Jeremy

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• Posted The Year of Magical Thinking Tries to Make Art Out of Grief to Seattlest
  "Inadvertently topical" is perhaps the best way to describe The Year of Magical Thinking, at Intiman Theatre through Sept. 20 (tix $40-$55). Joan Didion's own adaptation of her award-winning 2005 memoir of the same title, the one-woman show follows Didion's struggles with grief following the death of her novelist husband John Gregory Dunne in 2003, which coincided with the beginning of the long, catastrophic series of illnesses that eventually claimed her daughter's life the next year. But playing against the backdrop of the ongoing national debate over health care reform, during the show we kept coming back to the--again no doubt inadvertent--lie that is the throughline of the play, and one of the first things Judith Roberts, the marvelous actress who plays Didion, says at the opening: "This will happen to you."
• Posted Can't Miss It: Thursday to Seattlest
  NUCLEAR WASTELANDS: And they're in Washington! Tonight is your last chance to see lauded local doc Arid Lands, winner of the Best Film award at the 2008 Local Sightings Festival. The film explores the economic, environmental, and social impacts of, well, Hanford, the superfund site to end all superfund sites, replete with leaking nuclear waste containers, buried train cars full of radioactive animal poo, and countless other horrors of the nuclear era.
• Posted Binge & Purge: Jessie Smith's Dead Bird Double Feature to Seattlest
  Jessie Smith doesn't fuck around. About two-thirds of the way through Thrashoholic, her endurance piece/spelunking expedition into the psychology of binge drinking, she gives up on interpreting her subject through dance and just pours herself five big shots of Maker's Mark, which she takes in short, painful succession. And lest you think she might be faking, despite breaking the wax seal of the bottle onstage, the smell of what she pukes up (at least the night we saw it, though that outcome seems pretty inevitable) will prove you wrong.
• Posted The Purrs' CD Release Party Sat. at the Sunset to Seattlest
  Amused, Confused, & More Bad News, the third (or fourth, depending on how you look at it) studio album from local post-psych outfit The Purrs, comes across as guardedly autobiographical. Amidst the jangly guitar rock and fuzzed-out riffs, you can read the album as a document of the band's struggles since their 2005 debut The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. With songs like "Loose Talk" and "Taste of Monday" garnering regular play on KEXP, the self-released album did about as well as they could have hoped for. They signed to a local label, and things were looking good. Then, well, not much happened.
• Posted Can't Miss It: Thursday to Seattlest
  WHAT WE NEED: Coffee. Like, right now. These events today don't make any sense, and writing this is proving unusually difficult. And, of course, there's no coffee in the cupboard. Also, we don't live anywhere near a Macrina Bakery. They turn 16 today, and to celebrate you get a free coffee if you buy bread. But bread we do have. It's the coffee we're out of. All this is hard.