Tools
When: October 15, 9 pm
Where: Western Bridge, 3412 Fourth Ave S, 838-7444
What: A party with genius- level art, literature, film, and performance, as well as live music
Stranger Personals
"Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can," wrote the English poet Owen Meredith (who is sometimes credited, by people who mean to make light of his accomplishments, with the popularization of the girl's name Lucile). The French aristocrat and scientific theorist Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon said, "Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience," and the British philosopher Leslie Stephen said, "Genius is capacity for taking trouble," but Buffon was a man who had 57 bladder stones inside of him on the day he died, and Stephen was the father of Virginia Woolf, and look what happened to her. She filled her pockets with stones and walked into a river.
In other words, nobody who is anybody you would ever want to be knows what a genius is--except Gertrude Stein, who fully took credit for being one (and, by the way, had a weight problem)--but that isn't stopping The Stranger from giving out another round of Genius Awards. Every year (or until we're all done in by terrorists) The Stranger hands a $5,000 check to a visual artist, a theater artist, a writer, a filmmaker, and an arts organization we think is doing terrific work. Why? Because, as Emily Hall explained in announcing these awards last year, "In the delicate and slightly mysterious formula that dictates whether or not an arts scene becomes something to be taken seriously, money is just as crucial as high-mindedness, creativity, and skill. That the arts are lively in Seattle is a good start, but it takes investment, cold hard cash, to keep artists going."
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: What does it mean to be considered a genius by The Stranger? And, what do I mean by "terrific work"? These are excellent questions. In lieu of answering them, let me return to the question of why we're doing this in the first place. Seattle is either a big city or a small city, depending on how you view things, but it's a city, full of people and buildings and weirdness. It's packed to the hills with visual artists and theater artists and writers and filmmakers and arts organizations doing weird, wonderful things that we'd love to see more of. "Weird" is not the right word--I realize I'm pinning myself to the wall by trying to articulate what genius is, when no one knows what genius is except, again, Gertrude Stein--but think of it as an amalgam of the words "great," "unusual," "expansive," "arresting," and even "important."
One reason I keep bringing up Stein is because I'm stalling, and one reason I'm stalling is because it's difficult to talk about The Stranger's somewhat tense relationship with the arts in Seattle. Unlike everyone else in town, who can go to a reading or a screening or an opening and say, "Nice work!" even if they don't really think the work is nice at all--by the way, I'm paraphrasing Emily Hall again, who put this all so nicely last year--critics for The Stranger, as advocates for our readership, have to stand back and then publish exactly what we think of said reading/screening/opening, even when it's something we frankly hate. The Genius Awards, on the other hand, are about love. They're about recognizing the visual artists, theater artists, writers, filmmakers, and organizations we can't imagine doing without in this town. If we sometimes harp a little strongly on what we don't like about Seattle arts, the Genius Awards force us to turn that critical energy inside out--kind of like Borges' inverted birds, to grab a pretentious reference.
As Seneca pointed out, "There is no great genius without some touch of madness," which reminds me to mention that all of last year's Genius Award winners are still living. Susan Robb, who won the award last year in the visual artist category, is preparing for a solo show at Platform in 2005. Chris Jeffries, who won in the theater category (and is a theatrical composer--now you understand the usefulness of the evasive phrase "theater artist"), is currently overseeing workshop performances of his major new work The Horse Opera. Writer Matt Briggs has a novel called Shoot the Buffalo coming out in a few months. Filmmaker Web Crowell just finished his futuristic stop-motion robot movie Borrowing Time and is shopping it around to film festivals. Vital 5 and Velocity Dance Center, the organizations that split the organizational award last year, continue to produce outlandish multimedia and thoughtful dance events, respectively. Each of these individuals, in my definition of the word, is weird. All of them are geniuses.
Are you a genius? Is someone you know (or know about) a genius? These questions are important to us. The Stranger Genius Awards are modeled on the MacArthur "genius" awards--meaning that there is no application process and that the money comes with absolutely no strings attached--but, as we did last year, we're combining our expertise with yours (genius@thestranger.com) to tap a second generation of outstanding Seattle artists. (Last year, a tip from a reader led to us giving a Genius Award to someone we wouldn't have thought of on our own.) And, we sincerely hope you'll join us on the big night--Friday, October 15, at Western Bridge (3412 Fourth Ave S)--when we bestow a new round of honors on a new round of geniuses. The party will be open to the public, and all manner of musical artisans (i.e., bands and DJs) will perform, and some manner of refreshment (i.e., booze) will be served, and you and I and the good people of this city will dance and drink and lift our hats the way Schumann advocated the first time he heard a composition by that famous composer Chopin and exclaimed, probably drunkenly, "Hat's off, gentlemen--a genius!"
--Christopher Frizzelle
Arts Editor
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