"The Passion/Aggression of the Christ" Ian Gerrad Sometimes we all have trouble with forgiveness.......

Friday's Vote at the General Assembly. Photo by Joseph Williams, courtesy of the PC(USA). Yesterday, one of the largest mainline Protestant Christian denominations--the Presbyterian Church (USA)--voted at their General Assembly to end the ban on ordination of gays and lesbians. The vote was 54% to 46%, an impressive margin for a denomination that has been roiled by bitter conflict over this issue for a solid thirty years. Technically worded, the vote dropped the rule......

10 out of 10 Pro Bowl voters agree--the Seahawks have more talent on defense than on offense. From 2002-2004, the Hawks didn't send a single defense-er to the Pro Bowl. In 2005, rookie linebacker Lofa Tatupu went. Last year, Julian Peterson joined him. But this year, fully 36.36% of the Hawks' starting defense are Pro Bowl starters, as Patrick Kerney and Marcus Trufant will travel to Hawaii as well. We're happiest about Trufant, a Tacoma......

While trolling through today's Floor Proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives for our other job (it's an exciting one), we noticed something that will probably get no coverage anywhere else. However, we think it is important to note when Congress singles out one faith as important. We think it's doubly important to note when the vote is taken while Congress fights with the Bush Administration over funding the government for the next year, haggles......

This Seattlest started his carpet-bagging campaign here about ten years ago, so maybe we have an imperfect understanding of the Fun Forest and it's cultural baggage. When we heard that the City Council had elected to raze the Fun Forest in 2009 our first reaction was "What?! They're clear-cutting the Wenatchee National Forest?!" But then we caught on, as we occasionally do, and realized they were talking about the little carnivalette that lives in Seattle......

Hoo-eee, was Chop Suey's stage packed on Friday night! Promised: Macklemore, Gabriel Teodros, Rajnii, Language Arts, Knowmads, Hella Maze, and DJ Marc Sense. Performed: all of the above, plus XPerience, Khingz, and some group called 2012. Sometimes it can be exhilarating and refreshing to have so many artists jumping on and off stage in one night. In this case, it was confusing and overwhelming, and we hardly know where to start when telling you......

It's safe to assume that Sharon Jones is cooler than you. The current queen of neo-funk/soul grew up in Macon, Georgia and Brooklyn, singing in church before ending up doing session work in the '70s as the anonymous vocals on dance and disco records. Without a solo contract of her own, she left the industry and took odd jobs like corrections officer at Rikers Island and Wells Fargo armored car guard. Fate intervened in......

Towards the very end of last night's People Talking and Singing, as the clock ticked past 10:00 and John Roderick announced he'd play another song and take a few requests from the audience, our butts chimed in: "Hey, this is starting to go on a little long." Our brains, and most of the rest of us, were enjoying themselves thoroughly. But Town Hall started life as a Christian Science church, and the pew we sat......

Even that movie voice-over guy will be unemployed. You have heard of this impending strike, have you not? It may seem unrelated to you, the sad inner workings of Hollywood, but in truth, if you are someone who ever turns on their TV, if 8pm every day marks your celebration in the church of Stewart-Colbert, you best care. Without writers, the only thing left standing is Reality TV. We have known this for a long......

On a recent Wednesday morning, Seattlest was exiting Vivace on Denny with our clergy mother, happily discussing something secular. As we descended the ramp, Seattlest noticed a group of five thirty- and forty-somethings trailing past, each with a Bible in hand. We grew confused and a little nervous. After all, this has been our haunt for a solid year now and this was the first group of Bible-toting folk we've seen there yet. That would......

Last Friday we saw Sea Wolf at Chop Suey. We found this Pop Matters review of their first full-length album, but if you'd like to learn more, here's an interview by Sound on the Sound. The band says "We want to be JUST LIKE:"Wolf Eyes, Wolf Parade, We Are Wolves, AIDS Wolf, Wolfie, Wolf Colonel, Patrick Wolf, WolfMother, Guitar Wolf, Steppenwolf, Hugo Wolf, Kate Wolf, Laurent Wolf, Wolf City, Duran Duran (though they don't really......

We were first turned onto Susan Werner back in our New York days when she played a free show at the World Trade Center. We were broke and all about free things, and we had a nice healthy respect for the sort of music the show sponsor WFUV felt like sharing with the world. We were impressed then by her candid poetics and a particularly lovely tune called "Time Between Trains" that stuck with......

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods. LAist saw national headlines soar this week with......

Last night was our first live encounter with Ohio's Over the Rhine, and the Triple Door turned out to be the perfect venue for the neo-cabaret sound of their new album The Trumpet Child (which they're streaming on their site). Tonight's show is sold out, but they're doing SRO sales at the window. The Triple Door website will tell you the show's at 8pm, but we showed up at 7:45pm last night and got sat......

The husband-and-wife team Over the Rhine [MySpace] play at the Triple Door at 7:30pm this Thursday and Friday, and both shows are already sold out -- SRO tickets will be on sale the nights of the shows. They're touring for their new album The Trumpet Child, which All Music Guide reviews thusly:Produced by Brad Jones and recorded in Nashville, the album's music is steeped in the other kind of Americana: not the gothic country one......

The Mojo and the Sayso which opened at ACT last night is four actors and a car, but the car is the thing, the main entity. The car is the set, the stage, and the focal character. It may not have any lines, but it stands in for everything that moves playwright Aisha Rahman's story forward. It's the absent child, gunned down by aggro off-duty cops, it's the broken family, being rebuilt from the ground......

When we were young, our parents bought a house in Craftsbury Common, a tiny town in the Northeast corner of Vermont. There's a post office, a general store, a church, a library and frankly, not much else. The isolation of this place was troubling in former years (at sixteen, for example), but now it is to us, a tonic: a place where there is no coffee shop directly below our apartment, no cell phone reception......

Hey, whaddya know? There's another show worth your attention at the Sunset this week. Tonight it's Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan. Yeah yeah, we know what you're thinking: "Another singer-songwriter? Just look at him, all broody with messed-up hair strumming a guitar in an alley." Truth be told, we usually avoid the genre as a whole, since most singer-songwriters run the gamut from boring hippie to boring douchebag. But in this case, don't be so......

One Saturday a few weeks ago, we went to the Rainier Beach library with Little Miss Seattlest. After picking out several books, we were making our way to the circulation desk when one of the librarians behind the public service desk spoke. "Excuse me," she said. "Have you heard about the summer reading program?" We were, of course, familiar with the concept of a summer reading program, but we hadn't really thought about enrolling our......

As of this morning, queer couples in the state of Washington have about three new rights, which include, but are not limited to: 1. The right to spend time together. 2. The right to talk to each other's doctor. 3. The right to call each other "partner." Whoopdeedoo. We're not as excited about the new domestic partnership law that goes into effect today, as we are that, when you sign up, you get a......

Last night at the Crocodile was one of those evenings you stumble on where things just keep getting better and better. We went down to see headliners Sea Wolf [MySpace] after hearing them do an in-studio bit at KEXP (not posted yet). About two songs in, the indie-folk melodies and lead singer's baritone duets with cello swept us and Shelves of Vinyl off our feet. They're a six-piece -- Alex Brown Church on vocals and......

--Denny's is the new Cha Cha. --Starbucks announced their new World Beat menu today. --Mega-change at mega-church Mars Hill. --Why KEXP isn't observing the day of internet radio silence. --Get your Husky football tickets now, only about 35,000 seats available! -- "The texture of Seattle: Seattle feels, looks, tastes like the cinematic 1980s." Image courtesy of Grundlepuck.......

This week's Comment of the Week was posted as a reply to a post about an immigration announcement out of the office of Mayor Greg Nickels and uses the word "homo" six times, including such creative constructions as "homo liberals," "homo culture," and "liberal homos." Funny how homo liberals, choose not to see the real enemy in North America and they opt for hating America. Mexico has no culture except being forced into the Catholic......

Seattlest got a Sony Walkman for our 15th birthday, and bought our first couple of cassette tapes with saved allowance: Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It. As any self-respecting male teen would be, we were offended thrilled by the latter’s raw language and humor. So within a few weeks, we’d procured N.W.A.’s tape, Straight Outta Compton. That’s how we knew what we were hearing Sunday night when we were put on hold after......

-- Watch out, tuberculosis! Seattle's coming after your ass. -- "This building is a Macintosh. Most buildings in downtown Seattle are PCs." -- Mike Webb: still missing. -- Starbucks: Jones Soda is out, Izze is in. -- Hotel 1000 violates Scalzi's Law of Hotel Internet Connections -- but that's a good thing. -- "If I ever get a hearty recommendation from the Stranger that says my movie is crap save for the art direction,......

--A former Redmond church leader is being charged with child rape. --Mike Webb is still missing and his house has been ransacked. --Remember when the debate over whether to build a high bridge to West Seattle was concluded when a ship rammed the low bridge? How come that kind of stuff can't end debates now? --Light rail in Portland a crime magnet? --There was some kind of condo incentive in Seattle where if you bought......

The clock is ticking down on statewide ballot initiatives that hope to throw themselves into the field of vision of voters in November, and an article in Sunday's Olympian has a good rundown on who's going to make it and who's a laughable crank. The article mentions the boring-but-important initiatives that are likely to appear on ballots as well as all of the hilarious hits like the initiative that would apply the death penalty in......

-- Revenge + Craigslist = aunt's house stripped bare. Also, second-degree burglary, malicious mischief and criminal impersonation charges. -- NYC asks: What's a WaMu? -- Lycopene, schmycopene, says Fred Hutch. -- Sometimes parenting brings out your best. And sometimes... -- Neko Case will be on the tee-vee tonight, with M. Ward. -- Mike Sando's early look at the Hawks roster suggests Kelly Herndon could soon be out of a job. -- Starbucks' favorite Beatle?......

American Idol is down to the final four, in case you've been living at the Earth's core, or on some exploding star for the past couple of months (how awesome is that star story!). Anyhow, so we've been excited since last Wednesday to see what four of the best contestants to grace the Idol stage since Clarkson and Guarini, had to show for themselves. It was Barry Gibb week, and Gibb kinda creeped us out,......

The Daily Show appearance of the guy who staged a semi-successful one-man Holy War against An Inconvenient Truth in Federal Way has already been posted elsewhere, but we can't help reposting. He's really a funny guy--his Church Lady and his Al Gore impressions are hilarious and it seems like hanging out with him would be like spending some high energy time with Robin Williams, if Robin Williams were a religious nut who believed that any......