Since I spent a lot of April traveling in Norway, I didn’t pitch as much as usual. But it doesn’t seem to have mattered, since I had ten stories publish in May. In case you missed any of them, here they are. (BTW, this new blog theme doesn’t underline links, and I think the slight difference in text color is too subtle. Until I figure out how to customize link appearance, please note that all titles are linked to the articles.)
Seattle Times
Writing for Seattle Times is still new and exciting for me, so I’ll lead with the pieces I wrote for them. Only a few days after I got back from Norway, I met up with Seattle Times’ drinks columnist to celebrate the Blue Moon Tavern’s 85th birthday. The result was a new addition to the Seattle Times’ Arts Outing series: Opera in a Dive Bar.
I’m so proud of the article about Seattle Symphony’s Lullaby Project, my first real reported piece for Seattle Times. It was an honor and a privilege to hear Shawna’s story and talk to the symphony musicians who have helped women experiencing homelessness write music for their children.
I’ve been reviewing opera performances for years here on the blog. But writing the city newspaper’s review of Seattle Opera’s Carmen feels like writing the official version. I hope I did it justice; writing a professional critique of a performance that I just wanted to squeal in delight over was a challenge.
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ParentMap
I got to write a review for ParentMap in May, too. Seattle Public Theater’s The Call was excellent theater, but its incisive exploration of the complexities of international, transracial adoption hit pretty close to home. I hope I did it justice; writing a professional critique of a performance that sent me home in tears was a challenge.
I love recommending books, and in preparation for summer vacation, I got to write a list pairing Books That Celebrate Summer Adventures with real-life local adventures.
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Earth911
On a related note, I got to do a book list for Earth911. Stop the Summer Eco-Slide lists summer reading books that will get kids excited about nature and the outdoors.
I also got to celebrate the winners of the Green Earth Book Awards, whose winners also aim to inspire the next generation of environmentalists.
Following up on the roofing buyers’ guide I wrote a while back, I reported on the longest-lasting roofing options in Lifetime Roofs. Following up on the dishwasher buyers’ guide, I looked at the Water vs. Energy trade-off.
The quest for meaningful blog data continues. The number of page views jumped 35% over April, but it was only a little bit more than March. So I don’t know. I published 15 posts in May, fewer than either April or March. Here are the most popular posts in May:
So I guess what I learned is that I should go back to writing about the Constitution and stop writing about music? And promoting posts on Instagram (except for music posts) seems to work.
I’ve already shared how a birthday party created a figure skating monster. The monster was fed the following spring when we traveled to China and visited Qingdao’s brand new MixC Mall, which housed an Olympic size rink. While part of the rink was blocked off for a dancing walrus, my daughter taught herself to skate in a pair of rental skates and summer capris. It was her second skate, and my first inkling that figure skating would become a major part of our lives.
A lot of people like folk museums for their down-to-earth “what life was like in the old days” approach to history. For me, the old days in question are never old enough. But when you’re traveling with a kid, the hands-on outdoor folk museum is kind of a no-brainer. Plus, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum) in Oslo has a stave church. Since we were on Bygdøy anyway, that was enough to merit a quick visit. Little did I know they’d have to push us out the door at closing time.
The Draw
The Norwegian folk museum is an open-air museum with 160 historic buildings, mostly built in the last 500 years. One exception is the Gol Stave Church, a main attraction at the museum that was built in the village of Gol sometime around 1200. There are also indoor exhibits featuring Norwegian folk costumes, folk art, church art and Sami culture. They offer hands-on activities for children, and docents in period dress demonstrate old skills and explain aspects of life in different epochs. My daughter requested participatory art experiences on our itinerary, and this sounded like the kind of museum where you might get to try working at a loom or braiding rope.
The Reality
The reality of Norway’s hard divide between high season and off season with no shoulder in between meant that there were no costumed docents walking around or doing demonstrations. The majority of the buildings were locked up and only visible from the outside or, if you were tall enough, by peeking through a window. Surprisingly, running around on a sunny spring day peeking into windows had tremendous appeal to my ten-year-old. All the patience she extended to me at the Viking Ship Museum was now repaid, as she attempted to peek into every single one of the 160 historic buildings onsite.
The promised petting zoo of farm animals appeared deserted, and to my eyes, the dozens of elevated, turf-roofed farm buildings quickly blurred together. But my daughter was having a blast, stopping to photograph architectural details on nearly identical buildings and cataloguing the contents observed through dirty windows. We both found the apartment buildings where each unit was decorated in the style of a different decade entertaining. And the stave church, well, it deserves its own subheading. By the time we got to the indoor exhibits there were only a few minutes left to closing. We had to breeze past exhibits on folk art, clothing, and Sami culture. Fortunately these overlapped a lot with exhibits at our own Nordic Heritage Museum back home, so we didn’t miss too much.
Gol Stave Church
You may have noticed that I am irreligious. I have to work at being open-minded enough to stay on the polite side of antireligious. I do appreciate architecture, but churches don’t usually do it for me. (Exceptions include St. Stephen’s in Vienna and the chapel at Seattle U, both of which I can appreciate for purely aesthetic reasons).
I say all this is to set up what a tremendous surprise it was to walk inside the tiny wooden Gol stave church and feel something. Yes, of course it was pretty. But there really was a special atmosphere inside that little 13th century village church. Only one other visitor entered while we were there. She stopped short just inside the door, said, “Wow,” and quickly dropped to the floor to take a picture of the roof.
Medieval cathedrals in mainland Europe awe with their immensity. But this tiny church creates the same sense of smallness inside a vast universe using a very tall, narrow space. It almost felt like standing inside a concentrated column of energy.
Unexpected Highs
One of my favorite things about travel is how you’re guaranteed to have moments you’ll never forget, but they are almost never the ones you planned for. I never expected to have a spiritual moment in a church of all places. And I never thought that running around looking in the windows of old buildings would keep my 10-year-old occupied in sheer delight for a whole afternoon. I can only imagine what highs we might have achieved if all the activities I was expecting had been available. But then again, maybe the magic lay in having acres of old Norway all to ourselves.
I moved to Seattle for the music. But for all its musical history, Seattle has always been a little weak in the heavy metal department. So it was an understatement to say that I was stoked with a new heavy metal festival started up in Seattle presented by No Clean Singing, the blog that has introduced me to most of the metal I’ve discovered in the last five or so years. But times being what they are, life got in the way and I missed the inaugural fest. It happened again the second year. But this year I finally managed to make it to one night at one of the venues. So here is my take on Northwest Terror Fest.
NWTF 101
Northwest Terror
Fest is a 3-day extreme metal festival in Seattle. More or less. There are
some peripheral sets that extend the duration a bit, and there are always a
couple bands on the line up that don’t fit the “extreme” label. They combine
some pretty big names like Pig Destroyer and Inter Arma with a bunch of
Northwest bands that may be less familiar (even to locals, since there aren’t
so many Seattle venues booking metal).
So far, it has always been the last weekend of May at the
joint Neumo’s/Barboza venue with a stage in each. You can buy a full festival
pass or tickets for individual days/stages. The prices are remarkably cheap,
especially for the full festival pass. One of these days, I’ll manage to clear
the whole weekend and take advantage of the savings.
What I Saw
This year I was only able to attend on Saturday night, and
with funds tight, I only bought tickets to the Barboza Stage. That means I got
to see five bands: Shrine of the Serpent, Immortal Bird, Eight Bells, Gadget,
and Khorada. As is often the case, I was most excited about the bands earlier
in the evening.
Shrine of the Serpent
Shrine of the Serpent out of Portland are crushingly heavy doom. As I wrote last week, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything this heavy capable of maintaining a melody before, which makes Shrine of the Serpent a festival highlight for me. I’ll be listening to them a lot in the weeks to come.
Immortal Bird
Immortal Bird was a grab bag of goodies that take it to eleven. Their tags on Bandcamp include black, death, grindcore, thrash, prog, and sludge, and they are all accurate. The amalgamation isn’t quite cohesive, but it is hella fun. Fronting the band with great stage presence, Rae Amity’s gnarly snarls really transformed it from a set to a show.
Eight Bells
Eight Bells certainly have their extreme moments, but they exist more to punctuate the otherworldly, post-black Portlandness of their spooky, atmospheric ballads. These are the witchy women the Eagles sang about. Anyone who has ever sat in a basement smoking pot, playing D&D, and listening Black Sabbath needs this band. If you think that sounds dismissive, please remember that Conan the Barbarian was my favorite movie when I was twelve. You can’t listen to this music without visions of swordsmen and sorcerers dancing in your head. After the intensity of Immortal Bird, this set was almost a palate cleanser. In daily life, Eight Bells is absolutely my jam.
Gadget
After Eight Bells, we left Barboza to grab tacos down the street. We got back just as Gadget was starting their set, but the crowd had filled in, and we didn’t feel like fighting to get up front. So I enjoyed the madness of Gadget from a comfy seat in the back with a girly drink. These Swedes had a similar approach to Immortal Bird, but where Immortal Bird sometimes stepped back, putting some variety into the dynamics, Gadget turned it up to eleven and broke the knob off.
What I saw during the Gadget set.
Khôrada
Khôrada seemed like a bit of an odd closer for a set of mostly extreme bands. But Khôrada comprises Agalloch members Don Anderson (guitar), Jason Walton (bass) and Aesop Dekker (drums) and Giant Squid guitarist/vocalist Aaron John Gregory. With a pedigree like that, I would have scheduled them to headline, too. Plus, there was a doomy cast to the overall lineup (and for passholders, it was the pause before the storm of Pig Destroyer headlining the upstairs venue) that fit with Khôrada’s gothy melancholy. That dark but not particularly heavy music doesn’t always do it for me, but there are times when it’s all I want to hear.
Unfortunately, Khôrada was having a little bit of trouble
with the sound, and we couldn’t hear the vocals for much of the set. Compared
to how tight and clear the rest of the sets sounded, it was a little bit of an
anti-climactic close to a really great line up. I kind of got the impression
that they haven’t quite gelled as a unit yet. I’ll be keeping an eye on them in
the future, though. With such high caliber musicians in the group, in a few
years I will probably be bragging about having seen them when.
Clockwork and Butter
Neumo’s and Barboza are two of my favorite Seattle venues,
even in earlier incarnations. Neumo’s has hosted some of my favorite shows of
all time. Barboza is a classic Seattle shoebox, but in a basement. That should
make it awful, but somehow it manages a classy, almost speakeasy vibe and
always has good sound. The two stages are in the same building, and the NWTF
set times are staggered so that passholders never need to choose between shows.
The Barboza lineup started at 5 pm and was done by 10:10,
and yes, the set times were that precise. Smooth as butter and regular as
clockwork, you’d never know NWTF was run by mostly people new to festival programming.
Maybe getting home before 11 isn’t very metal, but personally, I loved being
able to see five bands and still get a full night’s sleep.
Quality Humans
For years, I’ve had a fancy set of expensive ear plugs that
I keep in my purse at all times. But a while back the drawstring on their
little pouch broke, and sometime this winter, one of the ear plugs was lost. We
also keep a box of the cheap disposable kind in a cabinet by the door. But I
forgot that I emptied the box last year at Pickathon (so many families don’t
realize kids need ear protection for amplified music regardless of genre).
Which is a long way of saying that for the first time in years, I went to a
concert without ear plugs. Late in the evening, a man standing near me tapped
me on the shoulder and asked, “Do you need ear plugs?” and just handed me a
pair. It was a small act of kindness that exemplifies the generally friendlier
vibe of NWTF.
Quality Fest
They’ll talk about it when asked, but marketing materials for NWTF never mention feminism. It is a feminist festival, though. Three of the five bands I saw included women (one was female majority). That is a higher proportion of female artists than any other festival I’ve ever attended. I’ve been to festivals that didn’t have any female artists. So I know that the organizers had to work really hard to bring that kind of equality to their stage, and it’s even cooler that that they don’t pat themselves on the back for it. They’re just quality humans doing what everyone should be doing – booking the best bands they can get, which includes making the effort to reach good bands that get overlooked due to structural inequality in the industry.
One thing they do promote is their anti-harassment policy,
posting it on social media and all over the venue. The first time I saw that
was as Eistnaflug, the Icelandic metal festival that feels like a family
reunion (if you liked your whole family) and I thought it was brilliant. I’m
glad to see it’s catching on. I think I’m not the only one, either, as the
demographic mix of the audience was a lot more varied than you usually see at a
metal show.
{Aside: I don’t mean that the festival drew a bunch of
non-metalheads, either. I mean, it’s still a line up of extreme metal bands and
you’d have to be buried pretty deep to believe that there even is such a thing
as “posers” who pretend to like metal. Heavy metal is still not cool in the mainstream
world no matter how many Kardashians wear Slayer shirts on Instagram.}
My Kind of Fest
Pairing the anti-harassment policy with NWTF’s generally loose approach to rules (sure, bring a camera, stage-dive, whatever you want) gave the entire event a very grown-up vibe. You know, fine, if you’re a 21-year-old white dude who knows how to behave, come on in. But for once, here’s a festival for grown-ups who don’t have time for bullshit that distracts from the music, and like the music they like. That music just happens to sound like jackhammers and broken glass. And it is sweet to my ears.
Most weeks my music list includes some metal. But there were a couple weeks in May that I discovered so much metal I liked, it made sense to collect the bands in one post.
Krypts
Maybe food metaphors aren’t the most appropriate for an album called Cadaver Circulation but Krypts is all kinds of crunchy and chewy tastiness. Plus, that album cover is pretty, like the romantic landscape paintings my daughter fell in love with in Norway. Even if it is a picture of bones decaying in the forest. (And doesn’t that image recast the album title to something more ecological and less gruesome?)
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Aseethe
The hardcore-ish screams are not my usual taste, but in Throes they only serve to make the subsequent growls like falling rock in a subterranean cavern and chugging riffs even more satisfying than they already would have been. Aseethe build a very pleasing tension with their combination of things both grating and soothing.
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Isoctrilihum
I don’t appreciate a tongue-twister band names, but I will forgive Isoctrilihum because The Telluric Ashes of the Ö Vrth Immemorial Gods (and I am somehow susceptible to the overwrought album title, ever since Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…) is so good. When I was in India, I used to go to the beach and wade out to where the waves were breaking. I’d stand in the hip-high water and let the waves crash over me. Sometimes they pummeled me as they passed; sometimes picked me up in a dead man’s float; and sometimes knocked me end over end until I landed on my butt higher up the beach. That’s what this album feels like.
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Pound
I broke a personal rule when I wrote about the unGoogleable Pound before. At the time, only one song had been released, and I prefer to write about whole albums. But when a band fulfills the promise of its name so perfectly, exceptions must be made. Now the entire album named .. (yes, that’s dot dot) is up on Bandcamp. Give it a listen, and if you survive it, you’ll love it.
I’m a freelance content and grant writer sharing my work and my thoughts about books, music, and travel on this blog. If you want to know how I can help you share the things you care about, read more about me.
