Author: Omar Willey

Omar Willey was born at St. Frances Cabrini Hospital in Seattle and grew up near Lucky Market on Beacon Avenue. He believes Seattle is the greatest city on Earth and came to this conclusion by travelling much of the Earth. He is a junior member of Lesser Seattle and, as an oboist, does not blow his own trumpet. Contact him at omar [at] seattlestar [dot] net
Culture Dance

The Working Artist: Paige Barnes — Teacher, Student, Artist

There are scoffers in the community who believe that artists do not do any real work. Paige Barnes’ life and career offer a perfect rejoinder to this sort of nonsense. She is as devoted to her community as she is to her craft and her creativity, in ways that those who do “real work” only wish they could understand. In spite of all her hard work and her innate genius, Paige Barnes remains a virtually unappreciated artist in a town that is known for failing to appreciate its working artists.

Comix Visual Arts

The problems of a Morning Serial

What is true of reading printed comics is equally true of reading comics on the Internet, with the added difficulty that stems from the distractions endemic to reading at a computer. How much more difficult then for a curator to attempt to translate the experience of reading webcomics to a museum gallery. Morning Serial shows how difficult it is.

Cinema Media Visual Arts

Gary Hill’s Glossodelic Attractors

Even among my friends and associates who tend to consider themselves more cultured than most, very few have heard of Gary Hill. Behind this lack of knowledge, I suspect, is the typical disdain with which Seattle often treats its own artists, preferring to fantasize that nothing good ever happens here and the real world is always somewhere else, probably New York.

News Politics Society

The Seattle Community Network Revives Their Commitment to the Future

It’s 1993. Unless you are locked regularly in the basements of university computer science departments, you have never heard of the World Wide Web. If you have a computer at all, your computer runs at a maximum of 100 mHz and may have 4MB of memory, unless you can spare an extra thousand dollars in which case you may have 8MB–if your computer can actually accept it, since upgrades are impossible in many models.

Culture Food Literature Media Music News Performing Arts Visual Arts

From the publisher

I aim with The Seattle Star to use my pages to help rebuild our community, to use our knowledge and our limited power to bring artists together and to bring people together with artists. So far we have done this quietly, by publishing poetry, drama, radio plays and fiction alongside our essay writing. We will continue to do so, but rest assured we will expand this mission visibly over the next year.

Culture Performing Arts Poetry Visual Arts

ArtsCorps Student Showcase: Watering the Grassroots

Virtually every good citizen is aware of the massive cuts made to arts funding and arts education on a national scale over the past twenty years. Fewer people, however, are aware of the immense disparity between the haves and the have nots when it comes to the education their children receive in the arts. For that reason, programs like ArtsCorps have always been of utmost importance to me.