February 10-16, 2016 | VOLUME 41 | NUMBER 6
How activist kids are changing the debate over climate change.
It’s a Friday night at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford, and Joey and Grace, ages 9 and 11—tiny, wiry, and ebony-haired—are tumbling over each other to tell me what
they know about climate change.Their introduction to the concept is pretty difficult to pinpoint, though, since it’s always been there, “like all those other facts,” says Grace.
“It’s just, like, a regular thing,” adds Joey. »CONTINUED ON PAGE 6
BY SARA BERNARD
SPROUTING RESISTANCE
CLIMATE ACTIVISM’S SECRET WEAPON: KIDS!
SPROUTING RESISTANCE
BARR
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Two items stuck out for me when I visited Kathy Nyland’s fifth-story corner office at City Hall.
One, on a shelf devoted mostly to nameless binders and reports, was Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath (“That’s my story!”) The other was a sticker on her door that read #HALAyes (“I didn’t put that there!”)
As Seattle’s so-called “neighbor-hood czar,” Nyland is tasked with helping all those would-be Davids in Seattle go up against the Philistines of Fourth Avenue—as she once did as a neighborhood activist in Georgetown. And yet as a member of the Murray administration (official title: Director of the Department of Neighbor-hoods), she sometimes can be cast in with all the other city leaders whose plans for growth—among them, yes, the Housing Affordability and Liv-ability Agenda (HALA)—stick in the craw of many self-appointed “neigh-borhood preservationists.”
With residents in Magnolia and Ballard claiming anew that their neighborhoods are under attack, and Saturday being Seattle Neighbor Appreciation Day, Nyland chatted with Seattle Weekly about the power of dialogue and why she hates the term “NIMBY.”
Your ’Hood’s
Gonna Be OK
Kathy Nyland still thinks we can talk
this all out.BY DANIEL PERSON
»CONTINUED ON PAGE 4
COURTESY CITY OF SEATTLE
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editorial
On Sunday, amid the Super Bowl advertisements for bad beer and disgusting pizza, was a spot for a pill called Movantik.
Developed by AstraZeneca, the drug is aimed at easing constipation. On the face of it, market-ing a product that addresses digestive problems between ads for gut-busting processed food seems genius, if a little gross. But as the voice on TV told us, Movantik is for a different kind of constipa-tion, that caused by long-term opioid use.
Little wonder.As Francie Diep blogged on the social-
science website Pacific Standard, “With so many Americans using opioid painkillers, it was only a matter of time before pharmaceutical companies developed a pill to take care of one of the pain-killer’s most common side effects: gastrointestinal distress . . . It’s a sign of the times that . . . Astra-Zeneca found it worthwhile to buy a Super Bowl spot for their ad.”
But constipation is hardly the only side effect of long-term opiate use, as we are seeing first-hand in Seattle with a homelessness crisis that is clearly tied to rampant addiction.
That many people living on Seattle’s streets today are heroin users raises a number of pub-lic-safety concerns, some more legitimate than others. Residents express fears about falling into piles of discarded needles; victims of property crime suddenly have a ready lineup of subjects underneath the bridges; a Ballard business man-ager says he started pouring water on homeless people’s possessions outside his business because he had previously experienced an overdose on his property.
The shooting that left two people dead in the Jungle two weeks ago has been tied to drug addiction: Police claim the shooters were settling a $500 drug debt for their mom. Police also say the shooters made off from the scene with $100 worth of black-tar heroin.
Big Pharma’s role in America’s heroin epi-demic is so well-established it can be taken as fact. To recount the shameful history in one paragraph: The Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of OxyContin in 1995. The drug-maker, Purdue Pharma, aggressively mar-keted the pill, claiming—with the FDA’s back-ing—that Oxy was non-habit forming. By 2010, the company was bringing in $3.1 billion a year selling it. As prescriptions rose, so did overdose
deaths from prescription painkillers—which quadrupled between 1999 and 2010.
Doctors and policymakers have gotten wise to Big Pharma’s dope-pushing ways, and have tightened access to opioids like OxyContin. However, policy doesn’t erase addiction, and many people who had been feeding their habit with prescription pills turned to heroin.
“If you’re addicted to opiates, and you’ve used opiates for a long time, your brain chemistry has changed,” Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, a drug-use researcher at the University of Washington’s Alco-hol and Drug Abuse Institute, told Casey Jaywork for his story on the spike in heroin addiction (“The Spike,” Aug. 12, 2015). “You lose your free will, because your priorities—literally, your biological priorities in your brain—are rotated around, so that the opiates become number one.”
For every person who ODs on black tar heroin, countless others are left to a more uncer-tain fate of living life fix to fix—sacrificing family, home, and all else for their next high. Following a homelessness roundtable last week, Dustin Davies told Seattle Times columnist Danny West-neat: “Everybody asks, ‘Why is homelessness getting so bad around here?’ I guarantee you it comes back to the heroin epidemic. But that’s the one thing they didn’t talk about in there.”
Outside the roundtable, heroin addiction gets talked about ad nauseam, but only as a reason why compassion should not be shown to those we see living in the margins. They’re not home-less, they’re junkies, this story goes.
No doubt a person who is homeless because of, say, domestic abuse needs different services than one who is homeless because of opiate addiction. But let’s cut the bullshit that every junkie arrived in his situation because he was a hedonist punk who had it coming. “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes,” John Prine sang, and a lot of that money lined the pockets of pharmaceutical companies who knew exactly what they were doing to this country.
So as the price tag of dealing with homeless-ness rises—on Monday, King County Executive Dow Constantine pledged another $17 million of taxpayer money to the problem—how about we start sending invoices to Purdue Pharma-ceuticals? Because we seriously doubt they’re going to be able to come up with a pill to solve homelessness. E
Seeing Big Pharma’s Work on the Streets of Seattle
inside9 NEWS & COMMENT
Is Nextdoor just a Facebook for complaining about the homeless? Plus: battles over encampment sweeps and selling Kenmore parkland to a developer.
14 COMIXDo you really want to move here? It’s rainy. And finding housing is like playing Tetris.
17 ARTS & CULTUREPillar Point’s postcard from the edge; what Michael Moore loves about Europe; PNB’s cinematic tragedy.
22 FOOD & DRINKA brewer’s take on Southeast Asia; the re-rise of home distilling.
25 ODDS & ENDS
Photos by Mark Kitaoka Illustrations by Kevin Harris
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SW: During the 2013 campaign, Ed Murray said: “I want to empower neighborhoods in way that they haven’t been since before Mayor Greg Nickels.” When he goes back to voters next year, how close to achieving that cam-paign promise will he have come?
Nyland: The mayor is constantly talking about how he wants to engage people differ-ently, and I think he’s got two years behind him that indicate or show what he means and he’s doing just that. When he nominated me, I think that was an indication [that] this depart-ment has a rich history and it needs to have a robust future. We need to do things differently, and that was the directive given and that’s the charge I take seriously every day. I think he can go out there and tell, as I said, a really good story.
If you listen to the rhetoric in the press, that story isn’t necessarily shining through. Where is the disconnect?
I think it depends on who you’re listening to. I try not to do this, I try not to go onto social media and read anything, but there was this string over the weekend about community councils and engagement in neighborhood groups. I think there were over 50 comments of just people sharing their thoughts or experi-ences and Department of Neighborhoods and Mayor Murray were recognized quite a few times like “Things are changing.” Like, “They understand that we need to have more voices heard, more people at the table.” But I think there are some people for whom change is not easily accepted.
There are people who see HALA as a non-starter for what they call “the neighborhoods.”
Is there a point where engagement just doesn’t work anymore in these conversations?
The mayor, when he released the HALA recommendations, that’s what they were. They were recommendations to start a conversation and hear what people think and give people the opportunity to learn more and to engage and possibly shape. I will always continue to try and try and try to talk to people. I really believe, as does the mayor, that there’s more common ground than not.
Have the neighborhood summits of the last few weeks changed your belief on that?
I have the thinnest skin. Some of those meet-ings, they’re difficult. They are difficult but I think you can’t avoid them. You need to experi-ence that and push through it and again cling on to this belief that there’s more in common than not. And also, I think [at] those types of meetings you’re seeing the extremes, and the vast majority of people are neutral and haven’t formed an opinion yet.
Do you ever see your 2006 self out there in the crowd and go, “Oh my God, did I sound like that?”
You betcha! I think that’s one of the reasons why the mayor appointed me. Because I think I’m not that special, I’m not that different. I just had questions about different policy, and I was able to mobilize people and get some trac-tion. But I think there’s lots of people like me.
What does the term NIMBY mean to you?I can’t stand that term. Because I think it
means lots of things. People yelled that about me a decade ago because I had questions. I wasn’t against things, I had questions about different options, but it’s a term I try not to throw around or get pulled into that debate. I just think it’s so unnecessary. E
Kathy Nyland »FROM PAGE 1
EDITORIAL
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Send your thoughts on this week’s issue to
chatterbox
“Businesses have a right to protect their businesses because they pay property taxes.”
Last week, staff reporter Casey Jaywork published photos and a short description of a contraption set up at a Ballard upholstery business that seemed to be designed to soak a pile of belongings outside its fence—presumably left there by a homeless person or people. The post generated a considerable amount of chatter, on our site and elsewhere. Many read-ers were outraged by what they considered a cold-hearted affront to people already living in desperate situations. Others defended the business as simply responding to an uptick in homelessness and drug use in the area (A manager at the business, Mac’s Upholstery, went onto KIRO radio to justify his actions—the business never returned our call for comment—saying they had found a dead body on their property months before and did not want it to happen again.)
People of Ballard, I know you aren’t all heartless reactionary jerks like this story portrays. I urge those of you who live in Ballard but aren’t fans of kicking-while-down, please organize yourselves to support our most vulnerable community members, and to provide a counter voice to the really loud, really ugly voices we’re hearing from your neighborhood now.foxfount, via seattleweekly.com
Let’s take someone who is already having an incredibly dif-ficult life just trying to survive, has so little, and then go and ruin what little they have. Unbelievably cruel.countD, via seattleweekly.com
Kicking people when they are down! That’s the new America!voiceofcommonsense, via seattleweekly.com
Hey, let’s waste thousands of gallons of water while being pricks to the homeless. Way to go, Seattle.Hart Noecker, via seattleweekly.com
A lot of these “homeless” are homeless by choice and have no desire to be part of society. Other cities don’t put up with that garbage, but some-times being liberal and compassionate backfires.Mansgame, via seattleweekly.com
Businesses have a right to protect their busi-nesses because they pay property taxes. You can’t just camp anywhere in the city. If you ever have the privilege of owning a business or a home, you may change your mind about protecting it. And it looks like they have already put up a form of prison wire to keep the addicts out.Anne Steiner, via seattleweekly.com
The people in these camps are junkie criminals who just want to loll around getting high, poop-ing in the streets, and piling up garbage every-where. They do nothing but steal from other
people—even other homeless people—and col-lect free stuff from the government (paid for by us, of course).They are not “down on their luck.” No decent homeless person would live in these camps rather than a decent shelter. They are dangerous and unsanitary, but they are perfect for criminals because they provide a place to abuse drugs and alcohol, while most shelters do not.Molly, via seattleweekly.com
Have you had junkies camp in the alley behind your house arguing and screaming all night? Have you called the police and have them come out just to find out they don’t want to deal with the problem because there is not much profit to be made prosecuting a homeless person? I doubt it.Jacob McDonald, via seattleweekly.com
Shelters may be overcrowded or completely full. Domestic-violence victims may not be able to get rooms at shelters. There may be issues with theft at that shelter. Some shelters are religiously affiliated and require people to attend prayer services to obtain food or shelter, which might violate their faith or they might not be comfort-
able doing. Some shelters are day shelters only and require occu-pants to go elsewhere at night. Shelters may be far away from each other (either walking or public-transit distance). Combine
the latter two examples: Someone might have to leave for a night shelter that’s a 45-minute walk across the city only to find out that the night shelter is full—then they’d end up spending the night on the street.
So as you can see, there are plenty of other reasons besides substance abuse for not spending the night in a shelter.holymolylions, via seattleweekly.com
What a complete asshole. Guess I’ll never be going to Mac’s Upholstery in this lifetime. Nei-ther should anyone else.Jed Perro, via seattleweekly.com
Yeah, I’m sure you’ve been shopping around for new upholstery.Jimmy Jugular, via seattleweekly.com
Jimmy, come on, the sofa in your mom’s base-ment could use a facelift. Don’t you love her?Scribbles, via seattleweekly.com
Nah I’m waiting for Bernie to deliver a free one.Jimmy Jugular, via seattleweekly.com
As a matter of fact, smart ass, I have a good amount of upholstery work done every year.Jed Perro, via seattleweekly.com E
Comments have been edited for length and clarity.
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Still, for my benefit, the siblings cast their minds back to the old days, when they knew about climate change but they didn’t know that much about it.
“We knew it was caused by people burning oil and gas, but we didn’t understand what it meant,” offers Grace.
“We didn’t know how it works, we didn’t understand the effects, we didn’t understand how fast it was happening,” Joey says at a rapid clip. “We thought it happened in, like, 150 years, the big effects?”
“Something like that,” says Grace. But now they’re aware that “the big effects are
already somewhat happening,” says Joey. “There’s natural global warming . . . but this isn’t natural.” And then, with some gravitas: “If we don’t make some big changes by 2020, it won’t matter how much we try to help after.”
They share their feelings about that.“Frustration . . . anger.” “Frustration . . . annoyance. And kind of
like . . . nobody getting it!”“And a little bit this desperate need, like, ‘We
need to do something! Why won’t you under-stand that?! Whyyyy?!’ ”
We’re at the tail end of a monthly meeting of the Seattle chapter of Plant for the Planet, an international environmental club with 34,000 young members in 50 countries who have collec-tively planted more than 14.2 billion trees. There are snacks and games, as you’d expect at a kid meeting—muffins, cookies, carrot sticks, a swift round of hide and seek, some dashing about and shrieking and breathless laughter.
But mostly it’s quite serious. Moderated by the group’s 13-year-old president, Gabe Mandell, the young activists are celebrating the myriad climate wins of 2015—Shell is out of the Arctic! Obama vetoed Keystone XL!—and planning their next tree-planting workshops and retreats, as well as discussing the climate news of the day, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial trade agreement that could allow multinational corporations to skirt carbon policies.
These are the kids, aged 8 to 14, who’ve trained to become “Climate Justice Ambas-sadors”—the official title of every member of Plant for the Planet who participates in a day-long “Academy”—giving ebullient speeches to their peers at school and at climate events. They’ve shown up at Shell, Keystone, oil train, and Gates Divest protests; they’ve testified at climate conferences and hearings; they’ve urged the Seattle City Council to put warning labels on gas pumps. They’ve also spent time with Governor Jay Inslee and former Vice President Al Gore and been featured in the HBO docu-mentary Saving My Tomorrow; they’ve planted 11,000 trees and started a state-level challenge to plant a billion. They’ve co-hosted workshops and trainings all over the Puget Sound area and inspired the creation of a Plant for the Planet chapter in Portland. They’re about 375 strong since their inception in early 2013, with a few dozen active members. And eight of them were plaintiffs in a highly publicized lawsuit petition-ing the Washington State Department of Ecol-ogy to develop a carbon-emissions rule for the sake of their fundamental rights—a lawsuit that they almost won.
“A lot of the times when I hear bad things about [climate change], I start to cry, and I feel pretty depressed,” says Sierra Gersdorf-Duncan, an 11-year-old fifth-grader so gripped by the
crisis of ocean acidification that she’s been inter-viewed for a Philippe Cousteau documentary on the topic. But that kind of climate despair, she says, in herself and others, is “what we need to change. We have to tell them, ‘You’re right, these terrible things are happening, but we can do something about it.’ ”
If you, like Sierra, are 11 today, you were born not long before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Then, nearly every year of your exis-tence, the world has seen epic climate-related disasters: Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan, massive flooding in Pakistan, Pacific islands slipping underwater, Alaskan villages toppling from coastal bluffs, endless drought in Califor-nia, and catastrophic wildfires in Washington. Every year seems to surpass the last as the “hot-test year on record”; 2015 just beat out 2014 for the highest global average temperatures ever recorded, and 15 of the planet’s 16 hottest years occurred after 2001.
Also, if you are 11, you were born just before the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which marked a sea change in public perception around the concept—in this country, anyway—making “global warming” and “climate change” household terms as well as the stuff of political debate. More recently, you saw one of the larg-est international summits ever convened on this or any topic, and President Obama has been making climate speeches almost since you could speak.
By some accounts, we are beyond predictions and have entered the age of climate conse-quences. The entire lifetime of today’s children falls into that age. In 2050, the year that some of the more dire climate scenarios could begin to unfold, an 11-year-old will be 45.
“It affects us personally,” says 9-year-old Joey. “Most grownups will not be around long enough to see the big, awful effects I was talking about. For us . . . we’ll be middle-aged. We’ll be fully alive and have to worry about it.”
The kids’ passion has made an impact on the local climate movement. Put onstage, they frequently pull grand, tearful statements—and sometimes actions—out of our elected officials.
“Everything stops when the kid opens their mouth,” says parent and activist Michael Foster, creator of Plant for the Planet in Seattle. He’s taken these kids to a slew of climate events, he says, and without fail, when the kids speak, adults listen. “Whoever is sitting on that panel, behind that table, doodling their notes on their pad . . . The pencils go down. They make eye
contact. They are paralyzed, not breathing, until that kid finishes.”
Kids speaking up for themselves, for the planet they’ll inherit—it’s effective. 350 Seattle has been known to call these kids their “secret weapon.” But it’s not just some cheap ploy to fill out a climate agenda: The weapon works because the kids care, too.
Tim Deppe, a Climate Ambassador who just turned 10, says all the bad stuff he hears about climate change doesn’t make him sad. “Not sad, no,” he says. “Passionate.”
The journey to Plant for the Planet in Seattle began with a single Google search.
In late 2012, Foster trained with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps, and since his children were in fourth and sixth grade at the time, he figured he’d do a slide show for their sci-ence class. But the talk he’d prepared was pretty grim, and he wasn’t going to just slap on some sweet nothings at the end. “I cannot end a talk with, ‘But we’re gonna build a whole bunch of windmills, so you guys are going to be all right,’ ” he says. “That’s such a lie.”
So he plugged “children save the world” and “climate” into a Google search bar and the top hit was a video put together by a German wun-derkind named Felix Finkbeiner, who at age 9 decided that the best way to get around the cli-mate crisis was to plant trees. Today the 17-year-old has been named the 2015 “European of the Year” by Reader’s Digest, addressed the United Nations, and launched a global organization
with the goal of planting a trillion trees by 2020. (There are about three trillion trees on the planet today, but we’re still losing an estimated 15 bil-lion every year to agriculture and development.)
Planting trees: It’s a simple concept for kids to grasp, and it’s one possible solution to climate change, since forests are huge carbon banks—they absorb planet-warming CO2 while pumping out oxygen. It also gives children something to hold onto in the face of “all this gloom-and-doom Al Gore stuff,” Foster says. He folded Finkbeiner’s video and call to action into his science-class presentation, and it was a total hit. Kids cheered, teachers wiped their eyes. “I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” he recalls. “‘I’ve got to do this slide show more.’ ”
Foster has since presented to about a thousand kids in Seattle, by his estimation, and got on the phone with Finkbeiner, who chastised him for not having started a Seattle chapter of Plant for the Planet sooner. He’s also been a major con-nector for climate activists working with kids, as well as for local politicians—he’s brought Mayor Ed Murray as well as House Speaker Frank Chopp and representative Jamie Peder-sen (D-Seattle) to various Plant for the Planet events. His two daughters were also the named plaintiffs in Zoe & Stella Foster v. Washington Department of Ecology, the kids’ climate-change lawsuit. It was one of many state-level lawsuits filed by Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children’s Trust—a way to force action on climate change through the courts by using a legal principle called the “public trust doctrine” (and a secret weapon called “children”). Getting on board with that, Foster says, was easy: He stumbled across an Our Children’s Trust video and recognized a Carkeek Park landmark behind Andrea Rodgers, one of the attorneys working on the cases, who, it turned out, lived in Seattle. He called her and said, “ ‘I need to talk to you.’ And she said, ‘Is this Michael Foster? I need to talk to you!’ It’s a pretty small network of climate activists working with kids around the country.”
The kids got their final day in King County court last November; they’d been petitioning the Department of Ecology to create a carbon-emissions rule based on the best available climate science since summer 2014. While they lost their case in the end, Judge Hollis Hill nevertheless created a legal precedent that thrilled climate activists: the idea that the Washington state con-stitution should in fact protect the atmosphere for future generations. According to Judge Hill’s ruling, the only reason she dismissed the kids’ case was because the Department of Ecology was already developing a similar rule. Notably, Ecol-ogy is developing that rule because Governor Jay Inslee ordered it to last summer—11 days after he spent 90 minutes listening to five of the kid plaintiffs asking him to do just that.
Meanwhile, Senator Doug Ericksen (R-Fern-dale), chair of the Energy, Environment, & Tele-communications Committee, has sponsored SB 6173, a bill that would overturn Ecology’s ability to make a carbon rule without the help of the legislature. The proposed rule, said Ericksen in a statement, “gives manufacturers a perverse incen-tive to leave the state of Washington.” The bill passed his committee and is now in the hands of the Rules Committee, which may send it to the Senate floor for a second reading.
“The problem is we’re fighting a propaganda war,” says 11-year-old Grace. “Who can get people to listen more—the oil corporations or people like us?”
She sighs, acknowledging that there are plenty of other problems in the world that she feels sympathetic to, but that we don’t have a spare
Sprouting Resistance »FROM PAGE 1
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13-year-old president Gabe Mandell, right, listens to his peers during a monthly Plant for the Planet meeting.
Seattle’s Plant for the Planet members have planted 11,000
trees so far. Their goal: 1 billion.
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planet on which to solve those problems. “Hon-estly, if we don’t do something about climate change now,” she says, “we’re not going to have a chance to worry about the rest of it.”
According to Michael Foster, climate change is a “time crime.” We’re stealing the future from our children by burning fossil fuels with abandon, and we won’t really know it—we won’t know quite how much we’ve stolen—for decades.
It is also, in his view, kind of like second-hand smoke. “I grew up in Texas at a time when every-body smoked everywhere,” he says. “I remember everywhere I went stank, and that’s just how it was. It was like sucking on a tailpipe, just cigars and whatever, all the time. And the idea that I could be a kid in a world of people who are just smoking around me, everywhere, all the time, and know what they’re doing to me? That’s crazy-making.”
That’s why he wants to create an infrastructure for these kids—give them a platform so that “grownups take them seriously, and so they’re not feeling so crazy and isolated and alone with the knowledge that they have.”
Sure, it’s often people like Foster who’ve put that knowledge in these kids’ heads in the first place, but they live in this world too, and they’re listening. 11-year-old Sierra is very, very worried about the ocean’s dying diatoms, for example, but explains that Plant for the Planet “gave me a thing to do about it. The effects [of climate change] are very depressing, but once you get involved, it doesn’t seem that hard because you have all these other people supporting you.”
While some of the kids are interested in sci-ence or enjoy being mini-celebrities—it is nice, as former Planet for the Planet president Wren Wagenbach told me, to have somebody “listening to you, for once”—they often have very strong emotional connections to the issue, too. Last summer, 12-year-old Jenny wrote Governor Inslee a letter describing her attachment to a lake and a waterfall in a forest in China: She’d go every year to visit family, but one year when she returned, the forest had been cut down and turned into oil-slicked pavement.
For Grace, it’s about compassion. “If some-one’s upset or hurting or angry, it’s like it’s com-ing off them in waves and I feel it too,” she says. “But it’s not just people I’m actually in direct contact with . . . it’s like, every hurricane, every flood: It hurts.”
It’s not just guilt, then, that makes climate-caring adults lose themselves in the kids’
speeches. It’s also because they’re kids—so optimistic, so emotionally raw, so guileless. They put things in simple terms; they force us to inter-rogate our own assumptions; and they are utterly convinced that this is a problem we can fix.
Foster paraphrases a sentiment that he heard both Governor Inslee and Al Gore express at a fundraising luncheon in December 2014, follow-ing a three-minute call-to-action speech deliv-ered by then-9-year-old Abby. “It’s not because we’re doing this for her,” he says, and he is crying now. His voice trembles. “It’s because she embod-ies the spirit of who we have to become.”
Adds Foster: “It’s speaking truth to power, and saying, ‘You need to be over here with me. You need to be a little more like me. You need to be a little more bold, a little more courageous. You have to do the impossible.’ ”
As I wrap up my conversation with Joey and Grace, Grace insists several times that I include one very important piece of information in this article. “We need funding,” she says. Planting trees, alas, isn’t free. But “it’s only one dollar per tree! It’s not much!” I promise to mention it. Parents grab their kids’ things, someone plays a riff on the piano, tiny hands grab extra cookies and tiny sneakers squeak as a dozen or so chil-dren skip off into the wet night.
Just outside the door, Gabe Mandell reels off some of the intricacies of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “Do you want me to tell you the two worst things about it?” he asks, then launches into an explanation of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision, which would allow corporations to sue govern-ments over laws they find too restrictive in private trade tribunals, and if they establish the tiniest subsidiary in a country that has lax car-bon or public-health laws, they can opt to abide by those laws, instead of the countries they do most of their business in.
He then takes care to remind me—although, at this moment, I’m quite convinced—that this is not just kid stuff.
People “look at us and they just see a bunch of kids planting trees, or whatever,” he says, exasperated. “I think we really need to get it out that we are an organization that is dedicated to fighting climate change! We’re doing things. We’re not just a bunch of kids getting together on a Friday. We’re a bunch of kids getting together and trying to do solutions that many grownups aren’t.” E
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From the music of Motown, to the genius of Bert Williams,
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and the art of African Americans during February 2016.
BLACK MUSIC, DANCE, FILM, and more…
AMERICAN TRADITIONS
FEBrUAry 4 STG and NAAM present Funky Congregation:Lime Kiln Club Field Day CelebrationNorthwest African American Museum
FEBrUAry 6 Seattle Rock Orchestra The Music of MotownThe Moore Theatre
DUrINg FEBrUAry Motown Across the Years Intergenerational Sing-A-LongVarious locations
FEBrUAry 15Black Radio & Black Music How Motown Moved MusicRadio 7-8am | 91.3 KBCS
FEBrUAry 22 Lime Kiln Club Field Day Silent Film The Paramount Theatre
FEBrUAry 25 – 28 DANCE, DANCE, DANCEThe Moore Theatre
stgpresents.org/americantraditions
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Benjamin Lukoff, of Magnolia, signed up with the neighborhood social-networking site Nextdoor shortly after it launched in 2011.
“I’ve always been interested in neighborhood issues, so I signed up early,” he says.
For years, things were pretty quiet on the site, which requires address verification to ensure that only neighbors are privy to local conversations. There was lots of talk about finding good house painters, baby sitters, etc.
In recent months, though, as concerns over homelessness and property crime escalated in Magnolia, Lukoff has seen a sudden uptick in activity.
“Especially since the RV-slash-drug-whatever-you-what-to-call-it issue has been more in the press, I’ve seen many more people join,” he says. “You see when people have joined, and it used to be one a day, a hand-ful a day. Now it’s, ‘Welcome six more people.’ People are telling their neighbors, ‘Get on there.’ ”
Magnolia doesn’t seem to be an outlier in this respect. According to Nextdoor’s own data, the site saw a 103 percent increase in users in 2015.
At least some of this growth has been in concert with the City of Seattle, which in 2014 launched a partnership with Nextdoor as a way to foster better neighborhood conversa-tion. The Seattle Police Department has an active presence on the site, using the network’s ability to target specific areas of the city to provide hyper-local public-safety information.
And yet one of the many sub-narratives to grow out of the city’s homelessness crisis is that social-media sites aren’t helping the dialogue, but instead are fueling hysteria—with Next-door bearing the brunt of the criticism. Indeed, for many, “Nextdoor” seems to have become a byword to describe the phenomenon of commu-nities whipping themselves into a froth.
“What you guys are experiencing through things like Nextdoor is fueling your own hyste-ria,” activist Sarra Tekola told a crowd of angry neighbors in Ballard two weeks ago.
“Those complaints sound an awful lot like Nextdoor-fueled hysteria,” urbanist blogger Erica C. Barnett wrote recently, regarding complaints from Magnolia residents about an uptick in crime.
Mayor Ed Murray has avoided citing Next-door by name, but has certainly bought into the idea that neighborhood-specific social media is stirring up unfounded discontent.
“I just think that these [sites] can be great ways for folks to communicate about all sorts of con-cerns in their neighborhoods, both positive and negative,” Murray told Seattle Weekly last week. “But I think it’s important that providers not allow them to simply become a place where ram-pant rumors get started that could lead to some very scary outcomes. It appears that some of our neighborhoods where we have the highest com-plaints about crimes are not the neighborhoods that have the highest crime rates, but have a lot of social media that the neighborhoods are using.”
In many ways, the story of neighborhoods being overwhelmed by homelessness and crime
hit the media following a tense public meeting in Magnolia on Jan. 6. Barnett, on her blog The C Is for Crank (thecisforcrank.com), quoted one attendee: “If you fall . . . you’ve got a really good change of falling into a pile of needles.”
Lukoff says that Nextdoor played a large role in what went down that night at the Magnolia United Church of Christ. “I wouldn’t say it was organized over Nextdoor, but a lot of discussion and planning around it took place there,” he says.
Representatives of Nextdoor insist it’s a force for good in Seattle.
“What happens is when Nextdoor has been well-adopted, when there are issues affecting our offline world, those issues will be discussed by neighbors on Nextdoor,” says Kelsey Grady, com-munication director for the San Francisco-based site. “Nextdoor is a very democratic platform, open to all verified residents. You have a lot of people coming in and voicing their opinions. We don’t control the conversations.
“We’ve heard that neighborhood meeting attendance has been through the roof; that’s probably a sign that people have been talking about meetings on Nextdoor,” Grady says.
He emphasized Nextdoor’s close relationship with the SPD, and encouraged Seattle Weekly to reach out to police spokesman Sean Whitcomb for this story. As if to confirm that close rela-tionship, Whitcomb then proactively called the Weekly to talk about Nextdoor.
A Nextdoor fan, Whitcomb pushed back on the idea that the site is creating problems that aren’t there. Not all public-safety concerns can be reflected in crime data, he says, and neighbors sharing information about what’s going on on the ground is always valuable to police. “You can have a neighborhood where crime is low and concern is high. We have to do something about
that. You can have neigh-borhoods where crime is high and concern is low. We have to do something about that,” he says.
“Now, people have voiced concern about property crime. How does Nextdoor contribute to that? Nextdoor is really just a social-networking plat-form where neighbors can share experiences, be it this great electrician, this per-son [who] can help you if you need your gutter fixed, or ‘Hey, there are people stealing our deliveries.’ ”
“If they can share con-cerns with our department, that’s a good thing. . . . If we were just a data-driven department and were completely disconnected
[with neighborhood concerns], we truly wouldn’t be doing our job.”
The most measured thoughts on the issue may come from Magnolia’s Lukoff. He says he’s not too interested in a lot of the crime/disorder threads on the site, and sees people seeking out information that confirms their own opinions. But in the end, neighbors are talking to each other, and that’s a good thing, he thinks.
“The main thing is that it facilitates conversa-tions. There are neighborhood blogs, there are e-mail lists, there were things out there already, but never too much conversation. And comment sections on news sites, as you know, they can devolve very quickly.
“It facilitates conversation, but it facilitates all sorts of conversation. I had a positive experience talking to a homeless person on the bus; I posted my story; that produced a lot of positive conversa-tion. It also facilitates conversations where people want to complain and fight with each other . . . A lot of those conversations weren’t taking place, so I guess you take the good with the bad.” E
[email protected] Jaywork contributed to this report.
Social HysteriaNextdoor doubled its Seattle membership in 2015. Is that a problem?BY DANIEL PERSON
CYBER SPACE
news&comment THE STREETS
JOSE
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Off Their FeetPeople are losing what little they have in homeless sweeps. And for what?BY CASEY JAYWORK
Tim Harris has a bone to pick with the mayor and his Human Services director over the city’s clearing-out of unauthorized homeless encampments.
“What I’ve been hearing . . . from homeless folks,” says the advocate, “is that [encampment] sites are being swept without [receiving notice ahead of time], and that things that should have been stored have not been stored.”
Harris’ newspaper, Real Change, has made the same charge in print. Last week’s edition featured the story of Jason Goss, a homeless man and Real Change vendor who was out selling papers when his campsite was cleared. Goss reportedly lost a generator that was inside a tent.
To Harris, this is proof that the city’s ongoing encampment clearings aren’t as humane as adver-tised. “It seems like if anything’s going to rise to the fucking bar of what gets stored,” says Harris, “it would be an electrical generator.”
On paper, the city protocols for storing prop-erty found during an encampment sweep appear strong. Strict inventories are required, anything over $25 is to be saved, and several types of items are to be saved regardless of apparent value: “photos, jewelry, eyeglasses, medicine, crutches, slings, wheelchairs, braces or other similar items, radios, electronics, cameras, bicycles, carts, skate-boards, skates, tents, lanterns, stoves, pots, pans, dishes, and items with names or other contact information.”
Yet it is unclear how many items the city is actually saving, and whether those items that have been saved can be retrieved by their rightful owner.
When we called the phone number listed on flyers left at cleared encampment sites, it went to a voicemail system with no name or information. The city’s website contains a page listing seized items that was last updated during the Nickels administration. When we called city customer service, we were routed through three bewildered operators, the last of them at a police evidence warehouse that apparently has nothing to do with the storage of homeless’ seized possessions.
Even more concerning to advocates, the homeless may be losing their possessions in sweeps for lack of any warning.
Per policy set in 2008, the city is required to post flyers three days ahead of a clearance. However, “encampment” only means sites with three or more tents/structures. That’s only about a quarter of all unpermitted encampments, according to a city estimate from last month. That means that the three-quarters of encamp-ments don’t technically require notice. According to Human Services spokesperson Katherine Jolly, prior notice can also be waived at unpermit-ted encampments “where there is illegal activ-ity, including obstructing a sidewalk such that wheelchairs cannot pass.”
That doesn’t mean that smaller campsites never get a heads-up. They may, or they may not. “The City makes every effort to provide both notice and outreach wherever possible,” Jolly says.
»CONTINUED ON PAGE 11
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This lecture is free and open to the public. Seating will be limited and advanced registration is required. Mr. Osnos will sign books following his talk.
China is in the midst of transition and transformation economically, politically, culturally and internationally. National Book Award recipient Evan Osnos will discuss its upward trajectory as a global superpower and investigate the broad implications accompanying its rise.
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Exposure
SARA
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ANRD Monday marked the Lunar New Year, and was celebrated in the
International District with dances, fireworks, and small offerings (note the head of lettuce in front of the dragon). Festivities marking the beginning of the Year of the Monkey continue all week in Seattle.
Naturally, this kind of flexible guarantee doesn’t satisfy advocates. But it’s not just the details of encampment clearance, not just issues of notice and reclamation, which aggravates them.
“The sweeps, we believe, aren’t actually addressing the identified [public health and safety] concerns,” says Yurij Rudensky of Columbia Legal Services. Columbia’s position is that encampments are shitty—duh—but if the homeless had anywhere better to go, they’d already be there. When the city’s poor-est are figuratively hanging from the edge of a cliff, pushing them further away isn’t helpful. “I’ve been to a number of encampments and talked to people and I’ve witnessed sweeps,” says Rudensky. “What the city’s doing, it’s not actually alleviating [health and safety prob-
lems], because ultimately people have nowhere else to go.”
Columbia and other advocacy organiza-tions have called for the mayor to quit clearing encampments, at least until city leaders and homeless advocates can update the 2008 policy that currently dictates clearance protocol. That hasn’t happened yet, but a roundtable of advo-cates and service providers, including Harris and Rudensky, sat down with several City Council members for three and a half hours on Friday to discuss what is and isn’t working in the city’s current reaction to the homelessness crisis. In that meeting, service providers talked about their projects and asked for more money; a representa-tive of managed tent cities said his organization was close to folding and asked for more money; and Harris said this: “I’ve been doing this work for more than 20 years in Seattle, and I am more hopeful, actually, about how we are dealing with
homelessness than I have ever been. People are pulling in the same direction, we are talking about homelessness as the inequality issue that it is, we’re connecting it to the issue of rising rents.”
But all that good work could be squandered, he said, if roughshod encampment clearings divided the people at the table. “I don’t think anybody has an issue with dealing with encamp-ments that pose legitimate health and safety risks,” said Harris. “That’s kind of a no-brainer. But that’s not all encampments. It’s not even most encampments . . . We should have a public-health approach, and the first principle of a public-health approach is to do no harm.”
Controversy over encampment clearings has reached the city’s legislative branch and escalated tension between the mayor and the Council. Under questioning from Council-members Kshama Sawant and Tim Burgess at
a briefing last month, Human Services direc-tor Catherine Lester acknowledged that the city doesn’t always have enough shelter and/or behavioral health beds for the people it dis-places from encampments. She stressed, though, that the city is “increasingly . . . able to deliver.” At the same time, most cleared campers decline to move into formal homeless shelters, which often require guests to split up from their clos-est companions.
Lisa Herbold, who’s emerged as the Council’s lead on supervising encampment clearances, says she was not aware that the prior-notice rule doesn’t necessarily apply to camps with one or two tents until Seattle Weekly told her. “I think everyone is entitled to advance notice, outreach and access to services, and storage of belongings,” she responded, “regardless [of whether] they are in a camp of fewer than three tents.” E
Off Their Feet »FROM PAGE 9
news&comment
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BY JOHN STANG
Our parks system wants to get ‘entrepreneurial.’ But at what cost?
A Seminal Decision
Kevin Daniels and his bride held their wedding rehearsal dinner at St. Edward Park more than 31 years ago. Joe Marshall married his wife
20 years ago in “The Grotto,” a stone-and-grass alcove that looks as if it had been carved out of the side of a hill within the park.
Both have a longtime spiritual bond with the hilly park surrounding the empty Roman Cath-olic seminary, encircled by woods, picnic spots, and muddy trails. The vibe is gothic surrounded by a forested wilderness, with an invisible sub-urbia lurking behind the trees.
And now Marshall and Daniels are on oppo-site sides of what to do with the four-story, 85-year-old seminary build-ing. Developer Daniels sees it as a spa-oriented destination hotel with a rustic ambience. Attorney and Kenmore resi-dent Marshall sees that vision as sacrilege.
The Archdiocese of Seattle originally owned the 316-acre site along Kenmore’s Lake Washington shore, and built the main semi-nary there in 1931. Due to declining enrollment, the diocese closed the seminary in 1977 and sold the site to the state for $7 million. St. Edward seminary became the state’s St. Edward Park, with eight and a half miles of hiking trails, four miles of mountain-bike trails, parking for 195 cars, and an athletic field. However, the park’s centerpiece, the 90,000-square-foot seminary building, has deteriorated; it needs $14 million to $16 million worth of basic fix-it work before any significant renovation can begin.
Daniels—who has restored historical proper-ties such as Seattle’s Union Station and King Street Station—became interested in develop-ing the seminary when nearby Bastyr University asked him to study the feasibility of expanding its campus into the old building. Bastyr decided to shelve its expansion, but the study gave Dan-iels the idea in 2015 of upgrading the building into a rustic 90-room spa hotel with the semi-nary’s exterior intact. The overall cost, including the $14 million in fixes, would be about $50 million. Daniels’ plan is to buy 10 acres along the shore just north of the park and trade it to the state for a 5.5-acre spot that includes the seminary building.
Some Kenmore residents who hate this idea, arguing that carving out a private retreat from a state park would ruin the ambience, started a petition, now with more than 2,000 signatures, to protest the proposed swap. “This violates the purpose and nature of the property,” Marshall says.
“It’s best not to put [a 5.5-acre private business] in the heart of the park,” says Amy McKendry of Kenmore.
Daniels says the project has a great deal of public support and fits naturally into the park’s character. The seminary’s outward appearance would remain intact.
Daniels’ plan would require the State Parks Commission to approve the land swap, which for now has moved the center of the St. Edward drama from Kenmore to Olympia, where oppo-nents see an effort afoot to “grease the skids” of the deal.
Under current state law, the seven-member state parks commission must vote unanimously to approve a land transfer to private use. How-ever, the Washington Senate Natural Resources
& Parks Committee last week endorsed SB 6377, which would reduce the require-ment to a simple four-vote majority. There’s little doubt what lawmakers have in mind; currently, St. Edward is the only state park property being eyed for a land swap with a private business. This unanim-ity requirement dates back to 1947—and is the only such requirement among the state commissions involved with land deals; others require only a simple majority.
“Unanimous—we can’t find that model for any other government agency. It should be hard to transfer government property, but it shouldn’t have to be unanimous,” testified Mark Brown, one of the seven
state parks commissioners.Budget considerations weigh heavily on
Brown’s support of the bill. The state parks department is largely self-supporting: 77 percent of its budget comes from fees; only 23 percent is provided by state taxes. Thus getting rid of up to $16 million in fix-it costs would be a major sav-ing for a $138 million biennial budget. “We now find ourselves trying to be more entrepreneurial,” Brown told the Senate committee.
But others cautioned lawmakers about over-turning the unanimity requirement. Tom Riggs, president of Parks Local No. 1466 of the Wash-ington Federation of State Employees, says “The high bar was set for a reason.”
While the bill started with bipartisan sup-port, it was passed out of committee on a party-line vote, the committees’ four Republicans vot-ing to recommend that the bill be approved.
Critics have a Plan B and a Plan C if the parks commission gives Daniels a green light. Plan B is possible litigation over whether such a transfer is allowed because federal money was used in 1977 by the state to buy the land for public use.
Plan C is the legally required state environ-mental review of the swap on the 10 acres north of the park and on the seminary site—places full of hills and wetlands. E
REAL ESTATE
St. Edward Seminary.
JOHN
STA
NG
33K FANS & COUNTING!
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comix in the cityThe First Impressionby Ben Nadler
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It happened in Phoenix. On a Friday night in October 2014, Pillar Point had just wrapped up a set opening for Of Montreal at the sold-out Crescent Ballroom. Spirits
were high backstage as the capacity crowd of 550 came down from an energized set filled with songs from the Seattle electronic outfit’s self-titled debut album. As the audience prepared for the psychedelic spectacle of the evening’s head-liner, Of Montreal leader Kevin Barnes sat in Pillar Point’s dressing room, applying his makeup and putting on his wig while chatting with his opening act’s primary member, Scott Reither-man. The two were just getting to know one another; they had been on tour for two weeks with another two weeks to go. That is when it happened.
“It was just a casual conversation,” recalls Reitherman. “He said, ‘What are your plans for the next album? I think it would be cool to work together.’ ”
Unremarkable, yes, but this is where the trajec-tory of Pillar Point changed. Or perhaps it was two days before, when long-time Of Montreal engineer Drew Vandenberg, joining the group
to record a live album during the West Coast leg of its tour, suggested the same: that Reitherman forego recording in Seattle—as he had done for his entire career—and instead spend a few weeks holed up in Athens, Ga., home to Vandenberg and Barnes.
Three months later, Reitherman arrived at Barnes’ home studio with a handful of rushed demos and a hint of apprehension. Not only was Reitherman a long-time fan of Of Mon-treal, but Barnes happened to be one of the most prolific and inventive craftsmen of the indie-pop era, a member of the vaunted Ele-phant 6 collective and the mastermind behind Of Montreal’s 13 full-length albums, almost all of which he produced himself. Reitherman, on the other hand, was an artist at a kind of cre-ative crossroads, neither prolific nor completely sure of himself.
“There were definitely moments when I was showing Kevin, like, a three-chord song or a four-chord thing, and I thought, He doesn’t even sneeze on something like this,” Reitherman recalled while sitting at a Seattle coffee shop a year after his Athens sojourn and just two weeks
after the release of Pillar Point’s second album, Marble Mouth. “Is this going to be interesting at all for him?”
It was Reitherman’s three-chord pop songs that first garnered him attention in 2007 when he self-released Moonbeams, his first album under the moniker Throw Me the Statue, acclaimed for its combination of charmingly lo-fi instrumentation and catchy, insis-tent pop hooks paired with Rei-therman’s vocal melodies, delivered in a reaching tenor. The sound was naïve in a way, the strummy acoustic pop songs delivered over layers of curious sounds, part synthesizer, part thrift-shop. Praise arrived from national media, and Reitherman even flirted with ubiquity when the song “Lolita” earned placement in a long-running TV ad for a national hotel chain.
Follow-up Creaturesque was released by respected indie label Secretly Canadian and met with a positive reception, but Reitherman had already started to move on. While recording
the third Throw Me the Statue album, he found himself drawn more to the drum machines and synthesizers that previously had played a second-ary role in his music.
By the time he had finished the project, Reitherman knew he had created something so different that he could not in good faith release it as a Throw Me the Statue album. Aligning with a difficult breakup and his parents’ divorce, Reitherman decided to separate fully from his musical past. He retired his old songs, adopted the Pillar Point moniker, and, after being picked up by Polyvinyl Records, released a self-titled album filled with synth-forward songs aimed at the dance floor.
The only problem was that Reitherman didn’t really know how to make dance music. Also, he realizes now that he was maybe just too sad to do it right. “That first Pillar Point album was cathartic, but I’d like to make more joyful music,” he says. “The dance element to the songs was something that I thought I had achieved on that album. Only when I toured and started playing shows did I realize that only parts of the record did that to the audience.”
During his six weeks in Athens, Reither-man worked incessantly on achieving this goal. During the day he would work in the studio to build his songs. Taking a cue from another musical hero, Matthew Dear, he decided to almost completely discard that reaching tenor and instead lower his voice, doubling it with duplicate vocals at different pitches. The result is a richer vocal stack that is as much texture as it is lyric, a growl more than a croon. He also refined his sense of rhythm, trading those insistent beats with something more seductive, more encouraging to the reticent dancer.
In the evenings Barnes would stop in for a late-night recording session. The Of Montreal leader had never produced another artist’s record, but according to Reitherman he came at it naturally. He encouraged and challenged Reitherman, and contributed his trademark melodic bass lines and some vocals.
“Kevin has a very specific skill set that I don’t have,” Reitherman says. “He is a fantastic singer and a fantastic bass player, and he favors chord progressions that are a lot more kind of searching and psychedelic than I do. My taste is much more pop, so I thought adding him in could kind of freak out the simplicity of what I do.”
Essentially, Reitherman had stripped away the defining sounds of his earlier band, dis-tilling the rhythmic core of his music then
embellishing it with Barnes’ influ-ence. The result, as Barnes attests,
is exactly what Reitherman was searching for.
“It makes me wanna dress in drag and go to a blue-collar bar,” Barnes recently wrote in a newslet-ter for Polyvinyl, which counts Of
Montreal among its acts. “It almost feels like a greatest-hits album, since all
of the songs could be singles.”If Pillar Point’s first album was a departure
from Throw Me the Statue, Marble Mouth is a postcard from the edge, the music almost entirely unrecognizable. It is a radical, and welcome, shift. And, as Reitherman sees it, a permanent one.
“The first Pillar Point record was a pretty tran-sitional thing,” Reitherman says now. “This one feels, for me, like a full-on identity lock.” E
FILM 19 DANCE21 FOOD22 PICKLIST23
arts&culture
MEGUM
I SHAUNA ARAI
Pivot PointHow Scott Reitherman found his new sound with Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes.
BY MARK BAUMGARTEN
Pillar PointChop Suey,
1325 E. Madison St., chopsuey.com. $10.
21 and over. 8 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 11.
Reitherman says he wants to make “joyful music.”
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Michael Moore is a nudger. Rarely content to let facts speak for themselves, he can’t resist sticking his elbow in your side as he makes
his points. One reason Moore was at his most effective with his roaring 2004 polemic Fahren-heit 9/11 was that he kept himself offscreen for much of the film’s furious second half. In general, though, his weakness for broad-brush tactics and heavy-handed jokery hampers his documentary portraits of America gone wrong. Leaving well enough alone isn’t in his makeup—but then he wouldn’t be Michael Moore if he could leave well enough alone.
Moore’s latest is Where to Invade Next, a misleadingly titled look overseas. His thesis here is that if America could embrace the social-democratic practices of European nations (ideas that Moore argues originated in the U.S.), our people might be better off. You could argue that Moore’s approach cherry-picks good things and ignores problematic ones; this film mostly skirts the European migrant crisis, for instance. But on the other hand, why not cherry-pick? At least it’s a start to the conversa-tion, and Moore is nothing if not a crusader—he wants to change the world, not objectively observe it.
So he begins in Italy, in one of the film’s most charming episodes. I’m not sure anyone would hold up Italy as an example of societal competence; their cars may be well-oiled machines, but their governments have been prone to breakdowns. Still, Moore’s subject is human happiness. And the people he interviews look awfully happy: workers with two-hour lunches, regular middle-class folks with many weeks of paid vacation (and paid maternity leave), CEOs with generous attitudes. And everybody dresses so well.
To informed viewers, these discoveries will not be new (even though Moore does his best to act amazed at each revelation of European largesse). But I always suspect that Moore’s real target is not his fan base, but people who may not be politically minded or otherwise paying attention. To them, it
may very well come as a surprise that Europeans who live in those nightmarish socialist democra-cies we hear about are drawing their full salaries while spending a couple of weeks every summer in the south of France and an annual winter holi-day in Spain. Meanwhile, Americans are pitifully grateful for two weeks of paid vacation—per-haps a third if we work hard enough and long enough—although we probably couldn’t afford to go anywhere because of our medical bills.
One of the film’s funniest sequences—and Where to Invade Next is frequently funny—has Moore showing French schoolchildren photos of the kinds of lunches served to American kids. Quelle horreur, as you would expect. He travels to Finland to explore that country’s much-vaunted educational system, which excludes homework. (All right, that was a surprise to me. It makes you wonder if we’re enamored of homework as an educational method just because it’s always been
around, a vestige of the Puritan work ethic.)Among Moore’s dumber tactics is the repeated gesture of planting an American flag in his interview subjects’ countries, “claiming” the territory on behalf of the United States. This half-baked idea feels like something left over from an
early version of the concept, and it gives the movie its oddly inflamma-
tory title. Moore has always been canny about pacing
his films so they build to a strong climax, and this one makes Iceland its final stop. The choice allows Moore to build a case about a country that has recovered from the financial shocks of the past decade, elected a stand-up comedian as mayor of Reykjavik, put some of its weasel bankers in jail, and installed women in the top echelons of government. By this point, nobody will think Michael Moore is just talking about Iceland or any other European nation. His sub-ject is clearly America, and Moore remains both agitator and schoolmarm on the subject. Where to Invade Next is undeniably entertaining, but make no mistake—we’ve been given homework. E
Where to Invade Next places Michael Moore on foreign shores in search of a better America.BY ROBERT HORTON
Planting a Flag
reviews FILM
A crusader’s crush on Europe.
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DANCE
LINDSAY THOM
AS
Shakespeare is catnip for choreogra-phers, and Roméo et Juliette has been the biggest draw—more than 50 balletic versions of the tale have
been made, most of them set to Sergei Proko-fiev’s iconic 1935 score. Pacific Northwest Ballet has one of the more arresting productions, by Jean-Christophe Maillot, who has stripped the story down to its essential elements. Instead of an elaborate staging full of Renaissance details, the sets and costumes are quite spare, leaving the focus on the characters and their headlong tumble into love and death.
Yet it is Maillot’s pacing that truly sets his vision of this classic tale apart. The choreogra-pher incorporates some techniques from film, freezing certain moments and running others in slow motion, so that we notice relationships and follow actions more clearly. This contrasts with a general sense of gathering momentum as the work develops; groups rush on- and offstage rather than at the stately pace we might expect from classic theater. Assisting these cinematic devices, the character of the Friar acts as a kind of director, starting and stopping the action but ulti-mately unable to change the script.
That script, of course, is well known, as are its characters. Still, Maillot’s production takes nothing for granted. With the set pared down to a collection of walls that move in and out to suggest different locations and costumes that are equally restrained, it really is on the dancers to show us not only who they are but to illuminate their whole world. Juliette is a hoyden and Roméo a fickle young man—in this version love really is a coup de foudre, a lightning bolt that turns their world inside out. Maillot’s Juliette is more rambunctious than shy, while Roméo is more of a dreamer. Their balcony scene (with a simple ramp standing in for the architectural detail) is all rush-ing and jumping, like kids at recess on the play-ground. They literally squirm with delight.
Juliette was a transformational role for Noelani Pantastico when the company first performed this version in 2008. She went on to join the choreog-rapher’s company in Monte Carlo, but now she’s returned to PNB and brings even more depth
to her performance. Her inner narrative is much clearer than it was in the past—we see the deci-sions being made. Her Roméo, James Moore, has also thought through his choices, which, here too, makes the character’s impulsive nature read even more clearly. Lesley Rausch and Jerome Tisser-and, also performing the main roles, are newer to their parts and are still making connections, but their fundamental relationship is strong.
Both Ezra Thomson and Jonathan Porretta are returning as well to the role of Mercutio. The mis-chievous friend of Roméo is in almost perpetual motion, flirting, teasing, and fighting, and the temptation to just blast through the choreography must be strong. But both dancers realize that the
audience needs moments of stillness for the action to really register. Thomson does
an excellent job with that timing, but Porretta is really a master of phrasing here. He’s returning to performing after a long rehab, and it is a real pleasure to see him onstage again. Kyle Davis and Benjamin Griffiths are sharing Benvolio. Griffiths’
innate classicism gives him a slightly sunnier quality, which contrasts with
Porretta’s aggressive Mercutio, while Davis’ Benvolio has more edge on his own.
Most of the Nurse’s role is played for laughs. It’s full of Rube Goldberg-like sequences in which she caroms from one disaster to the next, stopping for a spit-take when Juliette opens her dressing gown to prove she’s a woman with breasts, or flirting with all the men in the marketplace. But when she comes into Juliette’s bedchamber to find her dead, the twitchy timing that made us laugh earlier reads as denial; when she realizes her charge is indeed dead, we get the tragic version of the earlier double-take. Margaret Mullin finesses these shifts very deftly.
The Friar is a pivotal role in this version of the ballet, and Miles Pertl, new to the company this year, is handling that challenge with aplomb. He spends a considerable amount of stage time alone, yet is able to give us a sense of what the character is thinking and how he hopes to shift the situa-tion in a peaceful direction. That he cannot is of course what makes this a tragedy, but the produc-tion as a whole is a triumph for the company. E
In Roméo et Juliette, Pacific Northwest Ballet illuminates a well-worn tale.
Triumphant Tragedy
BY SANDRA KURTZ
McCaw Hall321 Mercer St., 441-2424,
pnb.org. $30–$187. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.,
Feb. 11–Sat., Feb. 13, 1 & 6:30 p.m. Sun., Feb. 14.
Making a connection: Rausch and Tisserand.
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America has always had a complicated relation-ship with home distilleries. For some time they
embodied rebellion and revolt, yet moonshiners and makers of bathtub gin are more a subject for mirth these days than admiration. That’s a shame, as we owe much of our inspirituous legacy to the countless pioneering families who turned just about everything they could get their hands on into booze. They, of course, have been forgotten; now we associate bourbon with brand names and not the Scottish and Irish immigrants who invented it. Driven firmly underground by Prohibition and crushed under the weight of the commer-cial distilling industry, home distilling is a hobby few have dared to take on—even in the wake of the recent massively suc-cessful home-brew movement.
Indeed, while Washington’s craft-beer scene was largely fueled by home brewers looking to scale up and sell their wares, craft distilling has some built-in limits. A few distillers have experience working in larger distilleries or overseas, but for many it’s been a process of trial and error, in part because both state and federal law make home distilling difficult from a legal standpoint.
So imagine my surprise when I recently read a book aimed squarely at would-be home distillers—and from a local author to boot. Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home approaches the subject with an earnestness and forthrightness that seems to spring from author Victoria Miller’s background. She’s not a distiller who sought to bring her hobby home, but an individualist living largely off the grid on her farm in Sequim. Her interest is almost charmingly direct: find a way to legally make liquor more cheaply than she can buy it in a store, and make it taste good.
That no-nonsense approach shows through as she talks about building her own column still the way most of us would recount putting together a particularly simple Ikea bookshelf. I doubt teaching yourself to solder copper is quite as easy as she makes it seem.
The value of Miller’s book is twofold. First, it’s impressively comprehensive, covering everything from the permitting process you’ll need to go through to make your home setup legal (and safe) to easy-to-follow recipes to make your own versions of spirits like gin, vodka, whiskey, and rum. Throughout, she’s careful to point out the risks of ignoring either the law (she’s adamant you not try to build a stove-top still) or common sense (yes, you should carefully monitor the temperature of your distillates).
While few of us in Seattle will have the space for a home distillery, the economic argument Miller posits about making your own booze is hard to coun-ter. It’s true that at the moment, the state and federal government don’t really view home production as something distinct from opening a small craft distill-ery, but Miller advocates for laws that would allow a return to the independence that our predecessors enjoyed. Craft distilling might not be a paean to the artistic merit of homemade liquor, but it’s hard not to admire Miller’s ambitious spirit. E
By Zach Geballe
DIY Distilling
BARCODE
Mollusk’s curry chicken wings.
FOOD &DRINK
Perfectly Peculiar
BY NICOLE SPRINKLE
Seattle’s most idiosyncratic brewer moves South Lake Union with a new brewpub and restaurant.
Cody Morris made a name for himself in the obscurity of SoDo, where his Epic Ales and its attached Gastro-pod restaurant established him as
the city’s quirkiest, most cerebral brewer. When he decided to open Mollusk in the much-less-obscure Amazon bro-hood of South Lake Union, the initial plans were to keep both locales in business, using Epic for his more experimental brews and the new Mollusk for more main-stream concoctions. In the end, Morris opted to close Epic and Gastropod, but he promises to keep pushing the envelope in the new digs.
All indications seem to be that Morris and chef Travis Kukull are making good on that promise and bringing their irreverent spirit to Mollusk. Though the seven-barrel brew-house didn’t have the squid-ink pilsner I’d heard about last year, the beer menu did include standouts such as a lager brewed with mashed fruitcake, a light but complex rye cream ale with a lingering citrus note, and a puckering blueberry sour ale—all of which arrived on a tasting flight that includes six 4-ounce beers of your choice.
As for food, Mollusk is still pretty impossible to pin down. While you’ll find the majority of inspiration from Southeast Asia, it’s by no means a traditional take. The curry chicken wings with “soft herbs,” citrus, Nutella, and gado gado dress-ing are a must-try small plate. Gado gado is a signature Indonesian dish defined more by its peanut sauce than by the actual salad it dresses—typically blanched vegetables like jack fruit, string beans and corn, hard-boiled eggs, fried tofu, and tempeh and rice in a banana leaf. The sauce’s flavor is unlike any other, not as sweet and peanut-forward as a satay sauce, and the addition of Nutella brings a whimsical note. I wanted to lick it right off the wings.
A jerky salad is an inspired coalition of house pork jerky, pickled onions, peanuts, and pine-apple jerky over arugula, with a light garlic ranch dressing—and sweet and savory are in optimal balance. It’s worth pointing out that the pork jerky is, surprisingly, quite mild—nothing like
the extreme smoked flavor you find in many versions, which is indicative of the food overall at Mollusk. While the chef uses unusual Asian ingredients, the flavors are never overly bold, but played with a delicate hand that allows a dish’s main ingredient—be it a protein or vegetable—to reveal itself.
Besides the curry, we ordered one main dish: the beef-cheek baklava, essentially an open-faced beef Wellington made with cheeks instead of a filet. While the phyllo dough is gleefully flaky and buttery, and the braised red cabbage, gem raisins, and purple daikon a tangy counterpoint, the miss on this dish was the undersalting of the meat. When we asked for salt, our server
inquired helpfully (not haughtily) which dish was underseasoned and quickly
brought us a tiny bowl of salt—which made the moist meat as deli-cious as we’d hoped.
Dessert offers quite a few tan-talizing options, but we decided to try the housemade ice cream–after
I embarrassingly asked our server “How big is the ding dong?” (I’ll try
that another time.) The mushroom foie gras ice cream was nearly as good as the server promised, the chunks of mushroom somehow managing to taste like, well, mushrooms, yet still marry with sweet vanilla ice cream, while the foie gras got lost in the tofu caramel topping. The other scoop, bay leaf ginger, was my favorite. You know how when you make a pot of something with bay leaf, you worry about fishing it out lest someone accidentally eat it? Well, this ice cream is like getting permission to chomp into it—without the tingling taste-bud-kill.
The playfulness of the food and the serious-ness of the beer are represented well in an inte-rior that is both rustic and funky. And of course there’s the piece de resistance: the hulking brew tanks behind a glass wall, which serve as a not-so-subtle reminder of Morris’ true calling. It’s hard to say what devotees will think of the per-haps-tamer food and beer here, but there’s surely plenty of peculiarity for first-timers to savor. E
COURTESY OF MOLLUSK
Mollusk803 Dexter Ave. N.,
403-1228, molluskseattle.com
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FEBRUARY 10
Wednesday Tables & Chairs, Curated by Ing Anything associated with Seattle’s oddball jazz collective/label Tables & Chairs is guar-anteed to be the opposite of boring. Tonight, as part of the group’s regular Vermillion night, local “lullaby rock” singer/songwriter Ings will curate a very visual night of music, starting with the debut of her music video. Following her will be William Hayes, guitar-ist of experimental/industrial group Newax-eyes, performing a score he wrote to “micro-scopic footage of organisms.” Rounding out the evening is Netcat, an improv group with an incredibly strange setup, including cello, drums, a number of computers, and some-thing called a “chango,” a synthesizer com-puter program that emits sounds based on the intensity of the light received by a camera. Remember what I said about this being the opposite of boring? Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave., 709-9797, vermillion seattle.com. $5–$10. 21 and over. 8–11 p.m. KELTON SEARS
FEBRUARY 11
Thursday Chat RoomThe Internet. You’re probably on it RIGHT NOW. Local artist Minh Nguyen’s new quar-terly forum Chat Room hopes to get audiences thinking deeply about the impact the web is having on art and artists in the 21st century. Yes that means memes and GIFs and Tum-blr, but also more rigorous topics like getting paid. Tonight’s debut will feature a number
of digital artists and researchers exchanging thoughts about “value, labor, and the quantifi-cation of art work,” which is becoming increas-ingly murky for artists in the age of one-click reposts, shares, free streams, and Creative Commons. And no, you can’t illegally down-load tickets to this, you jerk. Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 329-2629, chatroom.vision. $8. All ages. 8 p.m. KELTON SEARS
FEBRUARY 12
FridayJulian SchwarzAfter studying cello privately as a Lakeside student and then at L.A.’s Colburn School, Julian Schwarz is finishing a master’s degree at Juilliard—but not before this week’s home-coming tour, which encompasses several performances and master classes throughout the Puget Sound area. Prior to weekend recit-als in Shoreline and Tacoma (Beethoven, Schumann, Poulenc, and more with pianist Marika Bournaki), a Friday concert reunites him with the Lake Union Chamber Orchestra, which—taking up the family business from his father Gerard—he served as assistant conduc-tor while in high school. With LUCO he’ll play Édouard Lalo’s suavely dramatic Concerto in D minor (1876), all about lyrical intensity and rich tone—parts of it sound like a baritone opera aria transcribed for cello. The rest of the year takes Schwarz as concert soloist and chamber musician to Mexico, Nova Scotia, Chicago, and coast to coast. See julianschwarz.com for full details. LUCO: Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., luco.org. $13–$18. 7:30 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT
FEBRUARY 13
Saturday King It’s been five years since Los Angeles trio King first gained notice with a three-song EP of mid-tempo, synth-skinned R&B. Prince, an early champion, even took the trio—Anita Bias and twin sisters Amber and Paris Strother—on tour. Yet aside from a few guest appearances and one-off songs, King had been silent until this month’s release of We Are King, an album that picks up where the EP left off so long ago, delivering an ornate and seductive col-lection of love songs that would fit perfectly alongside those of Babyface, Erykah Badu, and Luther Vandross. This isn’t a cynical take on an outdated sound; it is an earnest continuation, executed by three women who reportedly do all their own writing, playing, recording, and bookkeeping. The only thing more surprising than the group’s freshly reminiscent sound is the fact that since their EP was released, no one has succeeded in copying it. Then again, it’s difficult to imagine anyone doing it better. With Sassyblack. Barboza, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9442, thebarboza.com. $13. 21 and over. 7 p.m. MARK BAUMGARTEN
DræmhouseEvocative of Serge Gainsbourg’s cosmopolitan wispiness and Steely Dan’s mellow ’70s simmer, local four-piece Draemhouse (born of the ashes of Sub Pop psych group Rose Windows) is all about that sensual slow burn. Only Friends, the band’s new EP, delivers on the promise of its previous single, the earwormy “Woundlicker,” with four songs that assert songwriter Chris
Cheveyo’s mature chops, buoyed by the bounc-ing bass and dreamy vocals of Emma Danner. It’s going to be extra dræmy tonight as lilting Dallas shoegazers Season of Strangers open things up. With the Good Wives. Central Saloon, 207 First Ave. S., 622-0209, central saloon.com. $5 adv./$8 DOS. 21 and over. 9 p.m. KELTON SEARS
Chop ShopChop Shop is the smartypants brainchild of local choreographer Eva Stone—a very mixed repertory show with works from local and inter-national artists. It’s a chance to catch up with multiple artists from our own territory, and get a look at other dances from other places. The world of modern dance is as varied as the artists themselves, and this program is always stuffed with beautiful things—like a big Valentine’s Day gift of dance. (Also 3 p.m. Sun., Feb. 14.) Meydenbauer Center, 11100 N.E. Sixth St., Bellevue, 425-637-1020, chopshopdance.org. $23–$28. 7:30 p.m. SANDRA KURTZ
FEBRUARY 14
Sunday Valentine’s Day With Chastity BeltOne of the first songs that got me hooked on Seattle’s Chastity Belt was 2012’s “God Damn.” The tune, equal parts drunk and dreamy, perfectly soundtracks that feeling when you spot a hottie at a party and go slack-jawed, briefly imagine a life together, then return to your initial inebriated lusting, in that order. “God damn/That boy is hot damn/OH! Ohh-hhh . . . .” front woman Julia Shapiro howls. “I think he’s the one for me/He’s better than a Nic Cage movie/He’s gold.” “God Damn” is just one of many Chastity Belt songs featuring lyr-ics begging to be printed on novelty Valentine’s Day cards, including “Cool Slut” (“Ladies it’s okay to be slutty”) and James Dean (“This is sex/This is war/This is me fucking you on the dance floor”). Instead of buying your significant other a cheesy teddy bear, buy them tickets to Chastity Belt tonight for some guaranteed swoons. With Lemolo, Iji. Nectar Lounge, 412 N. 36th St., 632-2020, nectarlounge.com. $12 adv./$15 DOS. 21 and over. 8 p.m. KELTON SEARS
FEBRUARY 16
Tuesday Matt RuffThere are a million ways to talk about race in this country, but we could always use another. Enter Matt Ruff, the acclaimed Seattle novelist who will be celebrating the release of his latest, Lovecraft Country, in a sit-down interview with Paul Constant of The Seattle Review of Books tonight. Set in mid-century America, Ruff ’s story follows a young Army veteran named Atticus Turner as he searches for his missing father alongside his uncle, who happens to be the author of The Safe Negro Travel Guide. Along the way, Ruff deftly pairs the horrors of racism with those found in the work of H.P. Lovecraft as Turner finds his father impris- oned by the malevolent Order of the Ancient Dawn. Ruff ’s revelation is both sobering and hopeful, and his writing is irresistible. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m. MARK BAUMGARTEN
calendarPICKLIST
Martha Hart takes the spotlight at this weekend’s Chop Shop performances.
REX TRANTER
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The EMP Sound Off! underage battle of the bands is entering its 15th year, and with those years comes a brief history of the modern Seattle scene. Not every band who has won has made it out in one piece, but many have had a lasting influence beyond their existence. Here’s what’s happened to some of the hall-of-famers since their Sound Off! wins. Maybe play Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” while you read it. Really whatever gets you super-nostalgic. 2002: Aaron Richner and the Blues DriversConsidering how indebted rock is to the blues, it feels appropriate that eastern Washington’s Aaron Rich-ner and the Blues Drivers took home the first Sound Off! title. But sometime over the past 14 years, the teens grew up and the band dissolved. Richner is still playing the blues, however, putting a Christian-rock twist on it with his group Chariot Sky.
2004: Mon FrereMon Frere was the first female-fronted act to win Sound Off!, propelling itself with a “death-pop” sound. The band released a kick-ass album with an even more kick-ass name, Blood, Sweat & Swords, in 2006 before calling it quits a year later. Front woman Nouela Johnston ventured off solo under the moniker People Eating People before ditching the title and performing under her own name.
2006: The Lonely ForestThe Lonely Forest may be the most successful act to come out of the competition. Front man John Van Deusen and co. gained local notoriety with their sprawling epic We Sing the Body Electric, embracing indie-rock maximalism. The band’s knack for hooks and experimentation caught the ear of Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, who signed the band to his Trans- imprint and produced its 2011 mainstream rock album Arrows. In 2014, the band played its final show at Bumbershoot—a fitting end seeing as how Sound Off! Winners are typically given a spot on the festival’s lineup.
2009: Dyno JamzThough hip-hop acts had been performing in Sound Off! since the competition’s first few years, Dyno Jamz was the first to take home the title. Zac “Turtle T” Millan fronted the jazz group with his fresh flow and palpable charisma. The band split in 2012, and Turtle T went on to release solo mate-rial before joining rap crew Nu Era. Keyboardist Clarke Reid currently plays with Chilean outfit the Cumbieros, and drummer Saba Samaker has cre-ated drum and horn arrangements for artists like Paolo Escobar. E
PICK LISTSOUND OFFWHERE ARE THEY NOW?
BY DUSTY HENRY
Looking back on the fates of some memorable Sound Off! winners.
COUR
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OF
THE
ARTI
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The Lonely Forest
(2/10) Seattle Arts and Lectures:Amber Tamblyn
Feat. Bonnie Tamblyn
(2/10) Courtney WhiteLow-Cost
Climate Change Solutions
(2/11) The Art of Alzheimer’s:‘His Neighbor Phil’
Film Screening
(2/11) Don GlicksteinStopping a War That Won’t End
(2/12) Lake Union Civic OrchestraHigdon, Lalo, Beethoven
(2/14) Valentine’s Day ConcertGlobal Rhythms:
Les Chauds Lapins
(2/17) Jeb WymanThe Invisible Scars of
‘Ordinary Soldiers’
(2/18) Baz DreisingerRethinking the
Global Prison System
(2/18) Ignite Seattle 29
(2/20-21) Sounds True: Rick Hanson
‘Hardwiring Happiness’2-Day Workshop
(2/21) Short Stories LiveFiction, From Mother to Son
(2/22) John Allen PaulosInterpreting Life with Mathematics
(2/23) Diane Rehm with Katy Sewall
‘On My Own’
(2/24) Andrew Faas Recognizing, Eliminating
Workplace Bullies
(2/24) Jon Krakauer with Ross Reynolds
The Crossroads of Campus Rape,
the Justice System
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SEATTLE WEEKLY PRESENTS
SUN, FEBRUARY 10 th
JOSHUA DAVIS 8 PM - $20THE VOICE! FINALIST
SAT, FEBRUARY 20 th
Up & Coming
QUASISALLY TIMMS (OF THE MEKONS)
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NITE WAVEDJ BABY VAN BEEZLY
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LOSTON HARRIS TRIOWED, FEB 10Loston is doing his part to continue a legacy by blending traditional jazz, gospel and blues with his own unique vocal and piano stylings.
KURT ELLINGTHURS, FEB 18 - SUN, FEB 21‘Standout male jazz vocalist of ourtime.’ - NY Times
SONNY FORTUNETUES, FEB 16 - WED, FEB 17When critics speak of Sonny Fortune, names like Coltrane, Cannonball, and Parker are mentioned. Lucky for us, this sensational multi-reed player is still here and blowing hard!
MINDI ABAIR AND THE BONESHAKERSTHURS, FEB 11 - SUN, FEB 14Celebrate a special Valentine’s evening!Perennial favorite - Mindi brings her own special blend of saxophone soul, rock, pop, and contemporary jazz - on tour in support of her latest release, Live in Seattle!
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In 1993, I was just getting into pot. One blazing afternoon I was sitting in my living room in downtown Las Vegas, sweating, bored, when there was a knock on the door.
My good friend Charlie, whom I had not seen in six months, was standing on my doorstep with a shit-eating grin.
“Dude! I just bought a 10-foot bong,” he exclaimed. “You gotta come over and try it out.” Well, we all know how that turned out; two hours later I was paralyzed on his couch, trying to figure out how to deal with the flesh spiders at the ends of my arms and wondering why everyone sounded like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon.
In short, I had gotten way, way too high.It happens. It’s a realistic side effect of exploring your relationship with a substance and what your personal limits are. And rather than pretending that people don’t experiment with drugs or that people don’t make mistakes when estimating their own tolerance (I don’t know a single person who hasn’t had a hangover), I’d rather have an open conversation on what to do when you’ve had a bit too much.
If you are not a seasoned smoker, just one or two puffs of today’s superstrains can knock you off your feet. And even veteran tokers are being taken aback by the strength of dabs, which are akin to smoking a cannabis essential oil. So what to do when you find yourself gobsmacked? In my many years as a smoker—and not, let’s be clear, a health-care professional—I have tested a few techniques to handle getting way too high, and here are a few.
Often, the occurrence of feeling “too high” is a fleeting moment that just feels like it lasts forever. You inhale and for whatever reason, that toke is much stronger than the others. Maybe you inhale more deeply, maybe it’s a bigger amount, maybe someone you’re smoking with shares some par-ticularly potent flowers. All of a sudden you’re on a rocketship to Mars. This is usually accompanied by a head rush, maybe some dizziness, and some pretty deep thoughts. If you haven’t experienced this before, it can be scary. It’s similar to what you might think people who like dubstep feel when the bass drops.
First take a moment to slow down and breathe deeply a few times. Stay calm. This has happened to lots of people. If you feel dizzy at all, sit down. If you are already sitting, lie down on your side. If you’re with peoplem let them
know what you’re experiencing so they can help you if you need it. While you’re sitting or lying down, gently stretch out your body. After a few minutes, if you’re feeling better, slowly sit or stand. Drink some water. Drink some more. You will probably feel yourself “coming down” at this point, but you will still be pretty stoned, and that’s going to last awhile. Just take it slow and check in with yourself, no sudden moves. For the novice smoker, I humbly suggest that
you end your smoking session at this point to allow yourself to adjust; for the pro, give it a half hour or so before you jump back in the pool.
If you are still way too stoned, eat some food—the earthier the better. Those of the magickal persuasion would call these “grounding foods.” Potatoes, cabbage, bread, onions, beans, kale, tempeh. If you eat meat, make it beef. Give yourself about an hour to digest and mellow out.
DO NOT DRIVE. At all. Really. Please, with a nug on top. Take a cab. Take the bus. Ask a friend. But seriously, don’t be a dick. Do not drive if you could describe yourself as “too high” in the past eight hours.
I have never personally been so high on can-nabis that I felt I needed a health-care profes-sional, but by all means if the above suggestions have not brought you safely back to Earth, seek their advice ASAP.
Lastly, I’d like to impart a bit of wisdom from dear old Mom. When I began to experiment with cannabis, she told me, “When things start to get a little too weird, remember, you’re high. Meaning a) whatever you’re thinking or feeling is going to change in a while, and b) it will all wear off eventually.” In other words, don’t take anything too seriously. Just let the strangeness of life entertain you. This profound mental shift has jogged me out of funky mental trips several times into a headspace where I could simply witness the surreal beauty of reality.
Here’s to happy and healthy toking. [email protected]
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REPORTER The Vidette in Montesa- no, Wash., has an open- ing for a full-time report- er. We value enterprise and reporters who dig. We’re looking for some- one to produce clear, brightly written stories relevant to real people reading us in print, on our website and in social media with a heavy em- phasis on sports. Ability to take photos is a plus, as is familiarity with so- cial media. Montesano is near the Washington Coast, an hour from the Olympic Rain Forest and two hours from Seattle. Benefits include, but are not limited to paid vaca- tion, sick and holidays, medical, dental and life insurance, and a 401(K) plan with company match. Send a cover let- ter, resume and writing samples to: ca- reers@soundpublish- ing.com for immediate consideration. The Mon- tesano Vidette is part of Sound Publishing; West- ern Washington’s largest community news or- ganization. EOE
Tree Professionals WantedLooking for Experienced Climber to performing Residential Tree Trimming, Pruning & Removal work. Full Time- Year Round, No Lay- offs Day rate DOE, Incentives, Medical & Voluntary DentalMust have climbing gear, vehicle & DL Email work experience to [email protected] ext. 3434
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Temporary, Temporary-to-Hire & Direct HireDo you have administrative experience? We place:
• Receptionists
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EmploymentGeneral
Multi-Media Advertising ConsultantPuget Sound Region,
WADo you have a proven track record of success in sales and enjoy man- aging your own territory?Are you competitive and thrive in an energetic en- vironment? Do you de- sire to work for a compa- ny that offers uncapped earning opportunities?Are you interested in a fast paced, creative at- mosphere where you can use your sales ex- pertise to provide con- sultative print and digital solutions? If you an- swered YES then you need to join the largest community news or- ganization in Washing- ton. The Daily Herald/La Raza is looking for a candidate who is self- motivated, results-driv- en, and interested in a multi-media sales ca- reer. This position will be responsible for print and digital advertising sales to an exciting group of clients from Bellingham to Tacoma. The suc- cessful candidate will be engaging and goal oriented, with good or- ganizational skills and will have the ability to grow and maintain strong business relation- ships through consulta- tive sales and excellent customer service. Every day will be a new adven- ture! You can be an inte- gral part of our top-notch sales team; helping local business partners suc- ceed in their in print or online branding, market- ing and advertising strategies. Professional sales experience neces- sary; media experience is a definite asset but not mandatory. If you have these skills, and enjoy playing a pro-active part in helping your clients achieve business suc- cess, please email your resume and cover letter to: hreast@soundpu- blishing.com ATTN: LARAZA in the subject line. We offer a competi- tive compensation (Base plus Commission) and benefits package includ- ing health insurance, paid time off (vacation, sick, and holidays), and 401K (currently with an employer match.) Sound Publishing is an Equal Opportunity Em- ployee (EOE) and strongly supports diver- sity in the workplace. Visit our website to learn more about us!www.soundpublishing.com
@weeklyevents
EmploymentGeneral
The YWCA Seattle|King|Snohomish
seeks a
FAMILY HOMELESS- NESS PREVENTION
ADVOCATEThis position works closely with the King County Housing Au- thority Section 8 Pro- gram to identify and en- gage with previously homeless families to as- sist them in obtaining and retaining permanent affordable housing. This position will be expected to respond to crisis situa- tions which could result in loss of permanent housing if not resolved. The FHP program pro- vides services in King County outside Seattle. As an equal opportunity employer, we highly en- courage people of color to apply. Full-time $16.35 / hr, 35-40hrs / wk.
Respond to [email protected]
Details @ www.ywcaworks.org
EmploymentTransportation/Drivers
DRIVERSPremier Transportation is seeking Tractor-Trailer Drivers for newly added dedicated runs making store deliveries Monday- Friday in WA, OR, ID. MUST have a Class-A CDL and 2 years tractor- trailer driving experi- ence.• Home on a daily basis• $.41 per mile plus
stop off and unload- ing pay
• $200/day minimum pay
• Health & prescription insurance
• Family dental, life, disability insurance
• Company match 401K, Vacation & holiday pay
• $1,000 longevity bonus after each year• Assigned trucks • Direct deposit
For application informa- tion, call Paul Proctor at
866-223-8050.or visit
www.premiertransportation.com
EOE
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