KIRO Radio Highlights

August is here and it's the final few weeks of summer vacation, don't miss out on all the weekend fun!

It's a Block Party weekend with parties happening in South Lake Union and a brand new one in Edmonds! At the South Lake Union Block Party today, which is at the South Lake Union Discovery Center,  you'll find a community fair, beer and cocktails, lawn games, live music and the street scramble! What is a street scramble you ask?  It's described as an urban adventure where you and your team will try to find as many checkpoints before the clock runs out. Worried about over competitive teams? Don't worry, the event website says the fun is in the exploring so go at your own speed. The South Lake Union Block party is free to attend.

It's the inaugural Edmonds Block Party but they are putting on a weekend full of music that will get you moving and grooving whether you are a classic rock fan or you love the modern pop music. Not only will there be plenty of live music, games, food and more, there's also a Cornhole tournament! Those 21+ and up will need to buy a ticket on Friday or Saturday, but Saturday is free admission for those under 21! More details right here...

We will have a free day at Washington State Parks on Saturday, a perfect chance to get out and enjoy the great outdoors before locking into the back to school prep and madness. What's the reason? Well it's Smokey the Bear's Birthday! So why not celebrate by enjoying some nature and doing everything you can to prevent wildfires. 

You can get elemental this weekend at the Puyallup Gem and Mineral Show at the Tacoma Sportsman Club. There will be all sorts of crystals and minerals to learn about and buy, this runs through the weekend. Also in Pierce County, it is time for the Pierce County Fair at Frontier Park  in Graham! They will have bull riding, bumper boats, rock climbing and of course a giant slide, plus all sorts of games, food and local agriculture to enjoy! You can get tickets here

There are a few different festivals celebrating different cultures from around the world this weekend. In Tacoma, it is the In The Spirit Arts Market and Northwest Native festival. This festival has live music, a fashion show, vendors, food and plenty of art to check out as the Washington State History Museum, Tacoma Art Museum and the Museum of Glass are all part of the event and are offering free admission. Tibet Fest is at the Seattle Center Saturday and Sunday as part of the Festál series. The event's website says the event "bestows messages of love, compassion and kindness through a fusion of ancient and new Tibetan arts and culture to engage, entertain and educate." Tibet Fest is free to attend. There's also the Cambodian Cultural Celebration at Saltwater State Park on Saturday. There will be traditional dances, martial arts, games and of course food and live music. Remember, no need for a Discovery Pass! 

For the cat lovers out there, you'll want to head to Siff Cinema Uptown for Cat Video Fest! Sure you could just endlessly scroll on YouTube for cat videos, but this is a compilation of the latest and greatest cat videos, whether it be animations, music videos, or just classic cat being goofball videos. It runs about 75 minutes and when you attend, you can help cats as the festival supports the Pixie Project!

What are you getting into this weekend? Let me know at paulh@kiroradio.com 

 

 

The first weekend of August is here and even though it feels like the summer is already wrapping up, we still have lots of fun to be had!

The big event this weekend is of course the Seafair Weekend Festivals. The Blue Angels have been practicing for the air show, the hydroplanes are getting ready to rip through the water, plus live music, lots of tasty treats to eat and if you are looking to save on tickets, today is Free Friday! All the fun is going down at Genesee Park and runs through the weekend. Get tickets and details right here.

If you are one of the many 12s who are excited about Training Camp being back, hang out with your fellow fans and play some football themed games and more at the Seahawks Football Fest! There will also be bounce houses and more fun for you and the family. This is going down Saturday at Lumen Field.

In Lake City, it is time for the Lake City Summer Festival and Parade! There will be live music and not one, not two, but THREE parades! There will also be craft vendors, food trucks, a car show and more fun for the family. There will also be live music near the Lake City Library and the Festival is free to attend! 

Also in the world of summer festivals, Magnolia Summerfest is here! Three days of live music, food, drinks, vendors, parades... the list just keeps going! You can even start your Saturday and Sunday with some exercise! All the action is going down at the Magnolia Playfield. Get the whole schedule and more details right here. 

In Bellevue, you can check out the Bellevue International Festival which is a celebration of cultures from around the world, with performances, food and activities from around the world. Best of all, it is free and family friendly. The festival is Saturday from noon to 5 at Crossroads Park. 

While we want to focus on the fun stuff and not say the words kids dred, 'back-to-school", but at the Washington State Fair Expo Hall in Puyallup, you can save some money at the Back-To-School Sale with Just Between Friends. According to the event page, there will be savings on clothes, shoes, toys, books and plenty more, all for 50-90% off retail prices. The event is free to attend, but you can buy tickets for early shopping. The sale runs through weekend. 

Learn about the world of professional kite flying while also flying your own during the Kite Festival in University Place. This festival runs Saturday and Sunday from 10-4 and there will be kite demonstrations, inflatables, food trucks, vendors and plenty more family fun. Plus, 250 kites will be given away each day or you can buy a kite kit to make your own. 

We got lots of sports action going on this weekend, as the new look Seattle Mariners are in town and look to gain ground in the playoff race with a big weekend series against the Texas Rangers. The Seattle Storm are in action tonight at Climate Pledge against the Los Angeles Sparks and Sunday against the Indiana Fever. Sorry, no Caitlin Clark as she is still recovering from injury. On the pitch this weekend, Seattle Reign FC takes on Angel City FC tonight at 7:30 and the Seattle Sounders play Club Santos Laguna on Sunday as part of the Leagues Cup. 

How are you making the most of what is left of your summer? Let me know, paulh@kiroradio.com 

 

 

 

Can you believe we are already at the last weekend of July? There's been so much summer fun happening that the time is flying by! 

SeaFair continues to ramp up and one of the hallmark events is this Saturday, the Torchlight Parade! According to the event's website the parade has returned to its roots with a nighttime start and a new parade route. The new route goes along the Seattle Waterfront, starting at 7:30! There will be a pre parade run and spectators can start lining up starting at 6 pm. It's free and open to the public!

Also along the waterfront, Pier 58 is re-opening and there is a celebration today from 4-8! The pier adds around 50,000 square feet of park space, with a family friendly focus, including the new marine-themed playground and the elevated lawn space. The opening celebration is free and open to the public and you are encouraged to dance, play and come dressed in marine-themed attire! Plus local mascots will be in attendance! Learn more right here 

The Bellevue Arts Festival Weekend is here and it highlights over 350 artists using over 20 different artistic mediums, including the traditional painting, jewelry  and printmaking, but also newer forms like 3D Mixed Media. There will also be plenty of food vendors, family friendly activities, live music and special programing at the Bellevue Art Museum! More details can be found right here

If you want to see all the great food that Seattle has to offer, then the Seattle Center is where you will want to be as Bite of Seattle is here and I bet you can smell the food already! Over 300 food and retail vendors will be take over the center serving up tasty dishes from around the world, and while you enjoy your food, you can watch 3 days of live music! There will be beer and wine gardens, cider tasting, they'll have just about anything you can think of when it comes to the world of food! Bite of Seattle is free to attend, but you will be paying for your food. More information can be found here. 

There are a couple of free movies this weekend, the Rocky Horror Picture Show is being shown at Cal Anderson Park tonight as part of the Center City Cinema program. Ratatouille is being shown at the Mural Amphitheater and for both movies you are encouraged to bring your own chairs and blankets, and movies will start when the sun goes down. The Northwest Film Forum is also hosting the Children's Film Festival Seattle throughout the weekend, day passes and weekend passes are available. 

Over in Renton, enjoy a weekend on the river for Renton River Days! There will be a drone show and concert, a parade, tons of summer fun for you and the family, plus there will be the all ages chalk art competition and the Rubber Ducky Derby on Sunday! Get the full schedule and more details right here. 

If you are looking for free fun to do with the family this weekend that involves getting outside, there will be a beach shore stroll along Olympic Sculpture Park today from 10-1, with the lowest tide at around 11:52 am. Naturalists will be there to answer questions and show you how much is happening along our shores. Also this weekend is a bicycle weekend here in Seattle, that means a portion of Lake Washington Boulevard will be closed to motor vehicles from 10 am Saturday-6 pm Sunday, giving you a perfect route for a weekend ride along the water.

How are you enjoying the summer? Remember to plan ahead for traffic and to let me know about the cool stuff going on in your neighborhood by emailing me, paulh@kiroradio.com 

 

Last week I got the chance to step inside the studio of a legendary name in the world of glass. To celebrate the Seattle Art Fair, the Boathouse, Dale Chihuly glassblowing studio opened it's doors to show off their space and the decades worth of art that Chihuly and his team have created.

Once inside, we got to see the incredible glass work and other pieces of art collected in specific rooms designed by Chihuly. I didn't really think about glassblowing much until seeing the show "Blown Away" on Netflix. Through that show you are shown first hand just how difficult, demanding and rewarding the world of glass blowing can be and how hours of work, can shatter with one wrong move or one bad break.

During the hottest day of the summer, glassblowers were hard at work showing off their skills for those of us that gathered in the hot shop. That's when I got to talk to Mimi Carter, Chihuly Studio’s Vice President of Marketing and Sales.

"Dale (Chihuly) grew up in Tacoma and then went to school at University of Washington, but he also went to school at University of Wisconsin and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He taught at RISD for 11 years, as well as in Maine, but when he came back, he wanted to essentially create an opportunity here in Seattle"

And create opportunities he has, through his work and the work of his team Chihuly has become a common name in the world of art, especially here in Washington

"He founded the Pilchuck Glass School after he had taught in New England because he really felt that we needed something like that here. It's now become an international art center there in Stanton, Washington. You can now see his art at the Museum of Glass at Union Station, at Tacoma Museum of Art. You can obviously see it at Chihuly Garden and Glass. It's not only been a contemporary art form that really began here, but it's just continued to increase, I think, because of his mentorship and influence"

Through his mentorship and creative vision he has helped glassblowing thrive here, it is by creating and using resources for artists

"Dale was fortunate enough to have a Fulbright Fellowship, and with that fellowship,  he wrote 100 letters to 100 different factories around the world, and the only one that said yes, was the Venini factory, but that gave him the opportunity to go study with these masters in Murano, Italy. It's those types of experiences that are transformative, that artists really need in order to propel their career forward. I think, by having schools, by having programs, and it can start with Hilltop Artists, that's local here, and it starts with 12 year olds, and we've been working with them for now 30 years. It can start at Path with Art. It can be at the Artist Trust. All those organizations are organizations that Dale and Leslie fund through their foundation, actually, but they see a value to that, and they see that that type of influence, that type of investment, is what continues to snowball the interest and influence in glass blowing today."

It's amazing to see the transformation of the glass from tubes or shards into priceless pieces of art, what starts as something so simple and fragile, can be manipulated into large scale sculptures guaranteed to catch your eye. Each piece of a Chihuly sculpture is hand crafted and engineered specifically to match Dale's creative vision.

Carter had a simple explanation as to why Chihuly and other glass work stands out.

"It inspires joy, and joy is the oxygen for doing hard things. It doesn't take a master's degree in art history. It doesn't take a background. It you simply see the artwork and its color and its translucence, and it's awe inspiring. And I think you feel that physically when you see the artwork"

Maybe you are an artist looking to get into the world of glass or take your work to the next level, Carter adds the community is here to help

"I think there are programs around the Pacific Northwest. Some are community based, some are school based. Some are opportunities that are, you know, pay to play. I think researching what what you need at this juncture, whether it's university or community based, is the first step, and then really talking to people, because I don't know that it's going to happen just by researching on the Internet or AI even. It's a community that does help each other and mentor each other. You look at Donna Davies at Pilchuck Glass School, or Debbie lank at Museum of Glass. Those are leaders in the community that always want to help other young artists learn more about exploring new ideas. The community is really invested in Seattle, invested in the artists in Seattle. And we want to see it grow and flourish the way Dale did started to do this, in the early 70s. He wants it to continue.

And if this is somehow your first time hearing about Chihuly?

Here locally, you can obviously see a lot of work at Chihuly Garden and Glass here in Seattle, but also in maker's mark in Loretto, Kentucky. We'll have an exhibition opening in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the Frederick Meyer Sculpture Garden and park. We also have a piece in Montreal, a sun that's being reconfigured that's going to be beautiful at that museum. Get in touch with us.  I'm happy to talk to anybody about where they can see Chihuly." 

You can find more information at chihuly.com

Paul Holden, KIRO News Radio

 

For Walter Day… it was simple

 

“I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted the glory. I wanted the fame. I wanted the pretty girls coming up and say, Hi, I see that you're good at centipede,”

 

You might know Walter Day from the 2007 documentary film, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. In the movie, we learn that Day is the head referee and scorekeeper of Twin Galaxies, an international video game scoreboard, and back in the 80’s a legendary arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa. While Walter wasn’t the true star of the movie, which focused on the world of competitive Donkey Kong, he’s become a fan favorite and if you ask me, the world of competitive gaming as we know it, is thanks to him and his work. 

 

After researching and practicing transcendental meditation, Day wanted to know what made a champion, a champion, so he got to work. 

 

“I started monitoring high scores as I traveled around the countryas a traveling salesman and I fell in love with video game arcades, and I decided I wanted to do an arcade. And when I did the arcade, I immediately started a scoreboard and tried to monitor who is the best in all the games. Next thing I know, I discovered that the video game industry had no scorekeeper and had no scoreboard so I volunteered to do it, and the video game industry went for it. So suddenly, overnight, my arcade Twin Galaxies in Ottumwa, Iowa became the world's most famous arcade. It became the mecca of video game playing. It became the crossroads. It became the Dodge City of video games, and people traveled even from other countries, even just to say they once played at the great Twin Galaxies. So suddenly we were the center of the video game universe. And everything we did was completely original, pioneering and now historically, looking back on it, it is the birth of organized competitive video gaming, which makes it the birth of competitive eSports.

 

You learn more about his story and influence throughout the rest of the King of Kong,  but his latest movie Arcades and Love Songs, directed by Ed Cunningham, is not a sequel. 

“I got pulled back in just before I learned about Walter's music, because Walter got pulled into a lawsuit. Billy Mitchell had been in a lawsuit with Twin Galaxies, which Walter had sold after King of Kong. And I actually, because some of that lawsuit, it mentioned the film. It specifically mentioned the film. And so I got back involved to help Walter defend himself from a lawsuit, from a movie that we produced, you know, almost 20 years ago that was really a strain on Walter's life, and I was there as a friend, and we reconnected through what was the hardship for him”

 

In 2014, Walter Day sold Twin Galaxies and moved on to focus on his music career, hence the name of the film, Arcades and Love Songs. Years after the release of the King of Kong, Billy Mitchell, one of the Donkey Kong players featured in the movie, was accused of cheating. Mitchell was even stripped of his high scores from Twin Galaxies, and eventually Mitchell filed a defamation lawsuit against Twin Galaxies. In 2021 Twin Galaxies countersued Mitchell and listed Day as a cross-defendant, accusing the pair of teaming up to promote the fake score in order to drive up the value of the company before sale. However, Day was later voluntarily dropped from the suit, which was also eventually settled out of court.

 

During all this Day was still nursing a broken heart

 

“Of course, in 1985 I had a glamorous girlfriend, and essentially, one night, I was very in love with her, one night, she called me up and said, Walter, I've been seeing a friend of yours, and we're done. So my heart was broken the first time, and actually the only time I ever had my heart broken. And it was a very, very big experience. But what became interesting is that a couple of weeks into the heartbreak, I started hearing music playing in me, almost like I was channeling a radio station, but that radio station was playing songs that were new, that were my songs that didn't exist in the outside world.”

 

Over 100 songs are the result of Day’s heartbreak back in the 80’s and it has been his lifelong goal to produce and perform those songs. But there was one catch…

 

“The voice is still a work in progress. When I got up on the stage, I got up there with more courage than I got up with skill in singing, because I'm brand new, because I never was a singer, never expected to be a singer, never thought of being a singer, never imagined being a singer. When I got up there on the stage, I was singing for the first time in my life in front of people, and that was a huge psychological, emotional adventure.”

Throughout Arcades and Love Songs, we follow Day on his journey with building his voice and confidence, even revisiting the inspiration behind all this music. But the film is more than just following around a man who has dedicated his life to the world of video games, it’s a story of perseverance and that we should never lose sight of our biggest goals in life. That sometimes the thing preventing you from what you’ve always wanted is yourself. 

 

“I actually began to have tremendous fears, and would even have nightmares about how, oh, it’s the end of my life and I never, ever, ever did the music and never shared it to the world so the world would find out how beautiful it is.”

 

When the word got out that Walter Day needed help making his album, the video game world stepped up

 

“I was at an event when a couple people came out of the crowd and they said, Walter, we recognize you from the King of Kong. Whatever happened to that music? Anything ever come out of it? And explained to them that it was still my dream to do, but it never happened, just because of all the difficulties of life. And they said, Well, we made a game called Color Switch. It's been successful. You know, we've got the money and we want to pay for your album as a gift, no strings attached.

 

And when Cunningham heard the news?

 

it only took me about 24 hours before I realized, you know, Walter mentioned the scene in King of Kong where he's talking about his music and he's playing his song. And it's great scene in front of this barn in Iowa in the winter. And I just thought, you know, this brings it full circle, and it's also a different story. We had no interest in doing King of Kong 2. Walter said this early on when we started filming. He's like, you know, the story is almost already written. And I think our cameras being there up to Walter's game, it made it made it a little more important, and I'm very happy with what turned out to be really it's a singer songwriter heartbreak movie about this guy with an interesting background in video games” 

 

I don’t want to spoil how the performance goes, but the film is a must for fans not only of the King of Kong, but for those looking for a little inspiration.

 

This is not an action film at all. This completely is devoted to impulses of the heart. In a sense, this is completely all about how the way people work together, and how their hearts fit together, which is becoming an important theme at this time in history, because the world is so crazy.

 

You can stream Arcades and Love Songs on multiple platforms, right now.

 

Paul Holden, KIRO News Radio