Belltown Bloom is the passion project of sisters Valerie and Veronica Topacio, and the annual music festival has blossomed quite a bit over the years. You might recognize their names—you’ve likely seen them play across Seattle or even heard them on KEXP in their band La Fonda, a feel-good, femme-fronted, indie rock dream team. What started as a hyperlocal fest in 2019, Belltown Bloom has recently drawn in big-name acts including L7, Pussy Riot, Alvvays, and Crumb to name a few, but while the festival has grown in size and support, the Topacio sisters have maintained its DIY spirit. They're the ones painting cardboard cutouts of planets, attaching sweet little clouds to stages, or adorning walls with twinkling lights all while booking a festival that takes over all three of the Crocodile's stages. Festival-goers can bop between Here-After, Madame Lou’s, and the Croc's mainstage throughout the two-day fest and catch some bands who may be playing their first show and others who are playing their 1,000th! Belltown Bloom specially curates each bill to support womxn artists, as well as those in the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities, and this year, the Topacio sisters focused in on electronic, techno, and avant-garde acts. It feels near impossible to narrow down my favorites from last weekend, but alas, here are five performances I can’t stop thinking about:

I hurried through the arboretum. I caught glimpses of the fresh blooms in Rhododendron Glen. I paid tribute to the last petals clinging to the towering camellia bushes as I brushed past. 

Breathing heavy, I jogged into the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association (PSBA) apiary. For my latest exploration into Seattle subcultures, I got into the hives with Seattle’s hobbyist beekeepers. 

Former apiary manager and 12-year veteran hobbyist beekeeper Maureen Sullivan asked that I not reveal the exact apiary location because the last time someone wrote about the apiary, queen bees from three hives went missing. And queens are expensive. These ones were around $60 a queen.

“People came in and stole them,” Sullivan said. (If you are reading this, please do not steal any queens.)

“We can’t have this fenced off,” she gestured to the grassy area lined with stacks of bee boxes. “There’s been damage, people tip hives while jumping over them—frat boys. It’s really sad.”

Thunderpussy almost didn’t make it.

The future looked bright for the band when they released their debut full-length Thunderpussy in 2018. They earned critical acclaim for their riff-filled brand of ’70s-inspired rock, got featured in Rolling Stone as Mike McCready’s “favorite new band,” and ended the year signing to a major label, Republic Records’s subsidiary Stardog.

In the years that followed, though, things took a turn. It wasn’t clear whether the band would ever release a second record, let alone exist. But, after years full of heartbreak, loss, and uncomfortable but necessary metamorphosis, Thunderpussy are back, they’re stronger than ever, and they’re ready to blow the lid off Benaroya Hall in May.

Happy Monday! Start your week off right with our roundup of all the best things to do, from the kick-off of the 2024 Seattle International Film Festival to Thunderpussy with the Seattle Symphony and from Michelle Wolf to Melanie Martinez: The Trilogy Tour. Still sorting out your Mother's Day plans? Check out our calendar for ideas.

MONDAY

FILM

Uncropped with Tricia Romano
Former Stranger editor-in-chief Tricia Romano, who recently penned The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, will offer an in-person Q&A session at this screening of the Wes Anderson-produced documentary Uncropped. The flick follows "legendary" Village Voice photojournalist James Hamilton, whose subjects included everyone from Hitchcock and Meryl Streep to LL Cool J. Hamilton reflects on the coolest collaborators and most notable images of his 40-year career, which spanned New York City's "heyday" of alternative print media. LINDSAY COSTELLO
(Grand Illusion, University District)

Zebra nabbed: All illegal frolics must come to an end. On Friday, a group of "ordinary folks" and animal control wrangled the North Bend zebra, who had been on the loose for about a week after escaping from a trailer. Apparently, the zebra, who locals dubbed Z, is actually named Sugar, or Shug, for short. Shug's off to Montana now, the place she and her zebra friends were headed when they broke loose from the trailer transporting them last week. 

Israel ground invasion seems imminent: Israel ordered the evacuation of around 100,000 Palestinians living in Rafah, the southern city in Gaza where 1.4 million Palestinians originally fled to avoid conflict with Israel. Now, Israel is telling people in parts of Rafah to evacuate to Muwasi, an Israel-declared humanitarian zone already packed with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in squalid conditions. With these evacuation orders, an Israel ground invasion into Rafah seems imminent despite warnings from Israel's international allies. 

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, Sam Miller, our scheduled comedy headliner, will not be able to perform as originally planned.

In place of Sam, we are thrilled to announce that Dewa Dorje and Derek Sheen—two former beloved comedy Geniuses—have been added to the lineup. These two incredibly funny humans are sure to bring you some laughs along with our other Geniuses!

NEW OPENINGS 

Jack's BBQ
Jack Timmons's Texas-style barbecue joint plans to debut a new Eastside location next Thursday, May 9, serving steak, fried chicken, and breakfast tacos in addition to its signature smoked meats.
Redmond

The last time I saw Lesley Hazelton was around 7 pm on December 5, 2023. I remember the time and day because we and others were in Fremont celebrating the launch of Blaise Aguera y Arcas's book Who Are We Now? All I remember of her that night was her energy, which was the same energy she expressed when I first met her in 1995 at a literary event in the Ruins. The energy is not easy to describe. It was so many things at once: funny, deadly serious, raw, sophisticated, and in the moment. When speaking to her, I always felt the past and future dissolve into the intensity of the here and now. And this intensity was found in her books, the most recent of which were biographies of long-gone religious figures: Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen, Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother, and The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad. In the way she breathed life into a moment, she breathed life into her historical subjects. She made Jezebel a living being. The same goes with her approach to religion (she once wanted to be a rabbi but instead became an accidental theologist—the name of a blog ran between 2010 and 2017). With her, divinity was as real as her hair, the cigarette she was lighting, a book on her mind, the city that surrounded Lake Union and her houseboat.  

On Saturday, May 4, some of the Pacific Northwest's funniest people will take the stage at the Egyptian Theatre as part of The Stranger's Undisputable Geniuses of Comedy showcase. Andy Iwancio! Dan Hurwitz! Chris Mejia! Monica Nevi! Juno Men! Bernice Larson! Kermet Apio! And headliner Sam Miller! Plus, the whole night will be hosted by Emmett Montgomery, beloved weirdo, host of Friendship Dungeon and Joketellers Union, and one of 2023's Undisputable Geniuses.

It's going to be very funny! I hope you come! Tickets are available here! Exclamation points!

Glass Beams, "Snake Oil" (Ninja Tune)

Unlike most musicians today, Melbourne, Australia trio Glass Beams understand the power of mystery. At a time when everyone in the biz is hustling overtime for increasingly diminishing revenues and fans seek access to and info about their fave bands on social media 24/7, Glass Beams remain an enigma—a very popular enigma, garnering over one million monthly $p0t1fy listeners and selling out shows worldwide. They achieved all this despite rejecting the modern playbook for entertainment-industry success. (Only founding member Rajan Silva's name is known. A web search yields one interview with him—in Rolling Stone India.) You gotta love Glass Beams' quiet rebellion... and their fantastic music, too. 

Citing Indian luminaries Ananda Shankar (Ravi's nephew), R.D. Burman, and Kalyanji-Anandji as inspirations, Silva and band debuted with 2021's Mirage EP, a mesmerizing strain of psychedelic funk that hits with more mystical force than obvious sonic cousins Khruangbin. Glass Beams don't have a vocalist, per se, but they do incorporate chants and glossolalia as yet another instrument and mysterious layer in their rich aural tapestries. 

To Tony Sparks, author of Tent City, Seattle: Refusing Homelessness and Making a Home, the self-governing tent encampment Tent City 3 is as iconic and integral to the city’s social fabric as the Space Needle. Made possible by a 2002 consent decree that allowed the group to live legally on privately held land for 90 days at a time—the first such move by any US city—the camp is a “regular feature of Seattle’s neighborhood landscape,” Sparks writes, due to its “persistent peripatetic existence.”

As a graduate student at the University of Washington in the mid-aughts, Sparks lived in Tent City 3 for seven months, contributing as other residents do to the encampment’s ongoing maintenance and negotiation with landowning religious groups, city officials, service providers, NIMBY neighbors, and others governing the place of Tent City 3 and its residents. Tent City, Seattle, which Sparks says he began writing in 2020 “entirely as a rage piece,” is the culmination of that work. It argues that self-governance lets encampment residents rebuke how housed people and homelessness services perceive them, opening up cracks in the colonially determined ways Seattle governs shelter and movement. 

Let's go back to the critics of Kshama Sawant. They were, if you remember, in the habit of describing her as divisive. What was meant by this? Just one thing: She totally represented the interests of the destitute and working poor. Sawant had nothing to offer the rich. Nothing. Why? Because they already have everything: political power, economic power, and power over the distribution of mainstream information. Today, the only member of our City Council who comes close to Sawant's political program and positions is Council Member Tammy Morales. She beat the Republican Tanya Woo by 2 points. This makes the district she represents—composed of "Rainier Beach, Beacon Hill, Columbia City, Hillman City, Othello, [and the like]"—the baddest ("...not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good") part of town. And as one who lives in Columbia City, I can confirm there's great pride in this fact. A pride that grows as the majority of the Council regresses to the Lilliputian weltanschauung of Jonathan Choe and Brandi Kruse.

Whether you're putting the finishing touches on your weekend plans or you have no idea what you're doing right after you shut your laptop on Friday, we're here to help. We'd like to suggest cheap and easy events from Windermere Cup Week to the Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month Celebration and from Free Comic Book Day to Fogón's 2nd Annual Cinco de Mayo Block Party. For more ideas, check out our guide to the top events of the week and our Cinco de Mayo calendar.

FRIDAY

LIVE MUSIC

Kassi Valazza with Bart Budwig and Mike Giacolino
I love it when artists reference their own names (see: Caroline Polachek's "Caroline Shut Up," Cardi B's "Bartier Cardi" or Harry Styles’ latest album, Harry's House). So, when I saw that Kassi Valazza's new album was called Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing, I was immediately bewitched. The album doesn’t disappoint, with British folk-inspired tunes that explode into spellbinding psychedelic jams. However, it's Valazza's timeless vocals, which bring to mind folk greats like Joan Baez, Buffy Saint Marie, and Iris Dement, that make the album an instant classic. She will play songs from the album after opening sets from indie-Americana singer-songwriters Bart Budwig and Mike Giacolino. AUDREY VANN
(Sunset Tavern, Ballard, $15-$17)

On Saturday, May 4, some of the Pacific Northwest's funniest people will take the stage at the Egyptian Theatre as part of The Stranger's Undisputable Geniuses of Comedy showcase. Andy Iwancio! Dan Hurwitz! Chris Mejia! Monica Nevi! Juno Men! Bernice Larson! Kermet Apio! And headliner Sam Miller! Plus, the whole night will be hosted by Emmett Montgomery, beloved weirdo, host of Friendship Dungeon and Joketellers Union, and one of 2023's Undisputable Geniuses.

It's going to be very funny! I hope you come! Tickets are available here! Exclamation points!

UPDATE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, Sam Miller is unable to perform at Saturday's showcase. We are thrilled to announce that Dewa Dorje and Derek Sheen, two of our 2023 comedy geniuses, will now be joining us!