Bumbershoot comes to a close with Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse

Monday was another great day for staying indoors — which probably wasn't great news for the open-air performers on the third and final day of Bumbershoot 2009. But Seattle Center's indoor venues had plenty to offer.

Pacific Northwest Ballet offered a knockout set of three contemporary short works, plus an excerpt from the upcoming revival of Jean-Christophe Maillot's "Roméo et Juliette." Of special note was Marco Goecke's solo piece "Mopey," nicely nailed by James Moore, whose long-limbed fluid movement would fleetingly freeze into sculptural precision. His flung halos of sweat were a special effect unto themselves.

PNB packed the house and got a shout-out response to every piece on the program.

Over at SIFF cinema, multiple programs of film shorts drew middling to full crowds, with "Made in Seattle" (which included one film from Spokane) being one of the few standing-room-only screenings. One query in the Q&A that followed brought the house down: "If I wasn't related to you, how would you get your actors?"

It came from young Jesa Chiro, who played an undersea urchin in "A Water Tale," directed by her mother, SJ Chiro. All the films — most of them digital — had a sharp, polished look. The presentation at SIFF was impeccable.

Meanwhile, in the great, rainy outdoors, two living statues — no Bumbershoot is complete without them — braved the elements. Jesse Ferguson, a 7th Day Adventist preacher by day, and Patrick Toney, a musician with a band called Garage Voice, have been coming to Bumbershoot for eight years, always standing in the same spot, with different outfits each time.

This year they adopted an American colonial theme, with Ferguson playing George Washington. Unlike some living statues, these two move, depending on what kind of vibes they're getting from the Fisher Green Stage."During happy music," Ferguson explained, "we move more to make more money."

Their aged-copper-green-statue complexions (one concerned lady passing by said, "I hope that's not lead-based") were achieved with movie makeup. "The same as they used in 'The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,'" Ferguson said.

Apart from chatting with this interviewer, they stayed silent, beckoning festival-goers to dance with them or have their photos taken.

Monday night closed with rock-stadium blasts from Scotland's Franz Ferdinand and our own local Modest Mouse.

Franz Ferdinand, dressed in casual sportswear, looked like four nice boys from around the corner ... which made it difficult to believe just how much turmoil their energetic set was creating in the mosh-pit below them. As they raced through their numbers, security guards kept catching and rerouting crowd-surfers. The security force hosed down the crowd with water and it got hard to the tell the difference between crowd control and fetishistic ritual, as the security guys beckoned crowd surfers to tumble into their arms.

Modest Mouse took the stage right on schedule at 9:30 p.m., playing songs from their new EP, "No One's First, and You're Next." The numbers included "Satellite Skin," "The Whale Song" and "King Rat." But the muddy mix made lead singer Isaac Brock's scratchy, shouty voice all but unintelligible.

I'll be treasuring other Bumbershoot highlights instead:

• Dancer Sean Ryan in a turquoise tuxedo, shimmying and swiveling his way through one of J.S. Bach's 30 "Goldberg Variations" in Mark Haim's marvelously varied dance piece of the same name. Ryan even took advantage of a mike that dropped from the ceiling to mutter an ultra-cool "Baby ... oh!" over the live keyboard accompaniment.

• Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve 's "Next Floor" in "Best of SIFF: Jury Award Winners" was one of the best shorts I've seen in years: a special effects-enhanced marathon dinner party that keeps collapsing, literally, under the weight of its own excesses. The spirit of Luis Bunuel lives on! This one had to be seen to be believed.

• Christian Lander, author of the blog/book of "Stuff White People Like," was in snappy, snarky, lightning-fast form from the moment he stepped on stage. His reading from his blog entries on white people's fondness for "Adopting Foreign Children" and their curious use of scarves to regulate body temperature were pretty hilarious. But his account of his meteoric rise to fame and his ad-lib reactions to the audience were even funnier.

Until next year... .

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com