Unleashed Launches Blog

Unleashed, the Yakima Herald-Republic’s award-winning teen section, now has a blog.

Stories up on the blog right now include Lisa Garrigues’ column about going to the Sasquatch! Music Festival, her first concert experience, plus the complete entries from this week’s totally awesome “Day in the Life” project.

Where the heck is “Gossip Girl?”

Well, turns out, KCWK-TV is among 13 Pappas Telecasting Co. television stations that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month.

Great, now I’ll never know how Sabrina’s summer in the Hamptons went … or what’s going on with the new “90210″ show!

CWU’s Jeff Snedeker to be honored today

Today, the Central Washington University chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, the oldest and largest national honor society, will honor music professor Jeffrey Snedeker as its 2008 Scholar of the Year.

The award is presented annually to a faculty member who has shown excellence in teaching, research, public outreach and contribution to the university. Snedeker will receive the award during a ceremony at 4 p.m. in Black Hall, room 151. He will also give a talk titled “Practice Makes Product: Aspects of Scholarship in Music.”

Snedeker, a horn professor, has worked at CWU since 1991 and earned tenure in 1995. Snedeker is also the principal horn player for the Yakima Symphony Orchestra and presents the YSO’s pre-concert talks.

PARKING PREDICTED TO BE BAD, REAL BAD FOR TONIGHT’S CARRIE UNDERWOOD CONCERT

With the Class 1A and Class 2A state baseball championships going on at Yakima County Stadium, AND tonight’s sold-out Carrie Underwood concert at the SunDome, it’s going to be an absolute nightmare getting around State Fair Park tonight.

The SunDome folks are strongly urging people to leave early for the concert. They also encourage having exact change ($6) for parking.

On suggests leaving the car at home and to start walking now.

LOCAL ACTORS EARN 5TH AVENUE HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL THEATRE AWARD NODS

This week, three local schools earned a total of seven 5th Avenue High School Musical Theatre Award nominations, plus one honorable mention and one special honor for student achievement.

Presented by Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre, the awards recognize exceptional musical theater productions presented during the 2007-08 school year.

Now in its sixth year, the awards program was created as a way to shine the spotlight on high school musical theater programs and offer drama students the same recognition that accomplished high school athletes receive. This year, 73 schools from across the state entered their productions for judging.

Locally, Eisenhower High School earned nominations for its production of “High School Musical,” Davis High School for “The Wizard of Oz” and Sunnyside High School for “Seussical the Musical.”

And the nominees from the Yakima Valley are: Read more

“Spiraling Upward” Sculpture Installed in Gilbert Park

“Spiraling Upward,” a sculpture by Central Washington artist Debbie Young, is now a permanent part of Gilbert Park’s landscape.

The piece, which was originally housed inside the Allied ArtsCenter, is in the lawn immediately opposite the front doors.

“Spiraling Upward” represents Young’s effort to translate her interest in distressing flat surfaces into a durable surface for outdoor installation. The 10-foot-tall by 1.5-foot-wide columnar work was folded by hand on a custom-built 30-foot long table.

Gilbert Park is at 5000 W. Lincoln Ave.

Preliminary Folklife Festival Schedule Boasts A Great Line-Up

The preliminary schedule for this year’s YAKIMA FOLKLIFE FESTIVAL has already been posted.

Among this year’s diverse lineup of performers are the Tavria Dancers, Ockham’s Razor, Brendon Wires, Chad Bault, Tuck Foster and the Second Chance Band, Colin Spring and the Naugahyde Nights, Tracy Spring, Bye Bye Chinook, the Wapato Indian Club, Crescent & Shamrock, the Blue Tropics, Bouncing Love Monkeys, Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs, Westerly, Rävinwolf and Dick Weissman.

This year’s Folklife Festival runs July 11-13.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger: Two Cancellations to Report

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but FEVERCLUB, the indie-pop band previously known as The Look, will not be playing this year’s Edge Fest. I don’t have a reason as to why just yet.

And, I just found out that the Dusty 45’s won’t be coming to town either. The rockabilly band was supposed to play the Sports Center on June 7. S.C. booking agent Dan Craig says there won’t be a rescheduled show in the near future.

Sculptor Denali Granholm is good with figures

Of the more than 200 bas-relief sculptures that Denali Granholm has created for Nike’s Walk of Fame — Wayne Gretzky, Nolan Ryan, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, to name a few — she’s only met a handful of her famous sports subjects. Most of the time, Granholm is working from photographs to create the bronze portraits for Nike’s world headquarters in Beaverton, Ore.

She has an innate talent to turn those snapshots into three-dimensional works of art with personality, despite discovering her passion for sculpting after several other career and life paths — a flight attendant for United Airlines, teaching home economics in India, interior design.

Doing portraits, she says, is in her cellular makeup.

“It’s like I have a memory from another lifetime,” the 59-year-old Granholm says while sitting in her tidy Yakima studio, which is one of the stops on Saturday’s Tour of Artists’ Homes and Studios, an annual fundraiser organized by the Larson Gallery Guild.

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Now in its ninth year, the self-guided tour is an opportunity to visit the living and creating quarters of local artists. It offers insights into how local artists think, live, work — and decorate.

And like last year, all of the stops are new. Except, of course, for designer Leo Adams’ celebrated Ahtanum Ridge work-of-art abode, which has been included annually since the tour’s inception. (Regular tour-goers would most likely cause a stir if they didn’t get the chance to check out Adams’ continuously changing home — and hang out with his adorable dogs.)

In addition to Granholm, whose studio is in the basement of a beautiful English Tudor-style brick house near Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital, folks will get to visit Gary Dismukes (clay), Carol Fletcher (jewelry/mixed media) and Evans Fletcher (mixed media/fused glass), and Ardith Kaiser (painting) and her daughter, Holly Mahre (sculpture).

Also new this year is a $5 discount ticket for high school and college students.

Granholm is excited to be on the tour, but also sorry she doesn’t get to visit the other artist spaces. (It’s a common lament.)

Born and raised in the Lower Valley, Granholm has led an adventurous life filled with travel and various career paths. She has a curious mind that needed to see what was out there.

But it wasn’t until she took an art class just for fun while attending Metropolitan State College of Denver — she was studying psychology — that Granholm realized abilities she didn’t know she had.

Eventually, she earned her degree in art education from Central Washington University in 1977 (and a minor in psychology), then moved to Vancouver, Wash., where she started sculpting, and built a career as an interior designer.

However, in spring 1989, Granholm felt she needed a sign to tell her which way her life should go. Three months later, a Portland art gallery that showed her work called to say Nike was interested in talking to her about portraits for its Walk of Fame.

At the time, Granholm had only done one bas-relief sculpture, ever. Nike was so impressed with her work and ideas that she has a lifetime contract with the athletic company titan.

But sculpting the faces of seminal sports figures isn’t Granholm’s only medium. She’s responsible for the life-size bronze statue of the late, great jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton that stands at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Granholm met and measured Hampton for the piece. He was a man, she recalls, who exuded much love.

Granholm also sculpts beautiful, sensual abstract pieces — they come from the soul, she says — and has commissioned pieces of people’s horses. Granholm has had a life-long love of horses, and even bought one when she lived in Colorado. (When she was a kid, “I thought I was a horse,” she says.)

Granholm returned to the Valley in the winter of 2005 after her mother died and her father needed some help. And she plans to stick around and settle down.

She’s traded in her saddle for skinny road bike tires — cycling being another passion — teaches art classes and is at peace with staying in one place.

“I’m happy to be back,” she says.

If you go

WHAT: The Larson Gallery Guild’s ninth annual Tour of Artists’ Homes and Studios.

WHO’S ON THE TOUR: Leo Adams (paintings/designs), Gary Dismukes (clay), Carol Fletcher (jewelry/mixed media) and Evans Fletcher (mixed media/fused glass), Denali Granholm (sculpture) and Ardith Kaiser (painting) and Holly Mahre (sculpture).

WHEN: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday.

HOW MUCH: Tickets cost $20 for adults and $5 for students (high school and college) and are available at the Larson Gallery, Oak Hollow Gallery, Simon Edwards Gallery, Yakima Bindery and the downtown Banner Bank.

MORE INFO: Call the Larson Gallery at 574-4875 or visit www.larsongallery.org.

Carrie Underwood gives SunDome a rare sellout

YAKIMA — Pop-country sensation Carrie Underwood is the second artist, ever, to sell out the Yakima Valley SunDome. Fellow country star Toby Keith was the first during his 2003 visit.”In our market, we’re never very sure” what will sell well, says Greg Lybeck, assistant general manager for State Fair Park. “We’re always hopeful.”

The approximately Read more

Guilty Pleasures — Spring yard parties

When the weather starts to turn pleasant, as it has for the past few weekends — hey, there have been a few nonwindy moments — Guilty Pleasures starts to lament having a lack of yard space to host outdoor get-togethers.

Luckily, that’s no longer a problem because Guilty Pleasures has joined up with a group of folks who gather each Sunday for a yard party and potluck dinner at the home of two friends.

It sounds so wholesome, and it is.

We throw the foam football around in the yard, grill up burgers, do crafts, play Apples to Apples (perhaps the greatest card game ever invented) and help with the dishes after all sitting down for a “family” meal together.

But let’s be honest, these are Guilty Pleasures’ friends, so there’s also fire juggling, plenty of “that’s what she said” jokes, crude sidewalk chalk drawings, strange costumes and an endless supply of booze punch (pictured) — both of the people who live there are bartenders.

It’s pretty much the perfect way to spend a spring Sunday, and Guilty Pleasures can only see it getting better as the summer goes on — splashing around in a cheap plastic kiddie pool while listening to weird electronica strangely comes to mind first.

Sadly, however, with gas prices the way they are, the truly best part of these Sunday soirées is that the hosting house is within biking distance from Guilty Pleasures’ apartment.

Hmmm, anyone know how to strap tiki torches to a bike?

* Guilty Pleasures is a weekly look at whatever Guilty Pleasures wants to look at.

Night life spotlight — Mystery Fluid

Longtime Yakima band Mystery Fluid likes to say it plays metal that would make Ozzy proud. And frontman Joe Alvarez certainly has the long hair, the tattoos, the slightly sinister voice.

But it’s not like Alvarez is attempting to copy the Prince of Darkness. It’s just that he comes from the same heavy metal old-school.

Mystery Fluid — trust me, that name is better than the alternative — makes great, head-banging double bass drum rock in the tradition of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. They write their own songs and favor stacks of speakers and plenty of lighting effects. And if they blow your ear drums? Mission accomplished.

The core members of Mystery Fluid — Alvarez, guitarist Randy Tilton and drummer Mark Overby — have been together since 1997. Bass player Max Irwin joined last year. But aside from the occasional biker event, the band doesn’t play live much.

Booking a local gig is difficult, they say, especially for a metal band that plays original material. (Mystery Fluid isn’t the only band to lodge this complaint.)

But on Saturday, they’ll bust out of their cramped practice space in Irwin’s basement and into Brews and Cues, the downtown dive bar formerly called Amy Lou’s.

“When I walked in, I saw a dive bar — and I thought this is perfect,” says Irwin, who knows Brews and Cues owner Rick Newcombe, who took over the bar in September.

“It has metal written all over it.”

While that’s a compliment, Newcombe’s been working to revamp Brews and Cues and turn it into a “neighborhood bar,” he says. Live music in the space will only be an occasional thing, notes Newcombe.

Even if live gigs are few and far between, Mystery Fluid has also taken advantage of a couple of other ways to get noticed.

The band, of course, has a MySpace page (www.myspace.com/mysteryfluid) and recently paid to have a song included on a Metal Edge magazine compilation CD (think of it as audible advertising). It’s track 11 on the disk that came in the March issue.

“We never got discouraged,” Alvarez says about keeping the metal dream alive. “We just love the art of creating the darn songs.”

* Mystery Fluid plays at 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Brews and Cues (formerly Amy Lou’s), 104 S. Second St. Phone: 453-9713. No cover charge.

SUMMER, SUMMER, SUMMER JAM

The KUBE 93-FM SUMMER JAM is July 26 at the White River Amphitheatre in Auburn.

The artists playing the hip-hop-hurray festival haven’t been announced, but you can see the silhouettes of three of the performers on KUBE93.com. If you guess who they are correctly, you’ll be entered in to a drawing for a chance to win the first pair of Summer Jam tickets.

Tickets go on sale May 31.

CARRIE UNDERWOOD TICKETS AVAILABLE TO “INSIDERS”

Pop-country sensation CARRIE UNDERWOOD is the second artist, ever, to SELL OUT THE YAKIMA VALLEY SUNDOME. Fellow country star Toby Keith was the first during his 2003 visit.

The approximately 6,800 tickets to Underwood’s May 23 show sold out nearly three weeks ago, but THERE STILL IS A CHANCE TO SNAG A SEAT.

Greg Lybeck, assistant general manager for State Fair Park, estimates there are 100 to 200 tickets being withheld (it’s a contract thing) that could possibly be released in the days leading up to the concert. IN FACT, 16 SEATS WERE RELEASED THIS AFTERNOON.

Members of the SunDome Insiders Club — which is free to join online at www.yakimasundome.com — GET THE FIRST CRACK AT THOSE TICKETS, which is how I knew about it.

*Kim Nowacki*

TAKE ME … TO THE BARN DANCE TONIGHT?

Sooo, yesterday I was chatting with LONESTAR DRUMMER KEECH RAINWATER to talk about his band’s show this Saturday at the Yakama Nation Legends Casino outdoor arena in Toppenish.

Turns out Keech’s second career is directing videos and films and right now he’s busy wrapping up a video for ’80s pop-rocker Eddie Money — you know, the “Two Tickets to Paradise” guy who played the Central Washington State Fair last year.

Yeah, EDDIE MONEY’S GOING COUNTRY, Keech says — a statement confirmed by a CMT blog post and the “Give Me Some Water” track on Eddie’s MySpace page.

*Kim Nowacki*

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