WEDNESDAY 7/28
NWFF
Monteiro (center) in Come and Go, Tuesday and Thursday at NWFF.
©Rozarii Lynch
Doomed Wagnerian lovers Persson
and Forbis.
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Outdoor Art: A Five-Mile Art Walk
The poet Joyce Kilmer famously wrote, "I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree." The Center on Contemporary Art, curators of "Overgrowth & Understory," a series of 15 sculptures by regional artists in the meadows of Cougar Mountain, seem to have gotten the message. Rather than trying to compete with the landscape of the Issaquah Alps—a losing proposition among the sun-dappled foliage and sweeping views of Lake Sammamish—the best art here blends into its environment. Sarah Savidge's Sea Changes, a box of blue and white glass shards in a pattern that will shift over time, seems organic, more accumulated than installed. Burnt Offering, a charred, twisted stump embedded with copper wires and mosaic tiles, looks like it was decorated by forest fairies (actually Debra Harvey, Catherine Thompson, and Bob Prowda). But though the art is appealing, the most beautiful part of this exhibit is still the five-mile hike between its two sections. Trees are hard to beat. (Through Oct. 10.) Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park, 18201 S.E. Cougar Mountain Dr., Issaquah, cocaseattle.org. Free. Open during daylight hours. REBECCA COHEN
THURSDAY 7/29
Jazz: Peninsula Harmonies
You'd be hard-pressed to find a better weekend getaway spot than Port Townsend; and for any jazz fan, this is the weekend to do it. Some of Seattle's top straight-ahead players make the trip to Centrum's Jazz Port Townsend, like pianist Dawn Clement and saxophonist/trumpeter Jay Thomas, alongside hard-swinging headliners like pianist Benny Green and the Heath Brothers. Saturday alone will deliver nearly 12 hours of music, with concerts happening all day at Fort Worden State Park followed by shows in downtown clubs past midnight. It's about the most charming and scenic jazz setting you're going to find, outside of the Django Reinhardt Festival at Samois-sur-Seine. (OK, I'm just guessing Samois-sur-Seine is charming and scenic.) To complete the community feeling, there's a Wikispaces page for ride-sharing. Club shows begin tonight at the Upstage, Public House, and Northwest Maritime Center. (Through Sun.) Fort Worden State Park (and other locations), 800-746-1982, centrum.org. $18–$25. 7:30 p.m. MARK D. FEFER
Books: Mud to Glory
Maybe you didn't think much about SoDo until March 26, 2000, when the Kingdome was imploded. What was once South of the Dome became, in a dusty instant, South of Downtown: a roughly four-square-mile patch that looms large in our city's history. There's no better person to write about SoDo than Dan Raley, a native Seattleite who spent nearly 30 years at the P-I. His coffee-table book Tideflats to Tomorrow: The History of Seattle's SoDo (Fairgreens, $29.95) is packed with little-known history, fascinating anecdotes, and rare photos. From the old Duwamish mud and brine, SoDo has risen from Indian clamming ground to a Hooverville in the 1930s to the present headquarters of Starbucks, Filson, and other international companies. It's still the city's industrial heart, proximate to railroads and the Port of Seattle, even as housing is planned along its northern border and rezoning is discussed. (Oh, and the Mariners, Seahawks, and Sounders still play there, too.) Barnes & Noble, University Village, 517-4107, store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/store/2573. Free. 6:30 p.m. (Also: Elliott Bay, 2 p.m. Sun.) MICHAEL MAHONEY
FRIDAY 7/30
Film: The Perverse Poet
Actor-director João César Monteiro's films often take place in just a few quiet corners of Lisbon, but their philosophical scope encompasses everything between his cojones and the cosmos. Monteiro (1939–2003) was a modernist scavenger, his artistic persona a tramp Dumpster-diving through Western civilization, pinching from movies, music, painting, theater. This five-film retrospective ("The Genius of Insanity") begins with 1989's Recollections of the Yellow House, in which Monteiro plays a world-weary, chain-smoking, pubic-hair-collecting girl-watcher. With his vulture-like countenance, weedy hermit's frame, and exquisite gestures, Monteiro cuts a figure fit for silent film comedy. His alter ego, João de Deus, has a Peeping-Tom fixation on his landlady's daughter and an obsession with old movies (including Nosferatu and those of Erich von Stroheim). Monteiro reprises the character in subsequent pictures, which share a mood and style: Microscopic gags, epic run times, erratic plots, perfectly snipped-off long takes, and dreamy sensuality. João is not a great seducer, but the films are perfumed with his love of women. (Through Thurs.) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6–$9. 7 and 9:30 p.m. NICK PINKERTON
SATURDAY 7/31
Opera: Love Potion #9
Never had a composer dared to use a musical metaphor so unabashedly and yet with such refinement until Richard Wagner began Tristan and Isolde in 1857. Many operatic lovers had met tragic ends, but Wagner unprecedentedly wrote music that languishes and dies right along with them. Just as T & I never consummate their forbidden passion, so his score wanders, surges, agonizes, and seems only to come to rest at the very end as his heroine expires—after an orchestral orgasm—in a luminous B major. She's an Irish princess being forced to wed against her will; he's the knight tasked with bringing her to the wedding. In her anguish, Isolde takes what she thinks is poison—oops! Her maidservant switched it for a love potion. (Also, never had a composer made anything so transcendent out of such a dopey farce premise.) Clifton Forbis and Annalena Persson play the title roles in a Seattle Opera production directed by Peter Kazaras that will make use of the company's visual projection system—and, everyone hopes, atone for some of the legendary weirdnesses in SO's 1998 staging of the opera. (Through Aug. 21.) McCaw Hall, Seattle Center, 389-7676, seattleopera.org. $25–$191. 6:30 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT
