• The directors of the Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore, home of the Seattle Bruce Lee Fan Club, and Bettie Luke, the sister of Wing Luke (the museum's namesake), are calling out the Puyallup Fair for the Chinese cadaver exhibition it has scheduled. "The Directors of the museum believe this exhibit is especially culturally offensive as the Puyallup Fairgrounds as 'Camp Harmony' was once a 7,000-person detainee camp for Asians during World War II in 1942." Um.
• Street fight! Last week, "guerrilla marketing" company Poster Giant (which puts up ads for music and other shows on light poles and walls across Seattle, and has a dicey reputation for covering up other people's posters and generally treating public space like its own little fiefdom) pissed off some unidentified posterers known as "GIRL ARMY." Mid-week, GIRL ARMY had posted some pretty awesome walls-full of anti-rape, pro-lady-fist flyers, handwritten political notes, and graffiti messages on a much-used area of 11th Avenue. Poster Giant covered them up within hours with posters for a video game. GIRL ARMY responded with a big display reading "Oh Poster Giant Up Yours!" and a wheat-pasted photo of company president Doug Cox surrounded by a halo of dirty socks stapled to the wall. By Monday, Poster Giant had once again partially covered GIRL ARMY's handiwork with posters for a video game, Bumbershoot, and the band Slightly Stoopid.
• Rumor has it a hot Seattle drag star has been jetting down to Los Angeles to participate in a forthcoming season of RuPaul's Drag Race. If the rumor is true, the hot drag star's amazing actual singing should take her good and far in the competition.
• Do you know about the smallest reading series in Seattle? Claustrophobia is a monthly literary performance that takes place in very small spaces, including public restrooms. Last week, not too many people gathered in Ordinary Madness podcaster Steve Barker's apartment to hear readers including Elissa Washuta and Sarah Galvin fill the tiny, carpeted, poorly lit space with their voices. Due to the private nature of the venues, Claustrophobia isn't usually listed in The Stranger's readings calendar, but industrious souls should be able to find info via Google (or Bing, if you're freaky like that).
• The artists Dan Webb, Sarah Bergmann, and Amanda Manitach gave talks and showed slides of their work in the garden of the James & Janie Washington Cultural Center just as night fell on August 22. The artists are on the shortlist for a 2012 Genius Award, but couldn't be more different from each other. As Stranger art critic Jen Graves emphasized, all three deserve to win. (The winner will be announced at the Moore Theater on September 22.) The audience, sitting on blankets under a giant fig tree, included the writer Lesley Hazleton, the former Frye curator Robin Held, the performance artist Korby Sears, and the art dealer Greg Kucera. According to staffers at the cultural center, the fig tree came from a meeting the late artist James Washington once had with Martin Luther King Jr.