U-N-I, the L.A. headliners at last night's show at Chop Suey, is the profoundly West Coast hiphop equivalent of human superficial fascia: loosely, intricately webbed, sticky, and pliable. Tricky, surprising beats backed Thurzday and Y-O's tight rap in a dizzying but relaxed kind of way. The night was solid for such an unsung show, with performances from some of 2008's most promising local acts: J. Pinder (his ballsy, impeccable timing meshing perfectly with high-power......

Despite what you may have heard the past few days--scuttlebutt about the sale of the Showbox Market and subsequent consolidation of venues at the SoDo location--it turns out that the original (and best) Showbox is staying right where it is, thankyouverymuch. Says Chad Queirolo, Talent Buyer/Manager for both Showboxes: It used to be once a year an especially virulent rumor that the Showbox lease would end in March. This has been happening for at......

If you're a Cuban exile somehow randomly transplanted from Miami to Seattle, don't go see The Cook at Seattle Rep. The overwhelming majority of sources (including this play) depict you as pretty angry, and The Cook will only further piss you off. If you're anyone else, go see it--You'll love it, although it may also piss you off. If you're a hipster or, less likely, a commie, dress up in your little Castro hat......

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......

True confessions time: We've never set foot in 826 Seattle. We think we might have seen the building once, at night, while driving somewhere else. We'd turn in our hipster license, but as Seattlest Jeremy notes, "parenthood remains the antidote to hipness." We've never been all that hip, but we are writers, we (used to) read McSweeney's, and we've been aware of Seattle's hippest educational center, 826 Seattle, since before it opened. We just chose......

What the world needs is more shows like the one Portland's Hillstomp performed at the Tractor on Friday. Ok, we're predisposed to love this band for some reason, but after finally seeing them live we're absolutely sure the South will rise again. Will we be better off when they've transformed us all into dirty rockin hillbillies? Well, it'll be a change, at least. The Hillstomp premise is this: Two guys on stools. One plays......

Or we should have gone to see Brand Upon the Brain. Or stayed home to watch 30 Rock. Even Dancing with the Stars probably would have been more exciting than last night's show at Neumo's. Normally, we'd side with Donte, but we're going to have to go with Eric Grandy over at the Stranger on this one: Project Jenny, Project Jan fucking sucked. Perhaps they were casualties of a nearly empty house, which seemed odd......

About three lives ago, when we were living in a scientific research station in Ecuador, we watched The Postman (Il Postino) with a group of Westerners. After the movie, which is one of our favorites, we were sitting there, wondering why the room had suddenly gotten all dusty, when a privileged teenage British hipster/tourist named Aelys (pronounced like Alice, but her parents preferred the Welsh spelling) announced that she hadn't liked the movie because it......

The past two days, contributors Jeremy "The Seattle Samurai" Barker and Katie "The Kalama Quickdraw" Tiehen debated the age-old question of whether Seattle or Portland is better. Both Jeremy and Katie raised some excellent points, but that's what rebuttals are for. Katie rebuts Jeremy: [ED: Jeremy, writing for Seattle, alleged that Portland's ascension to Green-ness and "hipster paradise"-dom was not without social and economic cost--most notably, higher housing prices in the urban core, which pushed......

Seattle. Portland. Which one's better? You may say: "How can you choose? Each has their good points. It's like asking which religion is better." Guess what, asshole, that Negative Nellie attitude is the reason nobody ever asks for your fucking opinion. Jerk. To the debate! First up, it's a pro-Seattle opinion. Seattle is better than Portland, by Jeremy "The Seatown Samurai" Barker When I tell people that I think Portland's gone down the wrong road......

Sulking after having missed most of the music festival that took place in our own backyard last weekend, Seattlest ventured down I-5 to check out the northwest’s other early September music festival, Musicfest Northwest. We strolled over to Towne Lounge off SW Burnside St. Friday night for a roller coaster night of local sound and lots and lots cheap booze. Eskimo & Sons started off the evening’s lineup, giving the venue a mixed dose of......

We think Chief Gil Kerlikowske said it best:"We want to hold the ground we've taken and maintain the peace here and have real-time information about where the hot spots are..."Right away you get a sense of the high-level strategy involved in taking Seattle back, street by street, from people with very little money, clean clothes, or a complete high school education. Was it necessary to make the announcement in such a dramatic fashion? We......

KEXP is having an auction of some kind where they sell off a lot of crap they have lying around to the highest bidder. Fanboys and girls of the radio station can get a place at the High Dive VIP table, the transmitter, their urinal (those wacky DJs), or an evening with Systems Coordinator Cyrus Despres. Despres is described thusly in the auction listing: While most people strive to be on-air DJs or work......

It’s been just about a week and a half now since the grandmasters of interplanetary French electro-house graced Seattlest’s fine city. Now that the formerly much-anticipated Alive 2007 tour is almost over, Seattlest can only get its Daft Punk fix through the blogosphere, comparing online video posts and reading contentious hipster blogs that argue about at whom’s house the robo-duo first played. Lucky for Seattlest, The Fader’s online blog continues to publish the tour diary......

Oh Seattle, you make us feel so old. It was maybe a year ago and some, while we were wallowing in the mud at Sasquatch, clutching our $8 cans of Budweiser, when we finally said to ourselves, "You know what? Outdoor festivals suck." And then we recoiled in horror. Hating festivals is the very definition of getting old, isn't it? Really. There's an accepted narrative explanation of this phenomenon at pseudo-hipster bastions like The......

Seattlest arrived on scene soon after the Capitol Hill Block Party had opened. We wandered, checked out the stage locations and thought about getting a beer, then spotted a booth touting free bottled water. It looked like the booth had something to do with praying to the Earth Spirits or some other new wave white hippy crap, but we decided to take our chances. We asked for a water and oddly enough their were no......

British band The Klaxons started to receive attention almost immediately after their debut 2006 singles, as is prone to happen in the buzz-happy UK. The rock outfit is decidedly arty but catchy, hailed as champions of the "new rave" movement, a response to their citing influence by early rave culture. Thankfully, the "movement" never caught on Stateside, although the hipster set has all too willingly adopted neon back into their wardrobes. Despite that association, Klaxons......

Seattlest caught the Hands at the Georgetown Music Fest a few weeks ago and their set inspired us to go out and get their disc "So Sweet" which we love, even though we could not deny it when a friend said it sounded like an updated Stones CD. The Hands and Thee Emergency are playing at the Funhouse on Saturday in a show where the Hipster Threat Level is "Very High." It should definitely be......

Ladies, now that Pride is over, are you looking for a rock show chockful of straight men? Tuesday at Neumo's, jazz-leaning post-rock godfathers Tortoise will play to a room full of guys, and you can have your pick of the litter. Whether your type is the indie rock snob, the closet prog lover, or the patchouli-reeking Phish fan, they'll all be in attendance, and they'll be glad to see a woman or two who......

No, Seattlest didn't quite make it to everything on the checklist we created last Friday, but we did manage to stay out past midnight on both weekend evenings, proving we've still got it after all. Friday night's Purr toga party proved to be a sausagefest, which I'm sure was fun if you're into that sort of thing. We, however, are not, so we headed down to Chapel to party with our people. Damn it was......

Hey, whaddya know? Ever since the Showbox upped the service fees and made a pact with the devil, their bookings have been less than stellar. In fact, we haven't been to the downtown venue for a single show so far this year, which is totally out of the ordinary. Sure LCD Soundsystem and the Arctic Monkeys played last month, and of course Robin Williams sold out his three-day stand, but taking a look at......

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment The action was thick......

ELECTION NIGHT PARTY: Get happy with Cary Moon and the People's Waterfront Coalition, the prophets of the surface/transit waterfront. 7:30-9pm (votes trickle in circa 8:15) // Edgewater Hotel [2411 Alaskan Way, Pier 67] 9pm-? // Spitfire Grill [2219 4th Ave] MUSIC: What does it do to your "keeping it real" status when your hip-hop album, which more than touches base on drug culture, only blows up after attention from the Vices and Pitchforks of the......

After spending all day yesterday leading up to the Menomena show at the Croc singing the Muppets' menah-menah doo doo da doo doo song in our heads, we were stoked to have a band that sounds exactly like Radiohead buzzing in our ears. Or, as it were, buzzing all over our bodies. (We were standing dangerously close to the speakers.) The evening started with Siberian (the band that sounds like Radiohead and Coldplay combined).......

This past weekend Seattlest visited Gothamist's stomping grounds. We were there for the farewell shows of Rainer Maria, but had our days free to see the sights and take in the New York experience. We stumbled upon a once-in-a-lifetime event in the world of street art, and amazing as it was, we couldn't help but to be struck by what lessons it could have for Seattle. The building at 11 Spring Street was a......

If you're still in the dark this week (and you're presumably reading this at work), well, here are some shows to keep you warm in the evening. If you've got power, take it easy and kick back with your friends and family. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone. Tuesday, December 19 >>> The Northwest Boychoir at Benaroya Hall. The sound of X-mas has to be a "Festival of Lessons and Carols" with the astoundingly......

Music: The electronic talent of Guillermo Scott Herren's Prefuse 73 show at Chop Suey tonight comes highly recommended from every quarter of the Seattle media scape, and after listening to some of his work you can see why. 8 p.m. // Chop Suey // $12 Even More Music: A friend recommends the new deal at the Baltic Room called "The Beatdown." Quoth the friend: "I stopped by the first week and not only was the......

--That lovey dovey crap we said about Microsoft and China earlier today? Forget it. --Best unloved Reality TV-based Halloween costume. Ever. --Couple local skiers seem to be mixed up in a porn thing with a guy called Warren Miller. --John Moe unveils the girls team secretly plotting the violent overthrow of the boys team. Go on, girls! --SeattleDuck says no to procrastination, yes to Getting Things Done. --Renton's Displaced Hipster displaces himself even further,......

Much like Izzy, Seattlest was curled up in a ball(gown) throughout most of the Grey's Anatomy summer break. Now, Sunday is the new thursday and it's just Grey's, OK? Saying the full name is so last season. Episode one kicks off with Meredith riffing on time. It's elastic, like your momma's pants. We return to find Izzy on the floor, and Meredith wondering why she's called to console her--because she's the "president of people......

Yesterday we googled the phrase "best restaurant in Renton." (Don't ask.) It turned up this post on A Displaced Hipster's Guide to Renton, which gives the Melrose Grill top honors in Seattle's southern suburb. DH's mission statement: "Two years ago, my wife and I moved out of the city of Seattle to the lovely suburby city of Renton, Washington. We've learned to survive without great restaurants, nightlife, and entertainment--here's how we do it." Like any......