• On Friday night, nine bodies were laid out on mirrors on the floor of the Frye Art Museum for the "processional"/opening of Mark Mitchell's Burial collection—a collection of clothes for the dead. "I just keep wondering what's going through their minds," Roq La Rue Gallery's Kirsten Anderson said, looking down at a waxy, still model. The models would occasionally jerk and twist with discomfort, their eyes remaining closed. It looked like they were having nightmares. Above them, the museum's old paintings were packed together on the walls. People were crying. The crowd eventually hit nearly 1,000, and people who hadn't RSVP'd had to be turned away. The haute funeral parlor was fraught in about a hundred ways. Someone said that in the presence of all this death, those old paintings never felt more alive. Transferred to mannequins, the clothing will be on display through October 20.
• The latest victim in the story of the inevitable death of film is a service provided by local film lab Alpha Cine. At the end of September, the lab will no longer make prints for motion picture films. Alpha Cine had provided this service for trashy films like The Postman and local indie films like Police Beat. It will not be long before film becomes a cultural fossil like cassette tapes.
• Seattle's annual festival of original sketch comedy, SketchFest, includes performers from NYC, LA, Chicago, Portland, Spokane, and Grand Rapids, along with a ton of local talent this year. This past Saturday brought the SketchFest Comedy Film Challenge to Central Cinema, where the screen lit up with a dozen short blasts of good filmy comedy. Best in show: More Rock, Less Talk, created and performed by the ridiculously good Seattle duo Charles. Also great: the performance of Drop the Root Beer & Run's Caitlyn Obom in the Seattle group's short Giant Baby, and the totality of Travis Vogt's Alone, a highly accomplished short film that just happened to be funny as shit. SketchFest continues through September 28—for a full schedule, see sketchfest.org.
• Arcade, a local architectural journal that's been around since 1981, is to switch from a quarterly to a triannual, in order to, rumors say, make the operation of the journal easier and cheaper. Whether this is a bad thing will only be known at the end of 2014.
• Leo Berk won the Betty Bowen Award last week. He'll receive $15,000 and a small exhibition at Seattle Art Museum opening November 7, with a free public celebration at the museum at 5:30 p.m. that day. Jack Daws and Sol Hashemi, also interesting artists for very different reasons with very different attitudes, won the two smaller $2,500 recognition awards. All dudes? All dudes. Meanwhile, Artist Trust announced its shortlist for this year's $25,000 Arts Innovator Awards this week—and of the eight artists, seven are male. It's hard to even know what to say about that.
• In a tangential violation of the Monroe Doctrine and several subsequent accords, corollaries, and memorandums, the University Audi and Volkswagen dealership has expanded its borders to include the University of Washington and parts of Wallingford. 
