RALPH PUGAY Performance, 2013. The artist will be showing at SAM starting October 16.
  • Courtesy of the artist
  • RALPH PUGAY Performance, 2013. The artist will be showing at SAM starting October 16.

Ralph Pugay Wins the Betty Bowen: The disturbo-pop Portland painter gets $15,000 and an exhibition at Seattle Art Museum opening October 16. Winners of the Special Recognition Awards ($2,500 each) are Gretchen Frances Bennett and Klara Glosova.

Songs in the Key of OHMYGOD: Stevie Wonder is doing a series of concerts in which he'll perform Songs in the Key of Life in its entirety in fewer than a dozen American cities and Seattle is one of them.

Black Up: For those who do not know, Alexander Weheliye ‏is a talented theorist of black culture, the Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, and the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. For those who do not know, The Black Scholar journal, which has its roots in the Bay Area, and is one of the most respected "journals of black culture and political thought in the United States," is currently run by a University of Washington professor, Laura Chrisman, who is also the daughter of its founding editor, Robert Chrisman. For those who may not know, Weheliye is the guest editor of the current issue of The Black Scholar, which examines black studies in the context of a society that has failed to become post-racial. The feeling is that black studies, like black life, is not taken seriously. The issue, as you can see, is timely.

Have You Read Carolina Miranda's Koons Poem?: It's made of phrases from the reviews of the Jeff Koons retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art this summer. Take these lines:

Silliness, shininess, filled with flops,
with waxed chest and having anal sex

Thomas Pynchon on Watts in 1966: This knockout piece by the author of Gravity's Rainbow and V has been making the rounds since Ferguson, but in case you missed it, you should really read it. Pynchon is narrating Watts a year after the riots, when the do-gooding social workers have moved in—"innocent, optimistic child-bureacrats"—but can't seem to figure out why everything's not just getting all better.

John Updike Was Not "A Penis With A Thesaurus"! He Wasn't!: New Republic writer William Deresiewicz defends a book that defends one of the most popular and critical novelists of the 20th century. Rescue poor John Updike from the iron grip of identity politics! (The penis descriptor is always wrongly attributed to David Foster Wallace.)

New Money Available from the Rauschenberg Foundation: Robert Rauschenberg is giving grants to artists and artist-activists from the grave. It's just the kind of guy he is.