Genius! Genius! Genius!

Last week, six lucky and unaware folks received lovely chocolate cakes informing them in icing that they were, in fact, frigging geniuses. These cakes, delivered whenever possible to astound and embarrass the recipients at work, were not accompanied with any sort of explanation, so we were delighted to hear that one young man was fairly sure it was from his mother.

These folks in the throes of sugar shock are, of course, the first generation of Stranger Genius Award recipients--we're pretty sure that by now they all know who they are--and proud we are of all of them. To find out who won, you'll either have to keep your ear to the ground, or else wait for next week's issue, an extravaganza on what we think is the best in Seattle art, writing, performance, and film. There you'll find profiles of our six winners (one in each individual category, plus two really very excellent arts organizations--so good, in fact, that we had to split the award between them), plus a big group of talented people to watch in years to come.

And don't forget to come to our big old party--with music by djs are not rockstars and Lifesavas--to celebrate all this startling creative braininess. It's free, for crying out loud, and it's on Friday, October 10, at Consolidated Works.


BAM! BAM! BAM!

In other, less geniusy news, everyone knows by now that the Bellevue Art Museum has closed, at least for the rest of the year, and perhaps longer, perhaps forever. What happened is quite simple: BAM ran out of money. In a swift Pyrrhic gesture, most of the staff was laid off, and the current exhibitions closed about three days after opening (for a quick, sad review of these shows, see page 29).

Lots of people seem to be in agreement about why this happened, locating the problem in a tangle of conflicting mandates--being a serious contemporary art museum and being a community center/education resource--the result being a lot of exhibition programming deemed "too edgy" for Bellevue. Apparently (and I seem to be reading this everywhere) Bellevue did not appreciate E. V. Day's battalion of flying G-strings.

No one is saying how insulting such thinking is both to those in charge of programming at BAM and to Bellevue itself. BAM board director Rick Collette's strange comment in the Seattle Times, on the occasion of the departure of director Kathleen Harleman, about how the museum was programming at a 9 1/2 but what the public really wanted was a 5 1/2, was one of the lowest points of weird, proud philistinism since Dave Barry declared that the public likes the artist Mike L. Angelo because the people look like people. Once again the definition of community assumes everyone's a little soft in the head; I'd love to hear from any Bellevueite who thinks to the contrary.

emily@thestranger.com