This Tube's for You

Kirkland Arts Center helps Bumbershoot update its literary program for the tech era.

The Literary Arts program has vanished from this year’s Bumbershoot Festival (September 4–6 at Seattle Center), replaced by the trendy new Words & Ideas program, which features a more web-and-pop-culture-conscious lineup. Tweedy traditionalists may raise an eyebrow at one event imported from Kirkland Arts Center: MeTube.

Illustration by Sean Alexander for City Arts.

It’s an extension of KAC’s popular BrüTübe events, in which renowned artists are “cürators” of shows of projected YouTube videos, while the audience drinks beer. BrüTübe’s February theme was the Valentine’s-Day-friendly “All’s Fair in Love and War.” “Chris Weber, who programs Bumbershoot arts for One Reel, visited,” says KAC exhibitions director Cable Griffith. Weber liked what he saw. So at Bumbershoot, luminaries will screen YouTube videos that remind them of their own lives, while Vis-à-Vis Society performers solicit the crowd’s response and project a graph showing the results. “It’s a little different than BrüTübe – no brews, a little more formal,” says Griffith.

And that’s not the only tech-happy, tradition-traducing program for the bookish at Bumbershoot. Twitter-loving Rick Moody screens the cheesy sci-fi flick The Crawling Hand, which inspired his new novel The Four Fingers of Death. Other Words & Ideas programs include “Why Bacon? Why Cupcakes? Why Now?” (about successful local bacon and cupcake entrepreneurs).

The literary luminaries include three writers each from the New Yorker and Saturday Night Live (one of whom wrote for both).

Not everyone is pleased with the change in programming. “If ‘Literary Arts’ implies a painstaking synthesis,” says Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, “ ‘Words & Ideas’ suggests more of a Las Vegas–buffet approach to culture. Cultural products and events are being reshaped to fit the expectations of a Web-saturated audience. So we get multimedia, interactive experiences that keep us pleasantly distracted and require little in the way of deep intellectual or emotional engagement.”

“Why shouldn’t people reflect on popular culture?” retorts Alix Wilber of Hugo House. “Sometimes you want a cupcake and sometimes you want a main dish – and between Words & Ideas and Elliott Bay and Town Hall and Hugo House, there are plenty of opportunities for a five-course meal.”

“I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing,” adds Hugo House’s Brian McGuigan, “especially considering how run-of-the-mill Bumbershoot’s literary programming has been over the last few years.”

KAC is the antidote to the run of the intellectual mill. But Griffith says irreverence beats irrelevance, and fun is a serious part of KAC’s mission. “We don’t have a collection or represent artists. We’re a hub of creative thought in the community.” And he insists that KAC’s multimedia mash-ups are very much in keeping with what’s happening in art. “Art historically, one of many definitions of postmodernism is that everything’s been done, so postmodern art tends to rely on repurposing things that exist. It takes a certain kind of individualism to be able to imagine yourself through YouTube videos – to be able to do something creative with that.”

The true test of Words & Ideas will be, well, the quality of the words and ideas presented. And some will prefer literature without the heady brew of multimedia. “I think real lit events take place when someone, alone, has his or her nose in a book,” says author Jonathan Raban. “At least that’s when mine do.” •