Hello and welcome to the 2008 Stranger Genius Awards. For the sixth
year in a row, The Stranger has scoured the city for the most
beguiling, brain-tingling, smartest, and best work in theater,
literature, film, and visual art, and now we present to you our
findings: Seattle’s (and indeed, the world’s) newest certified
Geniuses. Each of these five recipients is rewarded with the only thing
that really matters: money. A check for $5,000. And a fucking cool
party thrown in their honor. A party the whole city is invited to.
Which includes you.

The party is on Saturday, September 13, at the Moore Theatre, that
100-year-old beauty, and we have the whole building. You would like to
dance onstage? You may. You would like to wander up to the third
balcony with your drink and your date? Now you’re talking! There’s a
VIP party for the Geniuses first—to enter to win a pair of VIP
tickets, e-mail your first and last name to lineout@thestranger.com with “VIP
Genius” in the subject line by Friday at 5:00 p.m.—and doors open
to the public at 9:00 p.m. (Get there promptly! The party will already
be under way!) Emerald City Soul Club will be spinning throughout the
night, and live entertainment includes the exuberant hiphop of Dyme
Def, the court-jester surrealism of Daedelus, and the hot-shit electro
soul of James Pants. And it’s free.

And now for your questions. Do the Geniuses get to spend their money
however they want? They do. There really aren’t strings attached? There
really aren’t. So they can use it to take a trip, put a new floor in
their studio, or get a younger and fresher face? Yes, yes, if that’s
what they want, yes. Is there an application process? Nope. After a
year’s worth of cramming our eyes and ears with as much new local work
as we can—and writing about it in this newspaper and on
Slog—our critics (and our readers) have a richer, truer
impression of what’s happening around us than an arts-grant panelist
sitting in a blank room somewhere.

That isn’t to say our internal deliberations aren’t tense. This year
we conducted
them in a hot-air balloon careening dangerously
toward a melting glacier on Mount Rainier, because Jen Graves can’t
steer. The conversation in the basket was a prickly, squirmy,
don’t-you-take-that-tone-with-me near-bloodbath. Every year among The
Stranger’s arts staff, tears are shed and fingers are pointed, but,
eventually, consensus or a reasonable facsimile thereof is reached.
Among this year’s hot-button issues: Does worldly success knock a
would-be Stranger Genius out of the running? Should the award be won
for glorious existing work or given to an artist whose brain shows the
richest promise? And does a group of theatrical anarchists qualify as
an “arts organization”?

Answers to these questions and many more can be found in the
following pages, where each of 2008’s Stranger Geniuses is profiled in
full, alongside shortlists of notable artists in each genre.

See you at the party.

—Paul Constant, Christopher Frizzelle, Jen Graves, Brendan
Kiley, Charles Mudede, David Schmader, Annie Wagner, Lindy West

Christopher Frizzelle was The Stranger's print editor, and first joined the staff in 2003. He was the editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2016, and edited the story by Eli Sanders that won a 2012 Pulitzer...

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

10 replies on “The Stranger Genius Awards 2008”

  3. What is the minimum age for this? It sounds like a great time, but if it’s 21+, it sounds like all of us 19-20 year old youngins are left in the dust.

    Anyone know?

  6. Has Paul Constant ever read any science fiction? Neal Stephenson has to be the most overrated writer in America, possibly in the English language. Certainly in the history of science fiction.

    And Paul Constant, in one short paragraph, makes the two stupidest comments about science fiction I have ever seen or heard (and I go back 50 years as a reader). “The Diamond Age” defined cutting edge for the next ten years? God what an impoverished imagination you must have. Only to be matched, if not topped, by the claim that Space Opera has been long stagnant. This statement is so off the charts I can’t even parody it. If by “long” he means that any of at least three writers I can think of off the top of my head haven’t published anything this week, I will concede his point.

    Please don’t demean Sherman Alexie’s well deserved award by following it with one to a libertarian blow-hard suffering from terminal prolixity.

    I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but a few short pages later Paul Constant manages to make a third statement re Neal Stephenson even dumber than the previous two. “The Diamond Age” made science fiction “…matter again.” Constant must be dipping his raging hard-on in ink to be writing this stuff. He hasn’t the slightest fucking idea what he is talking about.

    d

  7. Not sure why the public is invited, and free.
    Lets take it from post-modern.. avant garde elitist.. where “the public isn’t invited.”

    It’s a great thing you’re doing really, but the party is bullshit.

  8. Hmmm… THE STRANGER has never before been known to gently (or not-so-gently) massage the prostate of the capitol hill, pike/pine-consortium… anyone who tells you otherwise must have read that in THE WEEKLY

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