• There's no other way to say it: The Lo-Fi Arts Festival at Smoke Farm over the weekend was disappointing. And expensive. And soggy. And mosquito-besieged. It wouldn't have mattered that it cost $30 to get in (plus $20 per car), or that it rained a little bit in the morning, or that the mosquitoes were chomping right through bug spray, if the art had been good, but alas, it wasn't. Recalling previous incarnations of the Lo-Fi Arts Festival induced utter sadness—performers like Zoe Scofield and Implied Violence have made pieces that burned themselves onto people's brains in that environment. Nothing of that caliber happened this year, and the curation team walking around bragging about how awesome the curation team was didn't help matters. (Organizers note that the ticket price was lower than last year, no one gets paid, and proceeds go to Smoke Farm.) Children seemed to be loving it, though. After one embarrassing piece, we overheard a mom in a neighboring area instructing her kids: "Clap for our neighbor! Yay for our neighbor!" This caused someone to wonder aloud if they should rename it the Yay for Our Neighbor Arts Festival.
• Some news leaked last weekend from Salinger, the much-anticipated J. D. Salinger biography coauthored by UW professor David Shields: At least five new books by Salinger are scheduled to be published starting in 2015. A new World War II– era photo of the reclusive author, uncovered during research for the book, was also published online. The young, smiling Salinger, lounging on a Jeep during the liberation of Paris, looks positively hunky. Salinger will be released on September 3.
• Seattle artist Ruthie V. will paint your portrait as part of her great show at Shift Studio (south side of the TK Building in Pioneer Square). Originally, the portraits were free, but the overwhelming response meant she had to try to slow it down with a $25 fee: She's done dozens so far. The watercolors, as Jen Graves wrote recently, magically contain exactly "the minimum number of strokes possible to transfer this human to this paper." Bring your father, mother, and brother, and you can end up with a family portrait; after the show ends on August 31, you get to take it home. Also: Don't miss her painting of a dog, with a series of improbable brush strokes adding up to exactly fur.
• This week, playwright Paul Mullin, winner of a Stranger Genius Award in 2008, announced he has finished his final full-length script, Philosophical Zombie Killers, which will have a reading on September 14 at Freehold Theater. "The day after this reading," he wrote on his blog Just Wrought, "I will officially step away from the theater" to work on other unspecified projects. "I have no plans to return."
• ACT Theater has begun selling all its day-of tickets as pay-what-you-can. ACT spokesperson Mark Siano says the program has worked, with the average person paying $15 (though some pay as much as $100) and an average of 400 PWYC attendees per production. "The patron base for PWYC," he wrote in an e-mail, "are artists and patrons who have no history of full-price purchases (i.e., they cannot/will not pay regular prices)." 
