The Stranger

Seattle may not be the first city people name when they talk about the movie industry, but there is an incredible amount of weird and wonderful film culture humming along here anyway: theaters held together by volunteers and sheer force of will, obsessive programmers creating found-footage fever dreams, curators who stretch what a moving image can even be, editors who find the pulse inside a pile of footage, actors who keep turning up in the best local productions, and filmmakers making work...

Picture it. 1991. Dollywood. A little queer boy. It was one of the best days of the 11-year-old’s life, until it was his worst. His grandparents liked to take the cousins in the van for a week. This time they loaded up 3 out of 4 cousins to Dolly Parton’s 5-year-old amusement park. The rides were a blast. The boy was stewarding his 6-year-old and 4-year-old cousins around the park as the big kid. They rode all the rides. Watched videos of Dolly perform. Looked at her glamorous dresses.

The Stranger’s Genius Awards began in 2003 as an attempt to recognize our favorite artists, and, crucially, to give them money. The awards changed shape over the years, then disappeared altogether after 2016. A decade later, we wanted them back. I knew that meant two things: It was going to feel so good to put real money* into the hands of artists making this city more interesting, and choosing them was going to be excruciating. What even is genius?

She’s the mind and muscle behind the cassette-only label Den Tapes, the manager of Sonic Boom Records, the assistant booker at the Sunset Tavern, and a KJ at Hattie’s Hat—all of which is why she was once called “the unofficial mayor of Ballard” by this very publication. She’s a musician, a photographer, a lifelong fangirl, and a local music champion. She’s Kay Redden, and she’s a fucking genius. “Do you like working?” I asked her last month, mystified, on the eve of the fifth annual Den Fest.

“There are 300 football fields of vacant commercial real estate in the downtown Seattle area. That leads to a lot of issues, but we’re also benefiting from it. We wouldn’t be able to do this 10 years ago.

We’re a music city, baby! But the talent runs way deeper than the excellent indie/rock/punk canon you may already know and love. Whether reimagining hip-hop, composing for film, pushing electronic music into places no synth has gone before, or running a record store out of a living room, these musicians are building on the city’s history while laying tracks for whatever comes next.

From classical ballet and avant-garde burlesque to puppetry and gay Bigfoot, Seattle performers take pleasure in disrupting whatever kind of programming you think you might be getting, turning a genre on its head, or throwing the whole damn stage out the window. More than simply entertainers, these performers are dramaturgs and world-builders whose work blurs the boundary between theater and visual art, dance and installation, ritual and nightlife, the viewer and the viewed.

We’re a book-hugging, library-loving, list-topping literary city, and no matter how much New York comes calling, we are proud that so many writers call us home. Like so many of the artists we’re celebrating in this issue, these literary wizards do more than merely spill their lifeblood and life stories on the page, they’re individuals who have proven pivotal in building and nurturing our cultural communities from the ground up, as booksellers, mentors, activists, and educators.

If you’ve ever found yourself squished into the nearly always sold-out audience of TUSH at Clock-Out Lounge on Beacon Hill, you’ll know that you need to expect the unexpected. You might see a drag queen do a beautiful rendition of a Beach House track, or another queen literally “ski” across the tables of the bar while “Chariots of Fire” blasts over the speakers. Either way, make sure you tip.

Our city’s grown up a lot in the past 10 years, and with it, our visual art scene.