One begins to wonder whether Gael Garcia Bernal will ever meet a transgressive sex scene he doesn’t like. In the King [siff], written by Monster’s Ball screenwriter Milo Addica, he plays Elvis, a twenty-one-year-old fresh out of the Navy who steps off his ship and heads straight for a Corpus Christie church by way of a whorehouse and used car dealership. He doesn’t go inside to hear the service, instead he tails the preacher (William Hurt) — the sort who was born again late in life, who enthusiastically welcomes the congregation to God’s house, and whose son fires up the crowd with Christian rock — back to his picture-perfect neighborhood.

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God alone knows how he got there, but a wild black bear showed up in the University District late Saturday night. He gave a couple dozen cops and wildlife agents a long chase before finally being killed, apparently accidentally, by a combination of too many tranquilizers and a Taser.

Memo to wildlife: it’s safer in the woods. Seriously.

[Seattle Times]
[Seattle P-I]

Technorati Tags: bear, seattle

Shanghai Dreams [siff] is set in the China of the 1960s, but everyone in it, particularly the teenagers, looks like they’ve taken wardrobe cues from an That 70s Show marathon. Strict school dress codes result in characters concealing their perms and having bell bottoms slashed at the door to their school. A strict dress code is but a minor example of oppressive authority that hangs over the characters.
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Image, via Pin Down Girls

So you think roller derby girls are the sexiest thing currently going, with all those flying elbows and knee pads? Have you seen the Pin Down Girls yet? No? Well, here’s your chance.

See, the Pin Down Girls are women’s tag team wrasslin, no holds barred. Both down and dirty. They’ll be giving an exhibition on the 16th of next month at the Showbox with music by Lushy, The Invisible Eyes, and K-Pop and the Coalition of the Willing. An exhibiton where you’ll be able to buy things like vintage female wrasslin’ videos. Seriously.

But before that? Before that is tomorrow, and tomorrow the Pin Down Girls will be doing a meet-and-greet at Tiger! Tiger! on University Ave from 1:00 – 4:00. When you’ve had more funnel cake and balloon animals than you can stand at the street fair, go say hello. There will be “live music and more,” although I won’t venture a guess at what the “more” might be.

As an added bonus, all proceeds benefit 826 Seattle. ‘Cause nothing says ‘helping the kids’ like hot ladies in spandex.

I was waiting for the bus today at 45th and 15th as this many-legged, enormous creature lumbered up the other side of the street. I can only assume that it was leaving the street fair. I never managed to get a good look at it head on, so I have no idea what the banner says, but its hands were pumpkins with cucumbers sticking out of them, I think, and it occasionally waved them around menacingly.

Veronica, a pre-op transexual who earns a living by sewing and dominatrixing when she’s not watching soap operas and waiting for a letter of approval for gender reassignment surgery, has a new upstairs neighbor. Charlotte, a successful salon owner has grown tired of living with her doctor boyfriend and takes the first flat she can find. When she can’t get her sort of ex to help her move her large IKEA bed into her new bedroom, she resorts to demanding that her new neighbor assist with the task. Such is the beginning of the odd but funny relationship of A Soap [siff].
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image, speaker speaker [myspace]

• Street festival season in Seattle kicks off this weekend in the U-District [mb]. You know you’ve been longing for an elephant ear all summer; at last the days of street food eating have arrived. Arts, crafts, people watching, and better performances that you’d usually run into on a typical day on the Ave.
• The Stranger’s 2006 Big Shots pop-punkish Speaker Speaker share the bill with Seattle Weekly coverband and favoritest rock band of the year the Divorce tonight at Neumos. Now if only the two papers could follow their example and make nice . . . [neumos]

Hello, Friday. This is your agenda.

• Say goodbye to Grandaddy. The band broke up, but Jason Lytle will perform songs from their final album,Just Like the Fambly Cat at the Queen Anne Easy Street Records at 7 pm.
• Tonight’s WTF? item: “Party with Playboy’s Miss June 2006″ at Trinity along with three hours of music from D.J. Scott Keith. This is the sort of thing that reminds me why I find the Pioneer Square so metaphysically unsettling. [upcoming]
• Decibel presents genre-destroying Modeselektor tonight at ReBar. I don’t know from electronica, but I’d take Ario’s [interimlover] word for it on this one. [simplyshameless]
• The Da Vinci Code premiered earlier this week in Cannes. If you couldn’t make the transatlantic flight to catch it then, you can watch it tonight at your friendly neighborhood multiplex. It might turn out to be as horrible as Tom Hanks’s film-mandated hairstyle, but why not give in to your obligation to engage in popular culture. For me, this means watching the movie, but not reading the Dan Brown book or any of the novel-inspired spin-offs, guides, refutations, or museum tours.

ideas, alternative suggestions, rebuttals? comment away.

Image, via wikipedia

Scientists have re-mapped the Seattle area recently to figure out just how bad things will be when the next earthquake happens [P-I]. The last map, done in the 60′s with incomplete data from the 50′s, only seems to have painted part of the picture. As it turns out, there’s a lot more unstable soil in places like West Seattle and Beacon Hill than they thought, and that soil is likely to liquefy and slide in the event of a quake.

Now, this might come from the fact that I grew up somewhere were earthquakes are incredibly unlikely (Florida’s two black dots are on the other side of the admittedly thin state), but isn’t it sort of a given that earthquakes are dangerous, and that when parts of the ground move other parts of it are bound to follow? I mean, I guess it’s nice to know where things are likely to go very wrong so that you’ll know where not to be, but it doesn’t seem like anyone knows how to make those places safer.

In any case, the northwest quadrant of the new map is now available, and the rest of it will be coming soon. The new map will also highlight the Seattle Fault Zone (which would make a great name for a dance club) that runs right through downtown and is likely to cause a real bad earthquake and a potential accompanying tsunami. It’s a little depressing and scary to look at, but I guess that’s why they call it a hazard map and not a map of puppies and sunshine.