The Stranger

MONDAY 9/7 Death Cab for Cutie LIVE on KEXP Jimmy Fontaine (MUSIC) For Seattleites, Death Cab for Cutie needs no introduction. Frontman Ben Gibbard started the indie rock band nearly three decades ago while attending Western Washington University. Since then, they’ve released 11 studio albums and won the adoration of listeners all over the world thanks to their catchy and emotional tracks.

Welcome to Noise Complaint, The Stranger‘s new audio and video music podcast featuring live performances right here at The Stranger HQ. Streamed live and released every other Friday, we invite a great band, musician, or wonderfully weird act to perform. Tune in, discover something new, and support art in your city.

The storied Route 7 now has an expiration date: 2032. At that point, King County Metro will change it to RapidRide R Line, a bus that will run between Rainier Beach and downtown Seattle. This new line will require the transformation of Rainier Avenue, a former highway with a reputation for fast cars that regularly crash into buildings, poles, and people.

British director John Boorman had already made six movies before he got the chance to direct Exorcist II: The Heretic, the 1977 sequel to William Friedkin’s 1973 blockbuster about demonic possession, The Exorcist. Boorman was hardly a novice. He even had two stone-cold classics, Point Blank and Deliverance, to his name.

Bumbershoot’s lineup is an unusually bookish bunch this year: Lucy Dacus has a famous Goodreads account with over 2,100 books cataloged, Noname founded a book club with chapters all over the country, Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna penned the memoir Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard is a fanboy of Jack Kerouac and Raymond Carver. To celebrate the upcoming festival, I gathered some of the headliners’ top literary picks.

Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end of summer, but don’t let that stop you from having a good time at events from the Seattle Indies Expo to Thunderpussy LIVE at the Colisevm of Art and from Rhinestone – A Celebration of Dolly Parton to MEZZFEST III. For more ideas, check out our top picks of the week. LIVE at the Colisevm of Art: Summer Music Series Do you like to consume art with a side of live music?

Fish fry: The first-of-its-kind light rail floating bridge is zapping the fish in Lake Washington. Sound Transit revealed its operations along I-90 have killed around 2,000 fish since the bridge opened in March—mostly perch and bass, but a few salmon are in the mix as well. Not killing fish was one of the requirements for the creation of the floating light rail bridge. The likely culprit are cables resting on the lake’s bottom.

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?