Support All-Ages Music

(MEETING) Attending this meeting of the Vera Project could easily be considered your good deed for the day. Why? Because you'd be showing support for a scene that's been getting no love at all, the all-ages scene. The Vera Project and Local 46 were created to help fill that gaping hole in youth-oriented music and arts, and aim to provide Seattle's kids with their first arts venue. If--no, WHEN--successful, the kids will finally have a place to hang their art, play their music, show their films, and read their poetry. How could that possibly be a bad thing? Meetings are held every second Thursday of the month; visit www.theveraproject.org for information on becoming a member/volunteer. MEGAN SELING

Local 46, 2700 First Ave, 956-8372, 7 pm.

Letter from Gaza, USA

(SOLO PERFORMANCE) New York performer Marshall Weber gets a lot of press for his marathon readings of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra (recited in 24 hours), James Joyce's Ulysses (34 hours), and the Bible (the entire King James in 72 hours). But he also does his own writing, as well as cobbling together assemblages of texts--describing a performance of his in Cleveland that included the history of the KKK and Chuck Berry tunes, Pform magazine said, "He pulled all these elements together with his own erratic energy and perspiration, which shone on his forehead just like the glimmer of his gold lamé shirt." Letter from Gaza, USA sounds more single-minded, but no less visceral: A multimedia examination of the ethics of Jewish American identity, with a particularly cold eye cast on the racism implicit in the Israel/Palestine conflict. BRET FETZER

Speakeasy Backroom, 2304 Second Ave, 682-6552, 8 pm, $7.

Low, Danielson Famile

(MUSIC) What kind of music do you produce if you were raised Mormon in Duluth, Minnesota? If you're like the three-member band Low, you make very slow, quiet, narrative songs that sound like you're trying simultaneously to keep it down so your little sister can nap upstairs, while still giving full expression to your growling, urgent angst. You harmonize vocals with your boyfriend (who will later become your husband), you accompany the vocals with only a guitar, bass, and drum set, and you consider the spaces in between notes to be just as important as anything else. Low's most recent album, Things We Lost in the Fire, mixes these philosophies into a molten-river flow of sounds; hearing the band live will reduce an audience to ashes. TRACI VOGEL

Paradox Theater, 5510 University Way NE, 529-7677, 6 & 10 pm, $10.

Shaken, Not Stirred

(RADIO) As wee boys, dissolute swinger with a perpetual hangover Little Johnny Seattle and buttrocker with a soft, nougaty center Scotty Crane grew up together on the same idyllic, tree-lined street, so they obviously have ample experience torturing each other. Happily, they've decided to train their laser-like aggression outward in their hour-long radio show, Shaken, Not Stirred, which gleefully pokes a pointed stick into Seattle's smug, over-inflated ass. The hilarious torrent of irreverent, scatological, and scathing sketches that pour forth can be heard every Saturday night, or thrilled to online. Whether streaking on-air through the Pike Place Market to "celebrate" Earth Day, hosting a Hot Dog Cake Bake-Off, or hawking Hooked on Ebonics, the boys are sure to delight whomever they don't disgust. TAMARA PARIS

KQBZ 100.7 FM, 9 pm, and www.shaken.net.

Clay Martin Puppet Theater

(PUPPETS) If you're looking for a way to keep your kids occupied without boring yourself to tears, an opportunity has arrived. First, Wallingford Center is putting on three Easter egg hunts at 10 am, which will feature some poor sap in an Easter Bunny costume, and which should have the little rugrats digging in the grass and dirt for half an hour. Then, at 10:30 sharp, Clay Martin will open his portable puppet theater and present a variety of classic tales, including The Frog Prince, Punch & Judy, and Moby-Dick--yes, Moby-Dick. Martin follows the aesthetic school of Warner Bros. cartoons, never afraid to tackle highbrow art and wrestle it to the ground with a maximum of wit and frenzy. You will be just as entertained as your wee ones, I promise. BRET FETZER

Wallingford Center, N 45th St & Wallingford Ave N, 517-7773, 10 am (egg hunt), 10:30 am (Clay Martin), free.

Day for Night

(FILM) François Truffaut's 1973 mash note to moviemaking was perhaps the surest-fire ever candidate for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. Indeed, the next year the Academy nominated it all over again in the mainstream competition for Best Director and Screenplay. Truffaut himself plays the director of an Anglo-French co-production trifle, Meet Pamela, whose production crises run the existential gamut from coping with the death of a star in mid-shoot to getting a kitten to lap cream on cue. The exultant high point is--seriously--the arrival of a bag of prop books that becomes a soaring hymn to the grandeur of film, filmmakers, and the tradition of film criticism from which Truffaut himself sprang. With Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Valentina Cortese (also nominated), and introducing the enchanting Nathalie Baye. RICHARD T. JAMESON

Little Theatre, 608 19th Ave E, 675-2055, Fri-Sun at 5:15, 7:30, 9:45.

Seattlestories.net

(WEBSITE) "Are we characters in Seattle's story, or is Seattle a character in ours?" asks Seattlestories.net. Each anecdote found on this cobbled-together virtual cocktail party has a byline, but the inherent anonymity of the Internet creates a good forum to explore this question. For all we know, the chronicler in one story could be a character in the next; the same place could be host to all sorts of different real events. That the stories are so varied, tied together only by place, evokes the structure of a certain genre of film and play, which in turn emphasizes our role as characters; that they are true, though, twists this relationship around, and the lines between character and place are blurred. In the weeks since Seattlestories began, dozens of stories have been posted. Probably no one will laugh at you if you add one or two of your own, and--always appealing--you can put in some deep metaphors about our place in the world, too. LISA SIBBETT

www.seattlestories.net

Other People's Lives

(ART) At Eyre/Moore Gallery, five photographers show voyeuristic images of everyday life. This is a portrait exhibit, though many of these photos are noticeably unpeopled: Houses loom lonely, and the one identifiable object in a homeless encampment is a shiny pair of shoes. Posterlike images of a '70s childhood are labeled with ridiculous captions like "Locked in the van while their mothers continued their affair, the boys were forced to piss into their chip bags." An anonymous couple's possible names flash below them on an LED display: names pulled from the phone book. These photographs speak to a sense of anonymity and loneliness, poignant, but edged with humor. We're invited to watch, and doing so, these lives don't seem so far away from our own. ADRIANA GRANT

Eyre/Moore Gallery, 913 Western Ave, 624-5596, Tues-Sat 11 am- 6 pm. Through April 28.

Vandana Shiva

(TALK) While the corporate-military-scientific establishment pooh-poohs concerns about "advances" like chemical and genetic pesticides, copyrighted genes, and GMOs in food, cancer rates continue to skyrocket. We may be at the beginning of a lab-grown epidemic of disease, famine, birth defects, and extinctions. Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist who has turned against this collusion-for-profit and is one of the sharpest observers of forest-for-trees today. Cataloguing the injustices suffered by Third World farmers and consumers, she provides a look at our possible near future, and on the eve of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) summit in Quebec City, she's bringing her bad news to the one place that needs to hear it most. Forget software... Seattle is already the world capital of biotech. GRANT COGSWELL

Kane Hall, Room 130, UW campus, 616-1825, 7 pm, free (tickets available at University Bookstore).

Psychedelic Furs, Tinfed

(MUSIC) Here is one of the sexiest sights still available to fans of post-British Invasion punk pop: Psychedelic Furs lead singer Richard Butler taking the stage to the opening strains of the beautiful "Love My Way," wearing a halo of smoke huffed from the skinny cigarette dangling swishily in his left hand, a wry Peter O'Toole smirk on his lips as he fronts the microphone. Or so I thought when I saw the band back in '86 as they played a dazzling, powerful, nostalgia-inducing show at the Paramount. Great, great band--almost mythological, you might say, though I can't vouch for how well they've aged. Then again, does it matter? RICK LEVIN

Showbox, 1426 First Ave, 628-3151, 8 pm, $25.

Good Men, Good Women

(FILM) The concluding chapter in Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's cinematic milestone--known colloquially as the Sadness Trilogy, comprising this film and its predecessors, The Puppetmaster and City of Sadness--is one of the most elegant films of the 1990s. A meditation on the emotional quality of history and the permeating sadness of modern Taiwan, Good Men, Good Women tells a dual tale: Filling in the modern aspect is Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh), an actress assigned the role of Chiang Bi-yu, a historical revolutionary in an upcoming film. Then, in black-and-white flashback, Hou depicts Chiang's story. Of all the film's superlatives--elegant acting, stately, sacred pacing, and a brilliantly complex narrative--none shines so brightly as the absolutely stunning camera work. This is one film so beautiful, it literally aches. JAMIE HOOK

Seattle Art Museum, 100 University St, 654-3121, 7:30 pm, $6.