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With no fanfare, the last remnant of the League of Fringe Theaters disappeared at the end of March. The once-ambitious organization founded the Seattle Fringe Theater Festival, and was intended to advocate for small theaters and help them pool resources. In recent years, however, LOFT had tapered down to just running an audition hotline. LOFT eventually threw in the towel, nominally joining forces with Theater Puget Sound, an organization dominated by representatives of equity theaters. At that time the hotline was taken over by Ellen Taft. The final nail was put in LOFT's coffin when Taft announced the closure of the hotline on March 28. Taft said that actors were calling the hotline, but theaters weren't sending her press releases, and between the equity hotline, individual theater hotlines, and one run by The Seattle Times, it didn't seem worth the time and effort.
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The Seattle International Film Festival's a month away from its opening, which makes it a perfect time for hot, groundless rumors. The best I've heard is that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace will have its world premiere as the opening night movie, May 13 at the Paramount. The timing is right--Phantom Menace opens nationwide on May 19--but Tuesday's report in the Seattle Times that the Cinerama would host a benefit screening of the movie on the 16th makes that unlikely. It's not a rumor that SIFF will hold a series of screenings at the reopened Cinerama, including the Seattle premiere of local filmmaker Gregg Lachow's long-awaited third feature, Money Buys Happiness, which will have its world premiere April 18 at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival.
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It's hard to imagine a better parody of the excesses of new music (or what the local zine Tentacle refers to as "creative music") than Electric Eel, a 1998 CD on John Zorn's Tzadik label that I picked up based solely on the cover art. Turns out, this seven-song CD was recorded entirely on electric Jew's harps. Electric Jew's harps, you ask? They use electromagnets to vibrate the spring, freeing the musicians of the exhausting task of plucking them.