• Easily the coolest thing to happen in Seattle art this week was the marriage, after 30 years of partnership, of dealer Greg Kucera and framer Larry Yocom on a sunny Sunday evening. It happened at their art-filled Capitol Hill home (a full Wedding Crasher will appear in next week's paper), where there's a little piece tucked in a back closet, behind a bathroom that has a sculpture of a cat asshole hovering over the sink. The small print "was like the holy grail," Kucera said—he found it, of all places, at Pacific Galleries, the antique mall in Sodo. Grant Wood (painter of the classic American Gothic) created the print in 1939; it's called Sultry Night, and it's a cult favorite. It pictures a naked, muscled man in a clearing, lasciviously pouring water on himself. Wood made it for a print club, to be distributed widely by mail. But someone alerted the postal service that Wood planned to pass along "pornography," so only 100 impressions were produced and sold at the New York publisher. At least one has found the perfect home.
• Stranger Genius Award winner Paul Mullin recently wrote a short play titled Openly We Carry, an allegory about an openly gun-toting society. It attracted the attention of forum.opencarry.org, where real-life open-carry advocates fantasized that the play might support their cause—until they got their hands on a copy. The resulting fomentation was hilarious: "Definitely written by an anti-gun, anti-Christian Democrat with delusions of adequacy running through his drug-soaked grey cells. Both of them." And: "I'm certainly hoping he doesn't have to use his artist pencil to defend his or his families [sic] life someday." And: "The play was written by a man supremely convinced of his own intelligence." (That last point is not entirely untrue.) Openly We Carry premieres at this weekend's Sandbox One-Act Play festival.
• Last week at the American Booksellers Association's awards lunch, author John Green, who'd just won the Indie Champion Award, gave a barn-burner of a speech in a video appearance about the importance of community in publishing. Green said, in part: "We need editors and we need publishers and we need booksellers. I am not in the widget-selling business. I am not in the profit-maximization business. I'm in the book business, the idea-sharing, consciousness-expanding, storytelling business, and I am not going to get out of that business. So fuck Ayn Rand, and fuck any company that profits from peddling the lie of mere individualism. We built this together, and we're going to keep building it together." In related news, we just fell in love with John Green.
• The 39th Seattle International Film Festival came to a close on Sunday at the top of the Space Needle. Among the winners of juried prizes: Harmony Lessons (best new director), Our Nixon (best documentary), and the David Sedaris story adaptation C.O.G. (best new American cinema). Among the winners of Golden Space Needle Audience Awards: Samantha Morton (best actress for Decoding Annie Parker), Nabil Ayouch (best director for Horses of God), and Disney/Pixar's Monsters University (second runner-up for best film). Congratulations to all the winners; SIFF 2014 starts in 10 minutes. 
