M.I.A.’s Aesthetical Warfare – Ahsan Butt
Thursday, April 30, 2015 11:04 — 0 Comments
I. Bucky Done Gun blitzed The Wedge on MuchMusic. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing or hearing. The trumpets sounded out into a memory though. That brown girl with the trumpets, I remembered, almost a year later.
Ghouls Gone Wild: The Haunted Pubs Of Pioneer Square
Monday, April 27, 2015 10:44 — 0 Comments
I met Natalie (my Safety Monitor) at The J&M Cafe: a busy, wood and brass cantina beneath a crumbling tin-ceiling. It was the first stop on the Spooked In Seattle, Haunted Pub Tour and the first watering hole for the evening’s spirits. She wasn’t alone… a stocky-rockabilly was leaning over her table. Natalie can take care of herself, but I don’t like strangers and wasn’t sure whether I was going to have to deal with this guy all night. Thank god he was only the waiter, but there was a sinister aura about him that hinted toward the macabre. I’m not sure […]
One Day in the City of the Future – Shaun Scott
Wednesday, April 15, 2015 13:32 — 0 Comments
Slight by skyscraper standards, Seattle’s Space Needle stands 605 feet near the eastern shore of Elliot Bay: two-thirds as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and no match for the 1776-foot Freedom Tower built in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. But the building has cut a formidable figure as a civic symbol since its construction in 1962. The Space Needle has been celebrated: its alabaster color appears pristine when plastered on broadcasts of Monday Night Football, in Macklemore’s music videos, in the critically acclaimed films of Seattle-based directors Megan Griffiths and Lynn Shelton. And it has […]
Stay Black and Die
Tuesday, March 3, 2015 10:08 — 0 Comments
“I don’t have to do nothing but eat, drink, stay black, and die.†–Langston Hughes, “Necessity†(1951).Â
Quarreler, vol. 2: Caleb Powell
Monday, February 23, 2015 14:06 — 1 Comment
I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, by David Shields and Caleb Powell is fresh off the Knopf presses. It’s a book in the form of one extended and contentious dialogue. Over the course of a weekend at a remote cabin tucked into the Cascade Mountains, Shields and Powell argue Life versus Art, testing the limits of civilized conversation and the boundaries of the self. The Monarch Review had the chance to talk with both Quarrelers individually about the making of both the book, and the adaptation of the book into a film directed by James Franco. This is the second of […]
Seattle Sound Guys
Wednesday, February 11, 2015 12:56 — 0 Comments
I recently sat down with Olie Eshleman, Kieran Harrison-Bulger, and Dave Abramson, sound engineers who work at the Sunset and the Tractor, to talk about mixing live music in Ballard.Â
Replacing Jon Stewart
Wednesday, February 11, 2015 12:23 — 0 Comments
It’s been a tough week. Before we’d even made it Tuesday afternoon we found out we’d have to find replacements for both Brian Williams and Spiderman. But neither of these revelations hit as hard as the news that we’d also have to replace Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show. After all, Spiderman is a fictitious character, and as it turns out, so is Brian Williams. Replacing them won’t be difficult. Stewart, on the other hand, is a person whose perspective we’ve come to depend on through three presidencies, a handful of wars, national tragedies and international triumphs. For […]
Superbands
Tuesday, January 27, 2015 12:35 — 0 Comments
The Seattle Seahawks are a star-studded football team on the verge of back-to-back championships (fingers crossed, knock on wood!!). The city’s music scene, both past and present, is also full of recognizable faces and all-stars at their craft. So, we thought we’d have a little fun as we approach the big game to try and figure out who, among our most well known sonic stars, would play the most important positions on the gridiron during the Superbowl on Feb. 2nd (if such fantasies were to be made real). Here goes!
Bug Brother – Kirby Wright
Thursday, January 22, 2015 10:09 — 2 Comments
My big brother wears his orange Terminix shirt with “Barry†stitched in blue on the breast pocket. I don’t understand why he wants to make his living selling fumigation packages and supervising beefy crews pulling tents over roofs. I guess the money’s good. His life is based on the death of bugs and guaranteeing his odorless gases kill everything crawling, squirming, flying, scampering, and scuttling wall to wall and attic to basement. Fearing destruction, owners destroy armies of little things to cope. Barry seems proud being a bug man. He stands tall in the kitchen of our old family home, […]
What We Were Never Taught – Shaun Scott
Monday, January 19, 2015 9:59 — 1 Comment
If you’re coming from lower Manhattan like I was, there’s no way to the Staten Island storefront that spawned #icantbreathe without taking a ferry.Â
The answer isn't poetry, but rather language
- Richard Kenney
