A Man, Buried, a quirky short with a wonderful premise - drunkard's family digs up a better version of him in the backyard.

With such a concept you know audiences will expect at least some visual tricks (i.e. seeing the same actor twice in one shot), but Taylor didn't consider the challenge too daunting. "(The effects) came out really well," he notes. "There's a shot where...they're playing chess with each other (a single actor photographed twice), and one reaches across and punches the other one." Taylor laughs. "It's pretty awesome."

Speaking of seeing double, in case you miss Scamp this weekend it plays later in the summer at the Columbia River Gorge Film Festival.

THE VOLCANO'S VISUAL ARTS CRITIC SOUNDS OFF >>>

In 1970 I wrote my graduate thesis. It had the somewhat high-minded title "A Ground for the New Art: An Alternative to the Frame-Pedal Aesthetic."  If you must know, my professor came up with the title and I thought it sounded too academic, but I was proud of the thesis. I became even more proud of it decades later when I read it again and discovered that I had done things that were ahead of my time. Not even realizing it at the time, I had predicted and advocated for post-modern art before there was any such thing. Not that other artists, critics and historians hadn't advocated similar things. There were clear historical precedents from Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Rose, Allan Kaprow and Andy Warhol. But I think I put it all together in a cohesive way that nobody else had.

In a nutshell, my thesis was that the linear development of art history had come to an end and now all schools, styles and trends were equally current and valid and none of the old aesthetic criteria applied. McLuhan has said "art is anything you can get away with," and I thought that was the only basis for judging art that mattered.

It was all about THE IDEA. Nothing else mattered.

As early as 1928 Renee Magritte had painted a picture of a pipe with the title "Cici n'est pas une pip." (French for "This is not a pipe.") The point was that pictures should be judge not for what they look like (a pipe) but for what they are (a painting). That was a revolutionary idea and it established the concept that the "idea" was as important as, if not more important than, the art.

And of course, as everybody knows, Duchamp had made the definitive statement on that idea even earlier, in 1917, when he bought a common urinal from a hardware store and entered it in a juried art exhibit - and wrote a brilliant defense of it when the jurors rejected it and said it was not art.

From there it was a few short steps to Kaprow's happenings and Rauschenberg's erased deKooning to Chris Burden shooting himself in a performance art piece.

In 1970 I championed happenings and performance art and conceptual art of all sorts, and theoretically I still like the idea - but some folks have taken it way too far. The big idea has shrunk and become redundant. Today's art world has proven not only that art is anything you can get away with, but that artists can get away with anything.

My friend Jack recently replied to something I wrote about art with this statement: "I too feel that a painting should be exciting all on its own, and that if it is not, it's a fraud. There used to be, probably still is, this exhibition space in the Railyard in Santa Fe that prided itself on being avant-garde. This is, most of the stuff was splendidly executed bureaucratic crap.  It was the art of the idea.  I called it the art of iteration, because there would be one move but it was repeated in the work ad infinitum, and somehow this was taken to be revelatory and far-seeing. A ladder in which all the rungs were gleaming sharp blades, for example.  Okay, kind of cute at first, but once you get the concept, which takes less than a second, there's nothing more to see."

Ah, what monsters have we created? 

I'm all for the clever idea, but when Jeff Koons - as just one of many examples - displayed basketballs and vacuum cleaners and called them art it was just a warmed-over repeat of what Duchamp did with his "Fountain" of 1917. The idea is important, but as my friend Jack said, there needs to be something more to look at.

MONDAY, MAY 30 , 2011 >>>

1. A down home American icon closes today at the Tacoma Art Museum. The exhibition American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell, which made its only Northwest stop at TAM and features 44 paintings and 323 original Saturday Evening Post covers, will close today at 5 p.m.  The show consists of archival materials showing how Rockwell worked, from preliminary sketches, photographs, color studies and detailed drawings to the finished painting. There's more nostalgia, sentimentality and Americana here than at a lifetime of family reunions and Fourth of July picnics. "Rockwell's works are part of our popular consciousness," said Margaret Bullock, curator of Collections and Special Exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum. Read the full review of the show here.

2. The Museum of Glass is also open today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A must see is Glimmering Gone, the three-part exhibition by Ingalena Klenell and Beth Lipman. Their "Landscape" part of the installation - inspired in part by the landscape paintings of former Tacoman Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943) - is a 12-foot-high by 25-foot-long by 18-foot-deep installation of sculpted, slumped and fused plate glass. It looks like a winter wonderland of shimmering ice. Read the full review of the show here.

3. Nell Robinson and the Jaybirds will fill the Mandolin Café with sexy vocals and whirling banjos when the bluegrass band kicks it at 6:30 p.m.

4. The Backstage Bar & Grill has the white trash market a home. Every Monday night, while DJ Lo spins Top 40, the Sixth Avenue rock club offers $5 40-ounce PBRs, $2 wells, $3 domestic pitchers, $1 Hamm's drafts, $2 mac and cheese and $5.95 steak dinners under the banner White Trash Mondays.

5. Let's tally up the score for Jazzbones' 9 p.m. Rockaraoke, shall we? A chance to sing onstage with a live band? Yes. Cheap Miller High Life? Yes. A valid excuse to drink on a Monday (repeat, Monday) night? Yes, yes and, oh God, yes.

PLUS: Memorial Day events

LINK: More arts and entertainment events in the south sound

LINK: Live music tonight in the South Sound

LINK: Happy hour!

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND IN THE SOUTH SOUND >>>

Spending Memorial Day Weekend enjoying the sights, sounds, tastes and smells from our own backyard:

Harmon Brewery & Eatery might be known primarily for its beers, nachos and ski parties, but the downtown Tacoma joint also brings in the crowd every time blues acts set up in the corner. Yesterday, the South Sound Blues Association ran the blues portion of the Tacoma Jazz & Blues Festival at the Harmon - and once again the joint packed them in. Opening band Blues Buskers (pictured) set the tone with their award-winning talent.

The Swiss Pub is remodeling their gamerome to increase band-viewing floor space. Bench seating along the wall has replaced the tall tables. A pool table will be eliminated to make room by the far back wall for the video games.

Valhalla Coffee Roasters on Sixth Avenue in Tacoma have organized a row of trinkets to enjoy while pouring soy into your coffee.

Paratroopers are snagged in the ceiling fan at Puget Sound Pizza.

A little neighborhood has sprung up at the Woolworth Windows as part of Spaceworks Tacoma. Artist Gabriel Brown has created a town defined by Mountain Dew. Mr. Clean, Lipitor, Cheez-Its and many other items that have come to play a ventral role in American life.

Jazz should be performed in a darkly lit speakeasy, not at 2 p.m. in a huge, bright space dotted with rows of white plastic chairs. However, once again, the Tacoma Jazz and Blues Festival filled those chairs with those who dig big band. Roadside Attraction (pictured) blew the crowd away, as well as the tykes down the hall in the LEGO rooms.

Steph DeRosa and the girls hit the drag show at Jake's On 4th last night. They had to squeeze through the packed crowd to feel the feathers across their faces. The star of the night was Flirticia Fondue (apologize about the crappy iPhone photo).

YOU MAY HAVE SEEN HER WORK WHILE HIGH-ROLLING IN VEGAS >>>

Daphne Nixon is a transplanted oil painter, originally from New York and California, just in the past two years drawn to the awesomeness that is the Tacoma area. Now based in Gig Harbor, Nixon currently has work hanging at both the Proctor Art Gallery and Gallery Row in Gig Harbor.

Nixon's extensive background in painting started in childhood. "I first learned to paint from my dad," she says. "He used to draw and paint and I really admired him for it. Dad's family painted too. If we went on a family picnic, everyone on his side of the family would bring a little box of paints and pastels and we'd eat and they'd break out everything and start drawing."

But it doesn't stop there. Nixon focused on art in high school and then went on to get a BA from the School of Fine Arts at Yale. She studied the masters in Florence, Italy, and in Holland. She attended the Arts Students League in New York City, and studied with a number of professional artists to hone her skills.

It's no wonder Nixon can capture the nuances of metal and my attempts look like gloppy leftovers at IHOP.

To read Kristin Kendle's full profile of painter Daphne Nixon click here.