Tlingit artist Yéil Ya Tseen (aka Nicholas Galanin) is known for his work across artistic mediums, from wood carving and sculpture to video work and his ever-evolving musical project, Ya Tseen. On his newest album, Stand on My Shoulders, Ya Tseen brings on collaborators Portugal. The Man, Pink Siifu, and Meshell Ndegeocello, among many others, for an album inspired by the gifts given by ancestors and the collective responsibilities to future generations. Genre-wise, the album is difficult to peg, blending electronic music with hip-hop, funk, and goth, but it has sonic similarities to labelmates Washed Out and Shabazz Palaces.

I caught up with him ahead of his album release show on Friday at the Clock-Out Lounge to chat about the collections of tools that are behind his shapeshifting work: woodcarving tools and analog synths.

What do you collect?

In my art studio, I have a collection of hand tools I use for woodworking, wood carving, etc. I was trained as a wood carver in my community. I also have a growing collection of analog synthesizers, which are also tools for the music studio.

Today Will be Gray: What you see outside right now is what you will get for the day—it won’t get brighter, it won’t get warmer, it won’t get colder, but it also won’t rain, probably. Those clouds in the sky will remain in the sky. It’s the big nothing. It’s like living under a weighted blanket. I love it so much.

Bobby Is Back! Yesterday, Gov. Bob Ferguson delivered his first State of the State speech, and in it he called out the “horrific and unjust” actions of the Trump Administration, and praised Dems’ efforts to tax the rich. A nice thing to see after he spent the first year of his term appeasing Republicans. Still, words are cheap. Now we need action. We’re watching, Bob.

King County Prosecutors Won't Charge Pedro Gomez: Cheryl Delostrinos, a local organizer, says Gomez raped her in 2024. In the story published on The Stranger yesterday, “KCPAO didn’t decline to charge Gomez because they doubted her account. In fact, in a written response to The Stranger’s questions, the prosecutor’s office emphasized on five separate occasions that they do believe her.” But “prosecutors concluded they could not prove the elements of rape in the second- or third-degree beyond a reasonable doubt when weighed against what they described as the ‘most plausible, reasonably foreseeable defense.’” Read the whole maddening story here. Then join me in screaming into the void for the rest of the day.

Cheryl Delostrinos, a South End organizer and abolitionist, doesn’t believe in the criminal justice system. 

She didn’t believe in it on June 18, 2024, when she says she went to a strictly-professional meeting over drinks with Pedro Gomez, the one-time director of external affairs for former Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell. 

She didn’t believe in it when, according to police reports, she woke up drunk and disoriented to Gomez performing oral sex on her. Or when she told him “no,” and Gomez continued to pull her toward him, lift her, and force her back onto the bed despite her repeated verbal refusals. 

To the homeowner who asked me how long it was going to take to get out of her driveway while I was waiting with a girl for the ambulance to arrive. She'd fallen coming down the hill on her skateboard and gashed her knee quite badly. You, more than anyone, crushed my faith in humanity. Rather than offering in any way to help or comfort her, you made it clear our existence was inconveniencing you.

It was depressing enough that the EMTs couldn't help her until they got permission from a family member. After a few attempts, at least they patched her up and drove her to her house to see if they could contact anyone in person. Of course, they can't take her to an ER or urgent care directly because it might bankrupt her family, but they did what they could.

I didn't do much, but at least I helped her gather the contents of her backpack that were scattered across your driveway. I called 911 and waited on the ground for the ambulance with her. It took a disheartening amount of time for them to arrive, but I wanted them to hurry to help her, not to clear your fucking driveway.

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.

It's impossible to miss Urbana. It’s a gigantic apartment complex (nearly 300 units), and, because of its prime location, Northwest Market Street and 15th Avenue Northwest, it introduces the world to Ballard.

I am a 45-year-old femme-presenting genderqueer AFAB person. When I have romantic relationships with cis het men, I’ve noticed two general types: They either enjoy sex and prioritize pleasure and making things fun for their partners and themselves, but make no special big deal about it, and we usually have frequent enough sex and that’s enjoyable and good. Or the sex starts out pretty good but — at some point — they make it known to me that they need to have sex regularly, that they can’t tolerate a lack of sex, that they get grumpy if they don’t have sex, that they’ve been in sexless relationships before — blah blah blah — and soon the relationship starts to revolve around how much sex we’re having. Usually around this time the sex either gets worse or I realize that it wasn’t that good to begin with and then we start having less sex and then it slowly becomes so terrible that I barely want to have sex with them anymore at all and then the relationship ends. I wonder if anyone else has had this experience, and if you have any comments.

Help Explain This Male Entitlement Nonsense

Wow: At least four attorneys in the US Department of Justice have resigned over the government’s political decision not to investigate ICE agent Jonathan Ross for shooting Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis last Wednesday. Instead, the FBI is examining Good’s “ties” to activist groups after wrenching investigative materials from the state level investigators in Minnesota. The Justice Department claims the attorneys had requested early retirement before the shooting and “any suggestion to the contrary” is false. Suuuuure.

Plants, huh? To his neighbor in Chaska, Minnesota, Jonathan Ross was Jonathan Ross the botanist, not Jonathan Ross the ICE Agent. At least, that’s what he told her when they met at a garage sale in 2020, reports People. So it was a bit of a shock for her when she saw him on the news after he killed Good.

We’re back with Episode Two, where our biggest challenge is keeping track of who’s who among the fourteen shapeshifters we just met. The producers treated us to another Drag Race classic: the girl group challenge. We said goodbye to our first Season 18 queen, but don’t fret! Our hometown hero Jane Don’t’s success last week was no fluke.

“Quintessentially Queer and Queeny”

The main challenge was called Q-Pop Girl Groups, but if you expected a K-pop moment on Drag Race (!), you’d be sorely disappointed. Instead, the featured genres were “Funk Almighty” (disco, Ru’s favorite), “Go Go Go” (pop), and “Cherries” (punk).

Disco might seem like it’d have a leg up in the challenge. The disco scene of the late 1970s was the musical epitome of queer joy. Rooted in urban, queer, Black and Brown communities in the US, disco became a global sensation for its emphasis on movement, freedom, and defiance of rigid social norms—embodied by Sylvester, the Queen of Disco.

MONDAY 1/12  

Collide-O-Scope 16th Anniversary

(FILM) For a whopping 16 years, Collide-O-Scope has been a fixture of Seattle’s underground film and performance scene. It’s an institution that’s evolved alongside our city’s venues and creative spaces, putting in a decade at the (dearly missed) Re-bar, shifting online during the pandemic era, and finding a four-year home at the Crocodile’s recently closed Here-After before landing at its newest venue, the Clock-Out Lounge! For the uninitiated, the 16th-anniversary show is the perfect entry point into the cabaret, the chaos, and the community that have cemented Collide-O-Scope as a resilient part of Seattle nightlife history. (Clock-Out Lounge, 8 pm, 21+) LANGSTON THOMAS

So many sneakers and Blundstones. In a sterile lobby of the hulking Columbia Tower, next to the Monorail Coffee stand, office workers in jeans walked by. Schlubs. Breaking from the crowd, Erika Evans walked briskly from the elevators in black heels with a leather binder stamped with “Seattle City Attorney’s Office” in her hands. 

It’s Wednesday, just two days after Evans was sworn in and officially took over the buzzing lawyer hive that is the City Attorney’s Office. Evans, the first Black person and second woman in the office’s 150 year history, will oversee prosecutions of criminal misdemeanors, the most serious of which are driving under the influence and domestic violence crimes. She’ll also be the city’s lawyer in all civil matters, like when big businesses sue the city for implementing any kind of progressive revenue or when the federal government attacks the city.

Good Morning! We’ve got a mild one today: highs in the low 50s, no rain. The sky’s bright, even if it’s gray. If you’ve been complaining about the Big Dark, today’s the day to walk that extra couple blocks to the next bus stop or keep your coat on and drink your coffee outside.

But in the meantime, let’s do the news.

Trump Surprises No One: Four New York Times reporters sat down with Trump for a two-hour interview, and the paper has been talking about it nonstop for four days now. (Did you know the transcript is 23,000 words? We do, for some reason.) The interview was, as usual, unsettling for readers who are typically grounded in even the loosest understanding of facts. Trump said that the Civil Rights Act was “reverse discrimination,” claimed that his administration “didn’t even know about all the oil” in Venezuela, said he captured Maduro because too many Venezuelans were coming into the US, and that he doesn’t need international law to govern his decisions because he had his “morality” and “that’s very good.” Oh, and he said that it was very “psychologically” important for him to own Greenland.

Port of Seattle Commissioner Toshiko Hasegawa leaned forward over the too-small table at Avole, the Central District coffee shop on Friday. Two days earlier, an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, had shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, and the government had spent the week lying about it..

“I went to the protest last night,” Hasegawa says, dry eyed with a voice strangled by emotion. “There's so many different feelings, but what can we do?”

Her resolve strengthened. “No one is above the law,” she says, her voice echoing in the empty coffee shop. “I want to see King County arrest, prosecute, and convict Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who should be equally as afraid that when they break the law that somebody is going to come knocking at their door.”

RuPaul’s Drag Race is back for an 18th season with a fresh cast of fourteen queens ready to snatch our attention and keep us entertained for the next four months. Once again, the new season includes a Seattle queen, Jane Don’t, whose combination of quirky comedy, vintage glamour, and sharp wit make her a serious contender for the crown and title of America’s Next Drag Superstar.

I met Jane Don’t in 2019 at CC Seattle’s after a show at R Place (RIP). I was a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, and Jane was a gorgeously hairy queen. I’d been a bearded queen myself, and admired how she pulled off extraordinary contouring and sickening eye makeup with a full beard. She had just started drag but was already making fabulous hats and gowns. I remember interviewing drag artist (and Stranger contributor) Miss Texas 1988 on a drizzly winter afternoon at the house she shared with Jane in Capitol Hill. While Miss Texas and I sipped tea and chatted about queer theory on their couch, Jane was hard at work styling a wig in the next room. It’s no surprise that Jane Don’t made it to the top of Drag Race Season 18’s first design challenge.

 

 

 

 

 

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Congresswoman Emily Randall (WA-6) announced on Bluesky that she’s done with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and is co-sponsoring Articles of Impeachment from Illinois Congresswoman Robin Kelly to remove her from office.

“Kristi Noem’s lawless agents are out of control,” Rep. Randall wrote. “We cannot have rogue government agencies killing its own people in our communities.”