Today I went to the final sing-along party for the Henry gift shop installation “I know, I know” by Jenny Zwick and Joe Park. When I arrived, neither of them were around- but their life size cut outs were. Their faces and bodies had been projected on to wooden silhouettes and anchored on a boat marooned in the left corner of the Henry gift shop. Below the boat, a strobe light and wind-blown metallic strips simulated a stormy sea.

Jenny and Joe hadn’t worked together before this installation. Their names were drawn out of a hat by Gift Shop curator Matthew Offenbacher and then they were given two weeks to come up with a piece to entice gallery-goers.

According to Regina Hackett, the two vendors who ran the Henry’s gift shop went belly-up, providing the imputes for Offenbacher’s whimsical gift shop project. Offenbacher hopes the exhibitions at the shop will “fall like dominoes: a cascading cavalcade of adventurous, collaborative, celebratory artistic energy.”

I dinked around the space, touching the artist’s installation drawings on the wall and eating Offenbacher’s delicious (and spicy) chocolate cookies.

Jenny and Joe arrived and began to unpack their ukuleles and banjos. “What a beautiful ukulele!” exclaimed Betsey Brock, the Henry’s communications director. “Did you know that they sell combination ukulele-banjos in Seattle?” Jenny said, before unearthing a tiny wind blown piano (called a “Melodica”).

Jenny began to strum the banjo and Betsey began to sing. Since the piece was an open installation, any visitor could come in and sing along. Most of the folks who wandered in looked confused – but pleased.

After singing the same song for almost half an hour, Betsey brought out ukulele-versions of songs by Radiohead, the Magnetic Fields and Rihanna. They were a hit.

“I have an urge to drum something” Offenbacher said emphatically. Unable to find a tambourine, he settled for hitting the sides of the marooned boat.

By the time I left the installation, the weather had turned from dreary to dark- but my mind was still somewhere tropical and Hawaiian.

The next artists to be paired up at the Henry are Claire Cowie, Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata. Their installation launches November 20th. You should go.

In one particularly effective moment, a woman’s naked body was re-arranged by the dancers in different locations on the stage as if she were a puppet. Their movements were purposeful and efficient as they dragged her around, bending her over, lying her down, and eventually tying her body into an elaborate knot.

While the impulse for movement may have been lust, their executions rarely felt sensuous or sexy. As a man sat with his legs in a V shape and his arms tied behind him, a woman attempted to push her head through the nook between his arms and his body. She pushed and pushed until he had to restrain her as she reached manically into the air. In another scene, a woman leaped on to the shoulders of a man, crawling down his chest, and through the space in his legs, pulling his pants down along with her. She leaped three times over him, until she had been disrobed and lay naked beside him.

Most movements were repeated ad nauseum. The movements seemed uncontrollable, as if they were a manifestation of addiction. The dancers moved because they had to move…because something, memory or perhaps emotion, was controlling them.

I’m not sure if everyone in the audience enjoyed the piece as much as I did. It was not an escapist fantasy. It was also not particularly cohesive. But it was confrontational in all the ways you’d hope a performance would be.

The City Council is now reviewing Mayor Greg Nickels’ proposed 2010 budget, which includes $2.8 million in cuts to the Library budget. Proposed cuts include a reduction in branch operating hours and a one-week closure of the entire Library system. The proposed hours reduction would mean that 21 Library locations would be closed on Fridays and Sundays – all year. Overall, the Library would lose about 23 percent of its open hours compared with 2009.

The proposed budget will impact all of our communities and neighbors who are relying on our libraries for computer access, job search resources, educational support, gathering spaces, and librarian assistance. In 2008, more than 13 million customers visited the Library and so far this year, visits are up another 8 percent. Circulation of books and other items was up 20 percent in 2008; this year it is up an additional 11 percent.

Want to save the libraries? Tell the city council you want your library open on Fridays and Sundays! Attend a city council budget committee meeting this upcoming Monday at City Hall (600 Fourth Avenue, 2nd floor, in the council chambers) and share your opinion with those who hold the purse strings.

Israeli artist Guy Ben Nur makes Ikea living rooms look like foreign lands we enter into. In his film “Stealing Beauty,” now playing at Western Bridge, he comments on the stark reality of remaining an immigrant in your own bedroom (your bed frame designed in Sweden, assembled in China, and sold just off I-5). But Guy Ben Ner isn’t content to simply satirize the American dream home. He also weaves in Marxist speeches, hilarious camera faux-paus, and visual gags into his work (check out the giant price tags and alien-like stock photos in the picture frames). The results transcend typical consumerist critiques.

Now playing at Western Bridge as part of a series of installations on the relationships between parents and children.

Kelly O knows drunk people. As creator of the Stranger’s “Drunk of the Week” column, she has faithfully captured Seattle’s inebriated since 2006. Her boozy, woozy photos have the tinge of 35mm film strips developed in vats of PBR, and her oft-hilarious captions read like the charming barfly who’s desperately, sometimes frustratingly, attempting to articulate the theory of the universe in between shots of Jager. The world represented in O’s photos is the ideal drunken Capitol Hill situation: everyone’s passed out, nekkid, sharpied with a penis on their forehead, and wearing something absolutely ridiculous. I absolutely cannot wait for this show.

Opens Saturday, August 15th, 7pm at Gossamer Collective. 1406 18th Avenue. Through September 17th.

Perhaps you’d like to use your car’s dashboard to create a lovely cornucopia of baked goods.

Yesterday I received a call from Debs Gardner – a local food blogger – who was baking cookies, caserole, eggs, quesedillas, and black beans on the dashboards of multiple cars parked around Greenlake. Behold: car-baked food!

Looks like the glare of sun on the windshield is melting the cheese on that casserole quite nicely.

Give these boiled eggs another hour on the dashboard and they should be salmonella-free. But now the car smells like Yellowstone

Soon these peaches and apricots will be liquefied so someone without teeth can eat them. Right now they’re just mushy. The car smells like a fruit farm.

Floppy cookies, anyone?

Think of all the potential ovens out there, sitting in parking lots, waiting for someone to leave a casserole, quiche, frozen turkey or Lean Cuisine TV dinner. The mind boggles.

Borat was, despite his cheerful bigotry, somehow a lovable character. His questions sprang from the sweet innocence of a third-world bumpkin wallowing in isolated ignorance. With Bruno, you mostly feel annoyed. A gay Austrian fashionista would be no ignorant rube. He would be sophisticated, savvy and certainly aware of prejudices against gays. Would he really prance semi-naked through Middle Eastern holy sites?

….Consequently, the character’s gayness reads false. Baron Cohen needs to spend more time in certain gay bars if he wants to learn how to do “flamboyant” and “fabulous.” It’s a ghost of the real thing.

Now, I don’t think Sasha needs to go to bars to learn how to ‘act like a gay man’. If Sasha accurately portrayed a gay man in Bruno, it would be a terribly boring movie (gay people, like straight people, can be really boring to watch for an hour and a half). On the other hand, if the portrayal doesn’t contain a germ of truth, it will probably  fall into the trap of being too ridiculous to be funny.

…I guess we’ll all just have to wait until July 10th before passing judgement.

“This is the most awesome space for a drum player ever,” announced Trent Moorman (one half of the band). At the London Bridge live room (where Pearl Jam and Soundgarden once recorded) no walls are parallel to each other, and suede-like cushions absorb the echos created by the hardwood floors and brick walls. The owner calls it “an even and musical ambient decay.”

“It’s so weird to drive up to Shoreline, and to feel like you’re in the middle of suburbia, and then walk into this space,” one woman said with wide eyes. There was a wall filled with platinum CDs from all the bands that had played at London Bridge (including ‘Three Doors Down’), another wall filled with found art objects and head shots, a pool table, an Atari game system, a few leather couches, and a cozy, well-appointed bathroom.

In the live room, there were drum mics and guitar mics and audience mics and back-of-the-auditorium mics. “It’s going to pick up on that,” Dave Einmo, the guitarist, joked as I chomped down on some mini Crunch bars near a side mic. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Do you think my hat will absorb too much sound?” a man in a cartoonishly large hat asked.

Trent and Dave walked on stage and the crowd cheered. As the two of them stepped on pedals and danced their fingertips all over their keyboards, the crowd used different tactics to create ambient noise. Some drank beer, others ate the catered food, and one woman danced with her eyes closed (perhaps trying to generate the sound of wind).

After Head Like a Kite was done performing, the crowd packed into the control room to listen. Trent and Dave didn’t plan on altering the tracks, since they wanted the piece to feel improvisational and unrehearsed (beer-guzzling  included). The crowd nodded their heads as the 12 channel recording streamed in through half a dozen different speakers. “It’s such an incredibly rich sound,” the man next to me whispered, staring at the neat rows of metallic buttons and nobs on the 1970’s-era recording equipment.

“You just can’t get this kind of sound from digital,” Trent said, shaking his head and beaming like some kind of recording studio groupie. Then he announced the band would play the song again, and the audience shuffled back into the studio to re-create, once again, the kinds of sounds a listener expects on a “live recorded” album.

AMBIEN and AMBIEN CR are treatment options you and your doctor can consider along with lifestyle changes. When taking either of them, don’t drive or operate machinery. Plan to devote 7 to 8 hours to sleep before being active. Sleepwalking, and eating or driving while not fully awake, with memory loss for the event, as well as abnormal behaviors such as being more outgoing or aggressive than normal, confusion, agitation, and hallucinations may occur. Don’t take it with alcohol as it may increase these behaviors. In patients with depression, worsening of depression, including risk of suicide may occur. If you experience any of these behaviors contact your doctor immediately.

Make up your mind, Ambien CR. Are you going to make me popular or depressed? Will I find myself depressed before or after making hella friends while sleepwalking? And how, exactly, is this aggressiveness going to play out? Am I going to aggressively eat donuts out of the fridge at 1am or am I going to aggressively have sleepwalker sex with a wall or door frame?

The Original A. Birch Steen Muppets

Back when the Muppets were huge (and they really were huge) everyone had their favorite character: the one they identified with completely and forever. For the average 70’s teenager, Henson offered the psychedelic, totally out-of-it Muppet on shrooms who wore sequins and stared at goldfish tanks all day long. And the grandpa in your family could find commiseration with the the old men in the balcony. 

There were, of course, also plenty of fantastical, bizarre puppets in the early days of the Muppets, like the puppets of Planet Koozbane who mated by running towards each other and exploding in a plumb of smoke, and the slinky-like puppets made of plastic tubing who were there to “just dance,” as the song goes. But even these puppets were meant to appeal to a select niche of the audience: the eggheads like you and me who just want to watch things to try to understand the symbolism of everything. Too much wacky, too much egghead, too much satire, and the family wouldn’t be able to watch the whole show together gathered ’round the sole television. 

Jim Henson didn’t initially get in the game of puppeteering to ‘comment on society’. He just wanted to get on the teevee. His advantage as a puppeteer was that he didn’t know the rules, and didn’t know how many of them he was breaking. He cut the fabric for Kermit from an old coat his mom used to wear and it just so happened that Kermit’s head was the ideal shape for exploring hand movements; Henson could fiddle his fingers to make Kermit look perplexed, and he could also scrunch ‘em up to make Kermit’s grimace like he was sucking on sour grapes (Kermit often sucked on sour grapes as he was always ‘ever the diplomat’, picking up the mess of those around him). 

The Muppets ‘101′ lecture at EMP/SFM was a lot of fun, and not just because all of this Muppet history has been downloaded into my ‘noggin forever (Craig Shemin, staff writer for the Muppets since 1988, is a charming and memorable speaker with the familiar, guttural voice of a Muppet ). No, no, no: the reason why it was so exceptionally, incredibly fun was because the crowd was in such a Muppet luvy-duvy mood that I found myself watching old clips with a renewed interest, like I was the psychedelic Muppet staring at a goldfish tank and thinking “wow…fish”. I started thinking all these academic thoughts, trying to figure out why it was I was so drawn to Muppets and why puppets allow us to criticize culture while wearing a mask and what does parody mean and what does satire mean and what do all the puppets symbolize??? (I’ve since erased that portion of this essay due to…uhm…space constraints). But seriously: there was/ is something about that show that’s totally beguiling. 

You know what? Let’s just let the pictures do the ’splainin. 

Shocked

Angry / Happy

Love?

The Q/A portion of the show was equally entertaining. Question: “What is the official Henson stance on ‘Avenue Q’?” Answer: “We’re trying to distance ourselves from the character of Trekkie Monster, since we, well, we also produce Sesame Street. Henson doesn’t want to damage its goodwill with parents.” 

(Trekkie Monster, for those of you who despise / ignore / don’t care about musical theatre, sings a song in the Broadway musical Avenue Q about how he spends all night hugging his horn to “porn! porn! porn!” Trekkie Monster was created by the Henson company, along with the rest of the cast of Avenue Q. In fact, the creators of Avenue Q initially intended on creating a Muppet movie called “Kermit: Prince of Denmark.” Then they created Avenue Q instead. Which was probably a good call.)

Question: “How do y’all feel about Elmo hogging the spotlight?” Answer: “We’re happy for him, but we hope other puppets get their time in the spotlight, too.”

Then there were some boring technical questions I didn’t understand. Let’s skip to the last one, the one on everyone’s mind: “What’s next?” Aren’t the Muppets a dying franchise? Yes and no. They’re still getting gigs. For one, there’s an internet-only Muppet Cooking Show coming soon that will star everyone’s favorite Swedish chef and “an English speaking chef.” Also: Henson Alternative (”HA!”) is busy creating puppets for shows like Avenue Q…puppets who show their puppet boobs and talk about puppet porn. If you go to the ‘Henson Alternative’ page on the website, you can find a description of an upcoming show called “Tinseltown” about a gay puppet couple (one’s a pig, the other’s a bull). It looks bizarre and not funny.

Then there’s the contract with Disney, and Miss Piggy’s contract with places like “Anne Curry’s lap”, and, oh, yeah, Sesame Street…always and forever.  But here’s hoping the Hensons can find a way to entertain us the way the Muppets once did. Maybe it’ll involve more Muppet boobs, or songs about porn, maybe it won’t. Personally, I could watch old Youtubes of the balcony guys all day long and be perfectly content without Muppet boob. But that’s just me. 

There are 8 more Muppet-themed events at EMP/ SFM (through August 15th) and really, it sounds weird, but you should totally go. It was a lot of fun. Check out empsfm.com for dates and times and all that good stuff.