Comedy/Bar Chat Up

We sat at neighboring tables while both our parties were late. I clocked you as ADHD and you had the same name as my friend. I’d love to chat more! ☺️

Riding the Gravy Train

We chatted at the Yung Gravy/bbno$ show in Seattle back in 2022. I asked you about your koi fish button down shirt bc I thought it was floral.

Of the thousands of bands I've talked to as a music journalist, somesurprises are the most soft-spoken. Their absolutely chill voices barely register on the playback of our interview, which took place in their Fremont rehearsal space, ExEx Audio. And this chillness seeps into the Seattle quartet's extraordinary music, which alchemizes a few of the finest rock strains—space, kraut, and shoegaze—into songs that massage your mind and tingle your body with subtle insistence.

Led by guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Natasha El-Sergany, somesurprises began as her bedroom solo project in 2012-2013. It expanded to a duo when guitarist/synthesist Josh Medina joined in 2015. The highly skilled rhythm section of bassist Laura Seniow and drummer Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy—who replaced Emma Danner and Nico Sophiea, respectively—fill out the lineup.

Celebrate Seattle's favorite holiday, 4/20, by blazing up and heading to one or more of the ultra chill events we've rounded up here, from Grass & Gas: 4/20 Celebration & Car Show with Sol and Chong the Nomad to Record Store Day and from 4/20 Feature: Reefer Madness (1936) and Stoned Shorts on 16mm to The Stranger's Pizza Week!

FRIDAY

PARTIES & NIGHTLIFE

Live Lasers to the Music of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department
Are you ready for it?! In honor of Taylor Swift releasing her eleventh album The Tortured Poets Department today, the Pacific Science Center's laser dome will "make the whole place shimmer" with an impromptu light show set to the album. Whether you consider yourself a Swiftie or not, I think it's time to enter your laser dome era! AUDREY VANN
(Laser Dome at Pacific Science Center, Uptown, $12-$15)

Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Amazon's Just Walk Out technology was not run by robots, but by the eyes of "1,000 workers in India who review what you pick up, set down, and walk out of its stores with." And so what looked like a new trick was in fact old hat. The work of American cashiers and attendants (a high-income society) had simply been, like service-related jobs, offshored to India (a low-income society). And this transference of services from one economic zone to another is only about one thing: wage arbitrage. 

The Seattle-based heterodox economist Alan Harvey put it this way in his excellent little book Demand Side Economics: Demand Side Minds.

Explicit in the new globalization is the free flow of capital and the opening and integration of markets. And while "trade" denotes an exchange, the current phenomenon is one of arbitrage of labor, regulation, currencies and financial instruments. Arbitrage is taking advantage of the price differences between two or more markets.

Amazon recently admitted that it does use humans in this technology, but only to train AI. In the near future, the tech corporation promises, humans will be completely replaced by robots. Nevertheless, Amazon is removing the Just Walk Out technology from its Amazon Fresh stores and replacing it with the Dash Cart, which is, in essence, a modification of the self-checkout kiosks found in most grocery stores. (Self-checkout, like the Dash Cart, transfers the paid labor of a cashier to the unpaid labor of a shopper—an extreme form of wage arbitrage.) 

After a relentless campaign from big corporations, the Seattle City Council appears poised to repeal or dramatically cut a minimum wage ordinance for gig workers known as “Pay Up,” which took effect this year. But interviews with the gig workers themselves reveal that the corporatist council might make that extreme decision despite missing a big piece of the puzzle.

Israel retaliates, strikes Iran: In a response to Iran's strike on Israel last weekend, which was in itself a response to an Israel attack on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria earlier this month, Israel launched a drone attack against a military base and nuclear site near the city of Isfahan. Israel's allies urged against this retaliation. Now, more world leaders are calling for both Iran and Israel to chill out, take some deep breaths, and not vault this thing into another all-out war in the region. 

Israel also sent drones to southern Syria: However, the drones caused only material damage. 

Meanwhile, on Friday, the Group of Seven foreign ministers chastised Iran for its attack on Israel earlier this week and dangled a threat of new sanctions.

Rap’s auto-tune auteur Future is coming to Seattle with Metro Boomin to support their second collaborative album, We Still Don't Trust You. Fresh off the Coachella mainstage with Lana Del Rey, Jon Batiste has announced a local stop on his Uneasy tour. Plus, corny dad joker Kevin Hart will attempt maturity on his Acting My Age tour. Read on for details on those and other newly announced events, plus some news you can use.

Tickets go on sale at 10 am unless otherwise noted.

ON SALE FRIDAY, APRIL 19

MUSIC

Alejandro Escovedo
The Crocodile (Sat July 27)

The Aristocrats: The Duck Tour 2024
Neumos (Thurs Aug 22)
On sale at noon

Avatar: The Last Airbender in Concert
Moore Theatre (Sat Nov 9)

Oneohtrix Point Never, the moniker of Daniel Lopatin, may not be a household name, but you’ve likely heard his work. The Massachusetts-raised producer and composer is a longstanding pioneer of the electronic scene. Having created a variety of scores for heavy-hitting Hollywood scripts—including Good Times (2017), Uncut Gems (2019), and The Curse (2024)—Lopatin has climbed into the captain’s chair of his own genre. 

Lopatin credits science fiction, philosophy, and “all the strange moments from Beatles songs” as primary influences. Drawing upon shoegaze, jazz, hip-hop, and more, OPN offers a spiritual (and at times unsettling) experience. You won’t hear Lopatin’s voice too often and you may not even see his face, but you will certainly fall entranced by his cybernetic reality.

Stylistically, LA stand-up comedian/writer Logan Guntzelman is the anti-Jim Carrey, the polar opposite of Robin Williams. She doesn't manically gesticulate, doesn't contort her face, and she eschews impressions. Rather, she delivers jokes—sometimes quite dirty jokes—in a deep-voiced deadpan and with a poker face, succeeding on the sheer strength of her words and setups.

Guntzelman's lack of effect compounds the hilarity of what she's imparting in an act that's heavy on self-deprecation and worst-case scenarios (for her, mostly). It should be noted that in the venerable history of diarrhea jokes, Guntzelman has told the most solid one I've ever heard—and I've heard a lot. (Speaking of which, you can follow Logan on Instagram @placesitookashitthisyear.)

Weather: Who’s trying to have a frozen margarita on a rooftop tonight? WHO? Okay, maybe not frozen, but with the sun in full view and temperatures in the low 60s, I think outdoor drinking weather is truly upon us. Maybe Friday we can spring for the blended drinks since temperatures will be in the mid 60s. Check an actual weather website because this shit is subject to change as I’ve learned from spreading weather misinfo in Slog AM in the past. 

Around town: Of course, there’s other things to do around Seattle that do not involve a $16 alcoholic beverage in the sun. Check out EverOut for the best recommendations for how to fill your free time. Tonight you could go see indie rock band Sheer Mag at Vera Project or 4/20's Eve Eve Comedy Show at the Crocodile. 

My husband and I opened the doors of our home to you and your family. For years we were there for you. We gave you a job, helped you with your kids and your boyfriend. You lived with us until we helped you find a place of your own. Then we babysat for you for free. 

WEDNESDAY 4/17  

Oneohtrix Point Never: Again Tour

(MUSIC) Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin) is part of that elite club of challenging, electronic musicians who've gone on to score high-profile movies, which includes Mica Levi, Robert A.A. Lowe, and Bobby Krlic. (Even stranger, Lopatin also was the musical director for the Weeknd's 2021 Super Bowl half-time performance.) The Brooklyn-based composer's early work—desolate, alienating, oft-times abrasive—didn't exactly foreshadow a side hustle soundtracking big-budget Hollywood films such as Good Time and Uncut Gems, but here we are. These cinematic assignments revealed OPN's deft grasp of Tangerine Dream-like atmosphere-conjuring. This work has slowed OPN's solo output, but 2020's Magic Oneohtrix Point Never and 2023's Again demonstrate his growing interest in skewed synth-pop and rock, submerging uncanny melodies in disorienting structures, transmuting nostalgic memories of cheesy radio fodder into futuristically warped facsimiles of same. This show will focus on Again's 13 orchestrated oddities. "Modular princess" Arushi Jain, who fuses elements of Indian classical music with beautiful ambience, opens. (Neptune Theatre, 1303 NE 45th St, 7 pm, $35-$41, all ages) DAVE SEGAL

In a world where arts and culture is often devalued, there is truly nothing like going out to experience the transformative power of cinema at a festival. The vast medium boasts works that can move us to tears just as it does those that may melt your face off. This year, the 50th Annual Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) has films that do each of those things and, in extra special cases, both at the same time.

Taking place in theaters from May 9-19 and virtually May 20-27, SIFF's got a whole lot in store—261 films in total. Not only is it a really strong year of films, but the even better news is the SIFF Cinema Workers Union recently ratified their first contract after coming together to form a union last year. Now that they’ve got better working conditions and the full lineup is out, with tickets currently on sale for members before being available to the public starting Thursday (all of which can be purchased online through their website or at any SIFF venue), here are some of the standouts you won’t want to miss.

I did not know how Pacific Northwest Ballet could improve on its production of The Seasons' Canon, the ballet that took my head off when it premiered in Seattle a couple years ago, but improve it they did. 

Last time, PNB Artistic Director Peter Boal & Co. paired choreographer Crystal Pite's masterful, hyperkinetic meditation on nature with some very good but more or less disconnected ballets. This time, the program felt so cohesive it amounted to a religious experience—one that, incidentally, might best be experienced from the cheap seats.