In my lifetime I remember Walter Matthau for his roles in such forgettable movies as Dennis the Menace, I.Q. and Grumpy Old Men. So I judged him based on these movies, dismissed him as a second-rate talent living off residual star power from decades past. I assumed he was the 1970’s equivalent of Tom Cruise – maybe in some decent flicks but certainly not carrying them. Then, earlier this year, I read an exchange by several writers discussing 70’s noir films, and one title that kept coming up was Charley Varrick. Trusting these opinions, I went to Amazon and ordered the movie without really paying much attention. The DVD arrived, and I was more than a little surprised to see the face of a younger Matthau staring back at me from the cover.I watched the movie. I loved the movie. I watched it again.

And what I saw was Walter Matthau being awesome. He plays the title character, an everyman antihero on the run after stealing the wrong pile of cash from the wrong people. The plot’s not important, though, as Matthau himself is the reason to see this film.

Filled with a newfound respect for the grumpy old man, I turned my attention to the Criterion Collection DVD of Hopscotch. In this dark spy comedy Matthau shines again, this time as a CIA agent who decides to out the agency by writing his memoirs. In both movies Matthau plays an in-control protagonist, perpetually one step ahead of his pursuers, and he plays it perfectly.

All this is an apology of sorts. I just want to say, I’m sorry, Mr. Matthau, for not realizing you were awesome while you were still alive. Up next is Matthau’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which I have it on good authority is also awesome.

Friends and UW MFA graduates Fred Muram and Mike Simi created Fire Retard Ants to artistically revist the awkardness of their childhood.  Their work about “growing pubic hair, fighting ninjas, eating Cheez Whiz, all while maintaining a C+ average, so their parents will take them to Pizza Hut” is featured this month at SOIL in Pioneer Square.

Title: Fire Retard Ants Curiously Investigating Wearing Ski Masks
Medium: 35″x”35″ Archival Inkjet Print
Date: 2007

1. Who or what is your biggest artistic inspiration?
FRT#2 (Mike) believes that his is confessional literature.
FRT#1(Fred)thinks his biggest inspiration is his angst pot… which is
animaginarycauldron created to hold all of Fred’s angst.

2. Where is the best place to view art in Seattle?
FRT#1 (Fred) Has a fondness for SAM and the Henry Art Gallery and
Western Bridge.
FRT #2 (Mike) FRT#1 agrees with FRT #2.

3. What is your favorite local bookstore?
FRT#2 (Mike) Amazon.com - avoid the crowd- buy books in your undies.
FRT#1(Fred)There is a cool little shop somewhere downtown that sells
tonsofsocialist lit, but there’s also a really cute girl that works
there, whoI always tell I’m Canadian.

4. If you were a typeface which one would you be?
Are there any other typefaces than Helvetica?

5. What is the best blog that we don’t know about yet?
Other than the FIRE RETARD ANTS BLOG?
FRT#1 (Fred) I’m kind of a fan of We Make Money Not Art
FRT#2(Mike) I don’t really read blogs all that much, but really likewatching
television, reading books, and listening to music.

http://fireretardants.wordpress.com/
 

[Editor’s Note: As in the print magazine’s Artist Portfolio, the blog feature will showcase exceptional visual talent in all mediums. Please send submissions to ali @ rivetmagazine.org.]

Now I know what love is. Before, not so much, but definitely now, yes I do. And I owe it all to Fletcher Hanks. Who is this mysterious master of my emotions? Let me tell you.Fletcher Hanks was a comic book creator who froze to death on a New York City park bench in the 1970’s. Rewind 30 years, however, and you’ll find the source of my love, a little comic called “Stardust the Super Wizard”, penned by dear Mr. Hanks at the end of the Depression, as war spread across Europe, and America turned to primary-colored pages of crudely drawn fantasy for comfort – for escape. This was the Golden Age of comics. For those of you not geeky enough to know what the Golden Age is, it’s where Superman and Batman came from (Spiderman was from the Silver Age, about the same time period when Hanks found himself homeless at the start of a brutal Northeastern winter).

Hanks was, quite frankly, crazy as all hell. “Stardust” is the surreal story of a nigh-invincible superhero who harnesses the power of stars and uses his nigh-limitless array of rays to stop gangsters, in particular, from ending all of civilization, as gangsters are wont to do. Sometimes he crushes people. These stories are crude, and the artwork is cruder, and the vigilante justice meted out is the kind of thing that would raise red flags in school systems if a black trenchcoat-clad student were the artist. But at the same time they’re brilliant and so far ahead of the curve (Jack Kirby, eat your heart out) that if you didn’t know better you’d think they were a psychedelic creation of the 70’s (a time Hanks would never even get to see).

Why am I bringing up a 70-year-old comic, you ask? Because by the grace of whatever particular brand of divinity you ascribe to, and probably in its level of miraculousness owing to the combined power of all faiths everywhere, publisher Fantagraphics has recently released a compilation of Hanks’ work from his short-lived comics career in an absolutely stunning book edited by Hanks “scholar” Paul Karasik. It’s called “I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets.” The book features several “Stardust” stories, as well as the equally astounding “Fantomah – Mystery Woman of the Jungle.” Sometimes her head turns into a skull-head, which is simply amazing (even more amazing is the pseudonym Hanks used for the Fantomah comics – Barclay Flagg).

I haven’t explained the love yet. These comics are CRAZY with a capital every-letter. Let me give one example – the one when my heart swelled as I read. In the first story in the compilation, Stardust captures a group of spies, suspends them in the air, and then uses a special ray to summon the skeletons of the spies’ innocent victims, and has the skeletons hover in front of the already-hovering spies!!! Needless to say, this particular panel should be framed and hung in the Louvre. Did I mention that sometimes Stardust just crushes people with his bare hands?

From his blurb on the back cover of “I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets,” the late, great Kurt Vonnegut probably said it best:

“The recovery from oblivion of these treasures is in itself a great work of art.”

If it’s good enough for Kurt it’s more than good enough for the rest of us. Buy this book. Read this book. Make other people buy and read this book. It’s a little piece of forgotten culture that we’d all do good to unforget.

Get decked out in your Saturday night best and join RIVET’s publisher, the Shunpike, at the third annual Factory Party.

Here’s the scoop:
Once again, the Shunpike takes you back to 1970s New York, where the artists were the art, the vibe was DIY and the dress was retro even before it had been worn the first time. Most important were the parties, where the glamorous, the hip and the creative mingled and collaborated until the break of dawn.

And the deets:
Saturday Nov. 3
8 p.m.
At Lo-fi
429B Eastlake Ave E in Seattle

Admission is $15—mention RIVET at the door and half of that will go directly to your favorite Little Magazine That Could.

Remember when we posted about the Crawl Space’s call for submissions  for, basically, a lock-in? Well, winner Michelle Fried has spent the last week wondering, ”How do these characters, like DJ Tanner, Kurt Cobain, Marshall Applewhite (the charismatic leader from the Heaven’s Gate Cult), and Igrid-Bayer (Escambia High School’s Homecoming Queen) play into our biographies as adults?”

Explore these questions of adolescence and other revelations this Saturday.

Details:

29 September – 14 October 2007
OPENING RECEPTION Saturday 29 September, 6-9pm
Crawl Space
504 E. Denny Way and Olive
*behind a wooden fence
Open Weekends 12-5 and by appointment

I love Ballard Seafood Fest. I always have, but I’m especially biased now as we live smack dab in the middle of it and don’t have to deal with festival transport or parking. My kid climbed over giant inflatables and scored major schwag, I got some killer crab cakes from the Hi-Life booth, there was much fun and family bonding.But the real rejoicing came later when kid-free and boozed-up I returned to the Fest for The Squirrels, the grand old stoner band of musically adept cutups slinging rock-n-roll mashups. My favorite of this particular set was a raucous cover of Judas Priest’s “Living After Midnight” with Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’…” lyrics. The Squirrels have been doing what they do for a long time and they know how to work the crowd. Lead singer Rob “Capt.” Morgan cavorted through the audience, and at one point brought some, um, local color onstage for an impromptu scarf dance. The show, needless to say, rocked.

The Squirrels always deliver and yet you never know what to expect. I ran into Capt. Morgan before the show and he said they were on their tenth set list of the day (a problem oddly eventually solved when they asked Reggie Jackson to pull names out of a hat).

[OK, it’s a pretty obscure reference, but those that get it are rolling right now. And I admit I’m only one because I’ve got a regular man-date with three friends to barbeque meat and watch The Bronx is Burning miniseries on ESPN (the flipside of the coin from Lifetime and Haagen Dazs), which I recommend if only to watch John Turturro aim for Billy Martin but actually land on Dobby the House-elf and because Daniel Sunjata as Reggie Jackson is bacon in the fryin’ pan.]

There are just two guaranteed (though other gigs do arise) times to see the Squirrels - their annual XXXmas X-travaganza and the Ballard Seafood Fest. That they recognize the awesomeness of the Ballard Seafood Fest and have played it for thirteen years running is just one of the many reasons I love the Squirrels. Another is the genius of The Not-So-Bright Side of the Moon, though, really, you’ve gotta see them live.

The biggest reason I love them? When I lived in San Francisco for a short time, a group of friends took me to Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin. Giant swingin’ chorus with great soloists, formidable preacher with a message of tolerance and inclusiveness, like nothing I’d ever seen, and I left thinking “THIS is how I should feel when I leave church.”

When I left the Squirrels show Saturday, I was thinking “THIS is how I should feel after rock-n-roll.”

I am in what I like to call an acquisition phase.I believe all artists are also audience, can’t possibly create in a vacuum, and that we swing between production and acquisition phases. Most often, some sort of balance is struck, but other times are dominated by one or the other.

The last few weeks, I’ve produced little but read voraciously. Frivolous reading (six Harry Potter volumes in preparation for the release of the seventh), semi-frivolous (The Contract with God trilogy by Will Eisner, after whom the Oscars of the comics world are named), serious fiction (Middlesex, and The Ocean in the Closet by Yuko Taniguchi), and non-fiction fodder (NYT, Salon, various posted links from the MEA, MediaSquatters, or a dozen other daily email digests). There are simply times when I feel the need to fill up the tank with raw material.

And then there are times when beyond balance, these two aspects become one.

At 14/48 - the world’s quickest theatre festival, production and acquisition, artist and audience, achieve synergy. Not only did the stories presented on any given night not exist 24 hours earlier, they don’t exist in any real sense until the moment they hit the stage.

I’ve written for 14/48 a half-dozen times, and every time the story that began with my script astounds me, not because it is such a reliable rendering of my vision but because it has grown so far since I left it with the artists eight hours before. And the dozen-plus times beyond that I’ve attended as audience, I’ve felt myself part of and in the presence of stories coming to life, actualized in the moment before me.

Of course I am biased as I’ll be writing for my seventh festival this coming weekend, but 14/48 is something not to be missed, an opportunity to produce and consume art in its freshest form.

What: 14/48: The World’s Quickest Theater Festival
Where: Capitol Hill Arts Center - 1621 12th Avenue
When: July 13,14,20,21 - 8:00 & 10:30
Cost: $15

[Editor’s Note: This post is written by Jim Jewell, one of a handful of new writers recently brought on to the RIVET blog. Welcome Jim to RIVET, and enjoy!]

Ken Griffey Jr. returns to Seattle tonight.

If you don’t understand the significance of that statement, then this post is directed to you.

Because you couldn’t possibly have been here in 1995, when streets were utterly barren, when everyone cared about one thing. Junior on first, Edgar hits a double, Griffey rounds third, and an entire city erupts.

Yes, it’s valuable to let the past go, but we can never forget its presence, its purpose. The past is made to crumble and be built upon. Seattle is a city that understands that in her essence, living on her own ashes.

We as artists making art in and inevitably of this city constantly grapple with questions of what the city is, should be, and struggle with the was, whichever was came before us. We wonder whether art can survive in Seattle, forgetting or ignorant of the fact that when Griffey left, Seattle was tripping over its paper money - the Rep was regularly staging shows in its second theater so lavishly designed they’d lose money if they sold out the run. Then techs crashed, and money dried up, and the death of mid-sized theaters was a grim prelude to the Right’s attempted assassination of the middle class.

And yet here we are again, with local theaters attracting world-class talent and earning national recognition, and a crop of young theater artists openly disenchanted with the lack of space for them, which can only precede their carving out of their own space.

If they know it can happen, if they look back long enough to see the cycles, if they read the stories when they roll back through. The point of unindulgent nostalgia isn’t a desire to return to the past, but adopting a spirit that allows the past to return to us, because a place, and therefore our place in it, can only be known on the long view.

I’ll be at Safeco tonight. The last time I saw Griffey in Seattle he was a four-story mural on First. That wall is something different now.

This time of year we all start to think about vacation. Most likely a result of our years in school, the undeniable urge to take advantage of “summer vacation” remains long after the school years have faded into the less-than-recent past. Instead of sinking into a deep, dark depression once you realize the impossibility of actually taking that trip, take a visit to the map archives. It can actually help the wanderlust to at least imagine the places you could go. And the archives have everything. Don’t believe me? Watch these videos: A World Of Maps: Part 1 and Part 2.

Those years of construction at Cal Anderson Park have already paid off. Sunny days, fountain-wandering, and the vaguely Teletubby-esque landscaping has made one more nook of Capitol Hill just that much better. But one thing that we know in Seattle is that it’s not a real park unless there is some kind of performance happening. In a city where even the Zoo puts on concerts (how do the penguins feel?), we can’t help but place a stage on a green place and fill the air with music.

Enter Sounds Outside, a series of shows in Cal Anderson Park. The programming is not your average park fair, though given the location of the park and the general awesomeness of a lot of the performers, no matter. It starts tomorrow (June 2), with the Degenerate Art Ensemble, Sunship, Seattle Harmonic Voices, and figeater. If you’re looking for an afternoon activity, don’t miss it.

What: Sounds Outside
Where: Cal Anderson Park - 11th Ave E. and Denny Way
When: 2-8PM, June 2