THURSDAY 6/1


Napping

(REST) Now that the days are longer, you can afford to take a quick nap after work without losing those precious few minutes of NW light. And getting your beauty rest means you can stay out late: drinking, dancing, flirting, and painting the town red. According to Professor James Maas, a sleep researcher and Psychology 101 instructor at Cornell University, one hour of napping provides two hours of keen brain activity (Let's see: If I only have $20, I can get five beers at $4 apiece, or four mixed drinks at $5, or...). Even a 20-minute nap can be dramatically refreshing and leave you alert without disrupting your regular sleep patterns. ERIN FRANZMAN

Seriously, though--you look like hell. Get some sleep.


Marigold

(LIVE MUSIC) The first time I stumbled upon Marigold, I was much too impressed and involved with their music--unpretentious, melodic, sincere indie rock--to even realize that they were playing to a cold, dim room of 10 people (maybe 10 people). It was early in the evening, they were the first opening band, and no one seemed to know much about them, except that they hailed from Eugene and their CD was "coming soon." I quickly became obsessed. But since that dreamy winter's night, Jacob, Travis, Nathan, and Adam have only graced Seattle with ONE other much-too-brief performance before retreating to Portland with their guitars and charisma. Catch tonight's rare performance, and make the boys feel welcome. Meanwhile, their CD is still "coming soon," and my obsession burns on.... MIN LIAO

Crocodile, 2200 Second Ave, 441-5611, 9 pm, $6.


Bill Speidel's Underground Tour

(WALKING TOUR) Most Seattleites only go on the Underground Tour when they have visitors to entertain, but you shouldn't wait for that. Your guide will take you underground to view some of the extensive subterranean sidewalks and storefronts of 1890s Seattle, while chattering incessantly about early Seattle's sewage problems and political corruption. The bad puns and cheesy jokes can be a bit much at times, but the unglorified approach to local history is refreshing. If you join a group tour without young children, you'll hear even more about early Seattle's numerous "seamstresses" (prostitutes) and the hard-drinking local pols they bedded. The tour ends with a quite respectable museum at the tour headquarters (next to the gift shop, naturally), which includes the world's first "Thomas Crapper" flushable toilet. MELODY MOSS

Bill Speidel's Underground Tour, 610 First Ave, 682-4646 or www.undergroundtour.com; daily 90-minute tours, call for times, $4-$8.


FRIDAY 6/2


The Shneedles

(LATE-NIGHT THEATER) Yeah, yeah, there's been a lot of clowns around Seattle lately--but these guys are really, really good. Bill Robison and Wolfe Bowart, a.k.a. the Shneedles, are somewhere between Buster Keaton and the ancient cartoon The Katzenjammer Kids. Their razor-sharp timing and buffoonish-but-sympathetic personae make them not to be missed. You will fall in love with them, they will fall in love with you, then someone will get jealous and club someone else over the head. You will laugh and laugh at the most primitive humor, presented with a rare delicacy and precision. BRET FETZER

Odd Duck Studio, 1214 10th Ave N, 324-1062, June 2-11, Fri-Sat at 10:30 pm, Sun at 7 pm, $10 suggested donation.


West Seattle Walk-In Cinema

(FILM) As film exhibition continues to redefine itself for a new century by seeking out new spaces, we can but marvel at the proliferation of alternativity in our fair city. And what could be more alternative than an outdoor cinema? Why, an outdoor cinema in West Seattle, that's what. A counterpart to the infamously wonderful Fremont Outdoor Cinema, the West Seattle Walk-In offers a Friday to Fremont's Saturday, with all the movies and bands you could ever hope to find in a single parking lot. This weekend kicks off the festivities (with music by the Donettes), so as long as the weather lasts, there's a lot worse ways to spend five bucks. "Why in hell would I schlep all the way out to West Seattle just to go to the got-damn movies," you ask? Two words: Smokey and the Bandit, motherfucker! We gone. SEAN NELSON

West Seattle Walk-In, Junction community parking lot (behind Husky Deli at California and Alaska St) in West Seattle, 7 pm, $5.


SATURDAY 6/3


Rain City Rollers

(GLORIOUS SPECTACLE) Ten of Seattle's favorite actresses, all in fine athletic shape, wearing tight-fitting team uniforms as they zoom around a giant track on roller skates, fighting for the lead, occasionally smacking into each other with fierce competitive fervor... mmmm. Smarty-pants House of Dames director Nikki Appino (director of Djinn and Beyond the Invasion of the Bee Girls) says it's a musical retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, featuring a three-piece swing band performing the compositions of David Russell (Cold Water Waltz) and Kevin Joyce (a core member of UMO), with choreography by Wade Madsen (who has too many credits to count). It opens on Friday, but give them a day or two to work out the kinks--then go, baby, go! BRET FETZER

Sand Point Naval Base, Hangar 2S, 7400 Sand Point Way NE, June 2-July 2, Thurs-Sun at 8 pm (with 10:30 pm performances on Fri-Sat nights, June 16-July 1), $16-$20.


SUNDAY 6/4


The Films of Charles and Ray Eames

(FILM) The best--indeed, the only--story about Charles Eames I've ever heard is the one about how, when he decided to start making chairs, the first thing he did was to call a few hundred people into his workshop and measure each and every one of their asses. This novel approach to furniture design carried over into the experimental short films Eames made with his wife Ray, which are obsessed with the literalization of the figurative universe. The most famous, Powers of Ten (which appears here along with its prototype sketch) takes the viewer backwards from a picnic all the way to outer space, then shoots us back, frame by frame, into the heart of an atom, thus quantifying infinity. Atlas pulls a similar trick: It physicalizes the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in an expanding, then contracting, world map. The realm of ideas has seldom had such ingenious spokespeople. Anyone interested in anything at all--as the Eameses seemed to be--won't want to miss this program. SEAN NELSON

Little Theatre, 608 19th Ave E, 675-2055, Thurs-Sun June 1-4 at 5:30, 7:30, 9:30 pm, $7.50.


Karen Liebowitz

(ART) There's not much painting that's really grand these days, and I mean that in the old awe-inspiring, knee-quaking way. There's thoughtful, intense minimalism, and there are new explorations into older forms of representational painting, such as still life and portrait. But Liebowitz's canvases are crowded with symbols and emotion and color, so that they're like altarpieces of old. This exhibition of new paintings, Chaos and Kiddush, draws on the iconography of Judaism, mythology, and history, and on different styles of painting (figurative, cartoonish, more- and less-finished) layered together into intense and cryptic narratives. It's a lot of work for a painting to do, but work it does, because Liebowitz can paint. EMILY HALL

SOIL Artist Cooperative, 12th and Pike, 264-8061. Opening reception June 3, 6-10 pm. Through June 25.


MONDAY 6/5


Rory Block

(LIVE MUSIC) If the primary prerequisite for being a blues musician is having the blues, one glance at Rory Block's life story indicates that she's more than qualified. She also had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time; coincidences of society, history, and geography meant that she got to play guitar with Son House (i.e., He Who Taught Robert Johnson), Mississippi John Hurt, and other blues luminaries whose careers were boosted by the blues revival of the '60s. As a result, Block is one of the finest acoustic blues musicians in the world today; she's got the touch, she's got the voice, and she's got the heart. She's done a lot of stellar albums, most recently Confessions of a Blues Singer--but like most acoustic blues musicians, Block's best heard live. GENEVIEVE WILLIAMS

Jazz Alley, 2033 Sixth Ave, 441-9729, 8 and 10 pm, $15.50-$17.50.


TUESDAY 6/6


Charles D'Ambrosio

(LECTURE) Writer and Stranger contributor Charles D'Ambrosio wants to expose the workings of Seattle's Dead Metaphor Department--that element of assiduous historical re-creation whereby, in his example, "when there are no more fish, you get fishmongers in the public market." D'Ambrosio, whose own semantic anthropology suits him in the guise of a salty scholar, speaks on "Scenery and the Scene" as part of Hugo House writer-in-residence Charles Mudede's Hugo Talks series, about creative relationships to Seattle and its evolving metaphors. TRACI VOGEL

Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030, 7 pm, $5/$3 members.


WEDNESDAY 6/7


Lewis H. Lapham


(READING) Editor of Harper's--the nation's oldest continually published magazine and really, the only major American magazine that still seems edited, rather than assembled as part of some kind of demographic marketing scheme--Lewis H. Lapham comes to town in conjunction with the publication of An American Album: 150 Years of Harper's Magazine. The book, an omnibus compilation of Harper's articles selected by Lapham and Ellen Rosenbush, is a daunting lump of coffee-table matter that makes it seem as if the most natural thing in the world would be for a magazine to get by for a century and a half with great writers and little attention to buzz. There's the little matter of Harper's unrelenting devotion to a kind of patrician socialism that really should seem dated on both fronts, but its political and social cant at least has the value of editorial sincerity--Lapham being a snobby lefty--and is often transcended by its unflinchingly literary focus, a quality that sets it apart from almost every other magazine on the newsstand. Besides, Harper's at its worst has never been as boring as The Atlantic. ERIC FREDERICKSEN

Lee Auditorium, Seattle Public Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 386-4650, 7:30 pm, free.