The Crosscut Blog

An evening with David Mamet is never a lighthearted romp, but Balagan Theatre’s offering of Edmond was a riveting descent into the sleazy hells of urban angst. Those who had the stomach for it were rewarded with a remarkable experience delivered by skilled, thoroughly prepared young actors under the stunning direction of Lithuanian-trained Paul Budratis. Budratis also created the intimate, spare, stage space that thrust Edmond’s demons right into your lap.

The 11-member cast was superbly balanced. Sam Hagen, as Edmond, displayed an extraordinary range of ennui, rage, yearning, and naiveté. Always onstage in all 21 scenes of ...

The lineup for the 2010 Sasquatch! Music Festival will be announced Monday (Feb. 15) at the Crocodile during the Sasquatch! Launch Party, which will feature Surfer Blood, Atlas Sound and Seattle's own Fresh Espresso.

Tickets for the event are free and can be picked up at Easy Street Records beginning Friday (Feb. 12) with a limit of two per person, or you can win tickets by listening to 107.7 The End. The launch party will be hosted by Luke Burbank and it marks the first time the festival's lineup will be announced live. I would've gone ...

Tuesday night the UW NextCity lecture series will feature Geoffrey Canada speaking on “Leveling the Playing Field: Helping Poor Children Succeed.” For 20 years Canada has led Harlem Children’s Zone, described in The New York Times Magazine as "one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time." The work has convinced him that the lives of impoverished, at-risk inner-city kids can be changed — if their schools, families, and neighborhoods all change at once.

Canada’s acclaimed Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America draws on a childhood in the South Bronx that did not ...

Ten years ago, PAC-10 athletic directors voted 8-2 not only to add a post-league-play men’s basketball tournament starting in 2002 but to enshrine the event at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. That "8-2" would amount to surpassing numbers were it the league record of one of this season's PAC-10 teams. As of end-of-play Saturday, though, the best any of the men’s contingents can claim is Cal’s 7-4, with five — yes, five — clubs, including the UW Dawgs (after trouncing both Arizona programs), at 6-5.

Most notable local stat beyond the Huskies' 16-7 overall record: The Washington ...

Garry Wills, one of his generation’s greatest nonfiction writers, will talk Tuesday at Town Hall Seattle about his latest book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. In the book, Wills argues that the atomic era's rise of presidential power has led to a secrecy-obsessed state that is far from the founders’ vision. The historian and journalist regrets the erosion of congressional authority to declare war, replaced by executive decisions.

In a well-written but puzzlingly bland New York Times Sunday Book Review article two weeks ago, the eminent journalist Walter Isaacson reviewed both Wills’ book ...

Sources from the Winter Olympics report that one of the hottest, or perhaps coldest (these are the winter games, after all), tickets is to the curling competition. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who views curling as the quintessential sport for the host nation of Canada.

Curling, that is, combines the distinctly Canadian pastimes of bowling and housework, all of it done while people and objects glide on ice. Couldn’t be more Canadian, one would imagine, if it were done while wearing plaid flannel shirts and sensible shoes and washing down beef stew with beer, eh?

Of course, as anybody ...

While tourism and hospitality folks in Western Washington are wondering whether winter sports fans will trickle south before and after the 2010 Olympic Winter Games that open Feb. 12 in Vancouver, Spokane has been silently gloating about its second successful hosting of the 2010 U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

The Lilac City first hosted the championships in 2007, attracting an attendance of 154,893, which shattered the record set by Los Angeles in 2002. And for 11 days in January, Washington state's second-largest city scored again by hosting the pre-Olympics event. That's when 158,170 fanatical figure-skating fans ...

“It's fun to have a bill that feels like it has momentum,” says Brendon Cechovic of Washington Conservation Voters. This is something different from the proposed $1.50-per-barrel oil fee to fund stormwater projects that Cechovic and his colleagues took to Olympia a few weeks back. That would have raised an estimated $120 million per year.

It was probably the enviros' most ambitious effort in this hard-times legislative session. They no longer plan to introduce it. What happened? Cechovic explains that key legislators said this just didn't seem like the year to pass such a bill. So the ...

Washington Law & Politics, the feisty, informative quarterly magazine for lawyers in the state, will be folding. The last issue will be the Spring edition. Staff were informed yesterday. I'm sad to see it go, not only because I have been writing the political column there for the last few years, but because it lived up to its cheeky motto: "Only our name is boring."

The news comes on the heels of word that its parent publication, Minnesota Law & Politics, has folded. The parent company, Key Professional Media of Minneapolis, kept the magazine going in part because of the success ...

This Friday night (Feb. 5), Seattle’s FM airwaves will crackle once again with the sound of live classical music, performed by the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra under the direction of Allan Dameron. PNB will perform Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty at McCaw Hall, and KING-FM 98.1 (also online at king.org) will present the audio portion live beginning at 7:30 pm. Forward into the past!

Live broadcasts of classical music were a mainstay of radio in the 1930s and 1940s, and represented the high hopes that many scholars and social critics had in those days for what ...

Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin reads Thursday night at Town Hall to benefit the nonprofit Copper Canyon Press, one of the region’s premier literary publishing houses. Merwin’s newest collection, The Shadow of Sirius, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize — his second Pulitzer. Come hear how the lines of one of America's finest poets, writing at the peak of his craft, stream like unstoppable currents that pull us into a speaking intimacy: the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud / through which the morning slowly comes to itself / and the ancient defenses against the dead / will be ...

Saturday night's marvelous performance of two plays by Harold Pinter played to a sold-out house at ACT's Bullitt Cabaret theater space. Afterward, two of the founders of this new company devoted to Pinter's works, actor Frank Corrado and director Victor Pappas, conducted a short conversation with each other and the audience. What they said was very cheering in these dark times for the arts and in the post-Pinter tristesse.

They talked about how tough it is for theater artists to get enough work these days, how easy it would be to settle into victimhood and self-pity. Instead ...

It's a name that, like a migrating gas bubble, triggers a light sense of nausea: Ken Behring, Seattle's Walter O'Malley wannabe circa 1997.

The name of the Seahawks' former owner, who schemed to move the team to Oakland more than a decade ago, is now be-marbled on the Smithsonian Institution like a Roman god. Maybe to expiate for his venture in NFL pirating (among other sins) Behring ponied up a record $80 million in 2000 to establish the Ken Behring Center at ...