The Showbox, 1426 First Ave, 628-3151

Opening night Thurs Sept 5 w/the Fakes, Fitz of Depression, Dirty Birds, and Alta May, free from 6-8:45 pm, $7 at 9 pm.

Fri Sept 6 w/Doug Martsch and special guests,

8 pm, $14.

While we wait, post-ban, for the new explosion of posters on telephone poles, there are already more than 10,000 square feet of meticulously hand-drawn-and-colored posters, flyers, rough sketches, and paintings in the slightly more refined environs of the Showbox. Post Neo Explosionism, which features work from three distinctive designers (Emek, Jermaine Rogers, and Seattle's own Justin Hampton), handily demonstrates that rock posters can be as exciting, visceral, and carnal as the music they're designed to promote.

Hampton's heavy black lines, sharp angles, and deep shades of indigo and blue capture the enigmatic personas of Nick Cave and PJ Harvey. His moody illustrative style coaxes the dark side out of Elliott Smith, Bob Dylan, and Blur, whose normally reticent members are depicted as menacing Children of the Corn. Elsewhere, Hampton tilts toward noir: Mark Lanegan is cast as a sinister bartender, while a Breeders poster features the long shadow of a pistol-packing femme fatale overtaking her fleeing male prey. His exaggerated female forms are drawn from the salacious adult comic book tradition, but these women are cool, collected, and always in control; a recent Queens of the Stone Age poster portrays a curvaceous, club-wielding cavewoman dragging her brute back to the ol' abode by his hair.

Emek's intricate designs often mesh aesthetics that seem disparate (propaganda art, sci-fi machinery, and bright, organic '60s psychedelia) with striking success--perhaps most notably in his uplifting Pearl Jam poster. Houston-based Jermaine Rogers' twisted world is inhabited by baneful teddy bears, despondent politicians, and pop-culture references--from Star Wars to Cookie Monster. In a Burning Airlines poster, a retired, scraggly, bearded Kurt Cobain sits in a Seattle park teaching card tricks to kids. A world of alternate realities, fit to fray on the side of a pole or hang framed in someone's den. MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG

The New Poverty

The Pound Gallery, 1216 10th Ave, 323-0557

Closed Sept 1.

The new poverty looks a lot like the old poverty, but that doesn't make this show any less good. Since at least the '70s (and even earlier), when pop art blew open the field, artists have been using whatever materials they could beg or scrounge (from arte povera to Mike Kelley with his sad old stuffed animals, Sophie Calle with her own birthday gifts), and the result has been at least as much about how art is regarded in the world of commerce as it is about guilt, acquisitiveness, and aesthetics.

Curators Jeffrey Miller (of Seattle) and Althea Thauberger (of Victoria, BC) have assembled a show of eight artists involved in the kind of art that loosely, but not exclusively, draws on the transformation of garbage. One of my favorite Seattle artists working in this vein is Sarah Morris, who has in the past created existential calendars of office materials: long chains of Post-it notes, bus transfers, and receipts, each sewn gingerly to the next, marking off her days of temp jobs. She also shows a full-sized wedding dress delicately constructed out of plastic bags; at the end of the dress' train, three bags proclaim "guaranteed!" lending a new consumer spin to the strange transaction of marriage.

Ingrid Mary Percy is showing wall collages: vaguely flowery, made of Mac Tac contact paper, here in both wood-paneled patterns and a kind of chintz--a dainty update on the supergraphics of the superdesigned '70s (implying lounging, implying time, implying money). There are two lovely sculptures by Jenny Heishman that feel out of place here, although this resistance may be my own stubborn desire to see her work isolated from the dirty world. My only complaint about The New Poverty is that it feels sparing instead of exuberant. It could have gone so much further in showing us what is gained, and perhaps lost, when artists refuse traditional methods. "What you have to measure out," Flannery O'Connor wrote, "you come to observe more closely." EMILY HALL

Bellevue Botanical Garden

12001 Main St, Bellevue, 425-452-2750

Open every day, 7:30 am to sunset, free.

To go somewhere, to sit, to do nothing. Isn't that what everyone wants? Most especially philosophers? And also those who are squeezed daily to the breaking point working for corporate giants like Microsoft?

Landscape, plants, and water are your balm at the Bellevue Botanical Garden, a removed reserve with benches and niches and rock-seats beside some of the most mesmerizing applications of water in the area. The garden's understated, lovely pools and tiny artificial waterfalls are conducive to contemplation; the place is blissfully underattended. As you step up to the visitors' center (built in the 1950s by Wright-influenced local architect Paul Kirk), you'll see that a stream actually flows through the cracks between the sidewalk's gray bricks. The water is fresh and sun-warmed, mimicking gravity itself as it moves past your feet and down a level or two toward a final pool.

Now, in late summer, the fuchsia displays are blooming all over the garden, the slim veins of their leaves blood red. If you're not from the Northwest, you can learn what "salal" is. You can see a gargantuan red banana plant, fat-tongued hostas, the Tropicana Canna plant's blatantly sexy orange flowers, and masses of long pampas grass that grow smoothly in a single direction, like a girl's hair.

You can take a trail around a wetland pond or through the Japanese garden. You can also wade through the surrounding woods or down another trail to Lake Washington. But the preferable thing, during these last days of heat, is to find a rock and just hunker down, like the cousin of the ape that you are. Stare at the underwater moss being tugged by current. It is good to do nothing, so good. STACEY LEVINE