As the Mariners ramp up their annual campaign, the best and the worst of Seattle baseball will come together at Safeco Field this season. Longtime fans are already well acquainted with what the worst feels like: If you endured the wretched Mariners teams in the 1970s and ’80s, you remember two decades of joyless seasons…

Living in a port city means getting so used to seeing stacks of shipping containers that we hardly see them at all. But that’s not the case for Seattle artist Mary Iverson (maryiverson.com), a graduate of both UW and Cornish College, whose work brings the colorful metal boxes to the foreground. In her hands, the…

MUST WATCHKafka’s The TrialOngoing (4/5–4/28) — New Century Theatre Company is staging an appropriately claustrophobic new take on Kafka’s classic, The Trial, housed (also appropriately) in Seattle’s former INS building. Audience members are categorized and “processed” as they enter, and sit in a “jury box” to watch the unsettling proceedings. Starring veteran Seattle actors Darragh…

As Swan Lake prepares for takeoff at Pacific Northwest Ballet (4/12-4/21), the company is posting some rehearsal videos that are pretty irresistible—in large part because they offer a peek at backstage ballet fashion, which never fails to mesmerize. How do the dancers end up wearing such a colorful mishmash of leotards, tights, heat wraps, flouncy…

There will be much ado, indeed, at SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) this year. The festival opens with Joss Whedon’s take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, starring Alexis Denisof, Amy Acker, Nathan Fillion, and Clark Gregg. The film was shot in twelve days, uses the original text and apparently was edited on a laptop…

[View the story “What Knute’s Reading: April 8, 2013” on Storify]  

When my husband and I first bought our home, we felt somewhat banished in pre-cool Ballard. (This was 2001, and the sleepy Scandinavian burg was the most affordable neighborhood closest to Lower Queen Anne, where we’d been happily living in an apartment.) But then we stumbled upon Ballard Market and discovered that the humble-appearing grocery…

MUST SEEMaster Harold…and the boysOngoing (thru 4/21) — Apartheid, class issues and ballroom dancing blend in South African playwright Athol Fugard’s acclaimed Broadway drama. Longtime local theater fans will be thrilled to learn that this contemporary take is directed by Burke Walker, founding artistic director of the dearly departed Empty Space Theatre, and stars another…

Franz Kafka was a master at crafting absurd yet convincing scenarios (perhaps most famously in his man-turns-cockroach story, The Metamorphosis) and capturing the particularly human feeling of existential dread. You might have experienced a similarly surreal sense of displacement if you ever had the misfortune of being an immigrant detained for days or weeks at…

You’ve swung the West Coast swing, spiced up your salsa and topped off your tango—what’s next? Time to kiss up to kizomba. This Angolan dance style first caught fire in the 1980s, and has since spread across Europe and recently landed in Seattle, at venues such as Century Ballroom (centuryballroom.net), which offers drop-in classes for…

Those little waving kitties have become ubiquitous good luck trinkets in Seattle shops—but what exactly do their upraised paws tell us? With Maneki Neko: Japan’s Beckoning Cats—From Talisman to pop icon, Bellevue Arts Museum provides both context and cuteness, exhibiting 155 vintage cats made from ceramic, papier-mâché, wood and stone, as well as several contemporary…

April 1 — Seattle’s booming South Lake Union is about to get taller. In anticipation of a neighborhood up-zone, a developer has dusted-off Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1956 idea of a mile-high tower to handle density. The building will be more than 18 million square feet.  As word of the 500-story skyscraper leaked, officials were quick to react….