To start 2017 off on the right foot, our arts critics have picked the best events happening this week, ranging from Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie to Contagious Exchanges featuring Sarah Galvin and David Schmader to the closing week of To: Seattle | Subject: Personal. See them all below, and find even more events on our complete Things To Do calendar.

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Jump to: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday

MONDAY

READINGS & TALKS

Henry Rollins: Spoken Word
Former Blag Flag frontman and current radio-show host, television-show host, columnist, and comedian Henry Rollins is on another one of his talkin' tours. If you've never been to one of his spoken-word performances, they're essentially 90 minutes of story time with a curious and thoughtful guy who travels around the world trying to be good and failing to be good. You get to learn from his failures and triumphs, all while wishing he would just launch into "Rise Above" and start a mosh pit, which might actually happen if Donald Trump nominates one more billionaire to his cabinet. RICH SMITH

ART

Go Tell It: Civil Rights Photography Closing Day
Last summer, a Reuters photographer snapped his shutter at the moment when a young Black nurse named Ieshia Evans stepped out in front of a line of riot-gear-laden police officers and appeared to repel them—and was arrested immediately afterward. She was a peaceful protester in the Black Lives Matter marches taking place in Baton Rouge on July 9. The photograph immediately went viral, and everybody but everybody—including me—wrote about it. So there's extra-good reason during this moment to revisit historical photography of the work of people arguing simply that Black lives have not mattered as much as they should, and that it's time for the iniquitous inequity to end. SAM has organized this small display of Jim Crow and civil rights photographs for that reason. You'll see images by Dan Budnik, Danny Lyon, Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Marion Post Wolcott. You'll also see a new 45-minute video by the Philadelphia artist Shikeith called #blackmendream, in which nine Black men are interviewed with their backs facing the camera. "When did you become a Black man?" is one of the questions. What are we all becoming? JEN GRAVES

MONDAY-SUNDAY

ART

Yves Saint Laurent: The Perfection of Style
The Perfection of Style features highlights from legendary fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's 44-year-long career, during which he helped redefine the world of women's fashion by introducing menswear-inspired garments like the trench coat and the pantsuit. The exhibit's US premiere features new acquisitions by the collection of the Foundation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent that have that have never previously been shown publicly, as well as a variety of multimedia elements from the archive that demonstrate the development of the YSL style, from sketches to completed garments.
This exhibit is closed on Tuesday.

TUESDAY

READINGS & TALKS

The Name of the Wind
At this book club, discuss acclaimed sci-fi author Patrick Rothfuss's first novel from 2007, a bildungsroman about a fierce young boy who can wield magic, which was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Rothfuss's later books have appeared on NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy Books list.

TUESDAY-SUNDAY

ART

To: Seattle | Subject: Personal
There are two kinds of objects at a museum, the ones that are borrowed and the ones the museum has decided to commit to by owning them. That commitment is just about as “personal” a decision as a museum makes, and Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, on the occasion of her departure as the Frye’s director last month, organized a show called To: Seattle | Subject: Personal, devoted entirely to works of art that have come into the collection of the museum, by purchase and by gift, since Birnie Danzker began in 2009. It’s her last hurrah of support for locally based, and locally born, artists, often working collaboratively, who address the social conditions of contemporary life. JEN GRAVES

WEDNESDAY

READINGS & TALKS

Contagious Exchanges
I'm not typically a squealer, but I let out a high-pitched noise when I saw the lineup for this iteration of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's reading series featuring queer writers. Sarah Galvin is the author of The Three Einsteins (a very funny and quietly poignant book of poems) and The Best Party of Our Lives (a very poignant and quietly hilarious book of essays about gay marriage). Stranger weed columnist David Schmader has a new-ish book out, too, and it's all about gettin' hiiiiiigh. Weed: The User’s Guide is a handy and hilarious guide to big chiefin. RICH SMITH

Reading Through It: A Post-Election Book Club
The Seattle Review of Books and Seattle Weekly aim to help you cope with the next four years with Reading Through It, a "monthly book club exploring who we are as Americans, where we're going, and how to fix it." In January, join them to discuss Citizen: An American Lyric by poet Claudia Rankine.

Silent Reading Party
Invented by our own Christopher Frizzelle, the reading party is every first Wednesday of the month at 6 p.m. That's when the Fireside Room at the Sorrento Hotel goes quiet and fills with people with books tucked under their arms. (And, occasionally, a Kindle or two.) By 7 p.m., you often can't get a seat. And there's always free music from 6 to 8 p.m.

FILM

First Wednesday Queer Film: Holiday Heart
If you haven't fallen under the spell of local legend Mark "Mom" Finley, now's your chance to see him in person and on the big screen. Finley hosts a screening of the lesser-known (but excellent!) Pacific Northwest heart-warmer Holiday Heart, based on the play of the same name. It stars Ving Rhames as a gold-hearted drag queen who forms an unlikely bond with a single mom played by Alfre Woodard—I mean, honestly, what plans could you possibly have on a Wednesday night that could ever hope to top that? MATT BAUME

COMEDY

The Gay Uncle Time Final Show
According to Matt Baume, the Gay Uncle Time is "an avuncular variety show starring Santa-esque comedian Jeffrey Robert and a rotating cavalcade of local stars, drag queens, storytellers, and weirdos," which gives a "healthy dose of history, comedy, and song from the gay uncle you always wished you had and his friends you always suspected were up to no good." This final, special good-bye show (before it goes to the Seattle Fringe Festival) will center on the theme "The Gay Uncle Explains It All To You," and will be "part memoir, part LGBTQ history lesson, part celebration of pop culture."

FOOD & DRINK

Feast of the Seven Fishes: A Filipino Holiday Pop-Up
Local pop-up purveyor Melissa Miranda is hosting a Filipino-themed version of the very Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes at Bar Del Corso. This makes good sense, as she is a Pinay from Seattle who went to Italy for her culinary training. She's thrown a few other pop-ups, but this one should be a doozy, as it's at one of the city's best Italian joints, in one of the city's most traditionally Filipino neighborhoods, and it's composed entirely of seafood, which Seattle has a dazzlingly fresh and abundant selection of. Also, on her way back from Italy, she spent some time in New York, where she was a guest chef at fancy Filipino restaurant Maharlika. In an interview on the owner's blog, she was asked if it was rough working in the male-dominated culinary industry, and had this to say: "Let’s just say it hasn’t been easy… I remember one of the first times I walked into a kitchen here in New York, and the whistling and hollering started, and the staff asked if I was the new hostess. Once I was introduced as a visiting chef, the look on their faces was worth it all." Fuck yeah. TOBIAS COUGHLIN-BOGUE

WEDNESDAY-SATURDAY

ART

Winter Gymnastics
Winter Gymnastics is a group show, a survey of works that pick up on the charms of a chill in the air, from Susanna Bluhm's large, thick, confectionary recent paintings of New York in snow to Doug Keyes's 2014 portrait of the artist Roni Horn as though she's seen through a block of ice, and stark-freezing photographs and paintings by Eirik Johnson, Mary Iverson, Robert C. Jones, Mark Thompson, Cable Griffith, Julie Blackmon, and Michael Kenna—plus works of historical photography by Marion Post Wolcott, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, and Jacques-Henri Lartigue. This is the gallery's first show after moving from its longtime Pioneer Square location up north to Lower Queen Anne, where it now sits on the same block as the great theater On the Boards. It's always worth it to show up for G. Gibson, whether it is conveniently located for you or not. And this gallery, the also-indispensable literary-contemporary-art venue INCA, and On the Boards are forming a vital little cultural bloc on that corner. JEN GRAVES

WEDNESDAY-SUNDAY

PERFORMANCE

Can Can Cabaret Presents Wonderland
Can Can will transform its venue into a snowy chalet and populate it with teasing beauties. VIP tickets get you champagne and a meal as well.

THURSDAY

ART

First Thursday Art Walk
During January's edition of the city's oldest art walk, look forward to gallery openings, free booze, and the opportunity to mingle with other artsy folks in Pioneer Square. This month, don't miss Jen Graves's picks: David Jaewon Oh's depictions of women fighters in Combatants, James Martin's colorful and disorienting Lion Around, It Seemed Endless by painter and sculptor Jeff Gerber, Juventino Aranda's well-deserved and exciting exhibit Weed the Lawn and Feed the Roses, devoted abstractionist Michael Knutson's Symmetrical Fields, work by sculptor Richard Rezac and painter Julia Fish, sculptor Christopher Shaw and performance artist Red Square's The Tea Library III, and Kiss Fear, a collaboration by poet Daemond Arrindell and artists Mary Coss and Holly Ballard Martz. See our First Thursday calendar for a complete list of openings and recommended shows.

READINGS & TALKS

Seattle StorySLAM
A live amateur storytelling competition in which audience members who put their names in a hat are randomly chosen to tell stories on a theme. Local comedians tend to show up, but lots of nonperformers get in on the action as well. This week's theme is "Voyage," so expect five-minute stories about travel, including "language barriers and the hunger, fear, lust or delight that compelled you to make the leap."

FRIDAY

READINGS & TALKS

Gary Taubes: The Case Against Sugar
Put down your mocha frappe—Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat) will speak about his 2016 book The Case Against Sugar, which exposes the sugar industry, the substance's detrimental health effects, and the influential lobbies working to keep it so popular.

FRIDAY-SATURDAY

PERFORMANCE

14/48: The World's Quickest Theater Festival
In a tradition that has lasted nearly 20 years, theater teams put together seven new shows in 24 hours—and then repeat the experience the following week. This means that shows are written on Thursday and performed on Friday. Watch the grueling but exciting birth of new theater.

The Three Yells: Giselle Deconstruct
I saw an early, truncated version of this show at Northwest New Works Festival this year, and I am pumped to see the whole, pulsing intensity of choreographer Veronica Lee-Baik's beast be brought to life. As I mentioned in a review from this summer, Giselle Deconstruct is a Butoh-influenced take on Giselle that reframes the popular ballet as a bildungsroman from the perspective of the man-killing "Wilis." The show opens with a bunch of women dancers in dirty gold gowns crawling out of Tupperware storage containers like baby snakes while heavy industrial music booms and screeches in the background. The dancers then hiss at each other, kiss occasionally, perform snake-like fights, and generally pubesce in a field of chest-shattering music before entering a cocoon phase. In general, it's a hypnotizing and super-creepy display of powerful feminist #squadgoals that deconstructs and at times shows up the ballet it references, as when the dancers slow-mo tiptoe off the stage with their hands outstretched like reptilian villains. RICH SMITH

FRIDAY-SUNDAY

PERFORMANCE

Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie
Folk legend Woody Guthrie mixed his progressive politics with his music in a way that elevated both enterprises. He scrawled "This Machine Kills Fascists" across his acoustic guitar, wrote about Trump's housing discrimination and racist slumlordery back when he was living in a tenement owned by the president-elect's father, and acknowledged the oppression of Native Americans and other subjugated peoples even as he celebrated the beauty and promise of the US in songs such as "This Land Is Your Land." (He wrote a whole mess of songs about this part of the country, too! If you haven't already, check out The Columbia River Collection.) This show, directed by Nick Corley, presents a musical portrait of his life, with David Lutken in the leading role. RICH SMITH

SATURDAY

PERFORMANCE

Arthaus 3.0: Bodacious Beach Party
Version 3.0 of Kremwerk's drag-queen battle royale/dance party is upon us. Teams of hilarious and artsy queens will compete for bragging rights, shade throwing rights, and the right to play puppet master at the following year's Arthaus series. As I predicted, Betty Wetter, Cookie Couture, Miss Americano, and Khloe5X of Halfway Haus won the series last year, and they'll be hosting and picking the themes this year. For this beach party, Haus of Misfit Sex Toys and Haus of Urchin will compete, with Halfway Haus hosting and performance by Cookie Couture, Betty Wetter, Americano, Old Witch, and Mal DeFleur. French Inhale will DJ. Drinks will be had. RICH SMITH

The Blue Show
Improvisers have been saving up their dirtiest material for The Blue Show, an emphatically adults-only improv comedy night that happens just once a month—and that has attracted celebrity guests Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher.

The Future is 0
This DIY game show (filmed with a live studio audience right here in Seattle) is described as “equal parts Double Dare 2000, nihilist performance art, and sarcastic TV experiment.”

READINGS & TALKS

Martha Grover with Corinne Manning
Author and zine editor Martha Grover will speak about her book The End of My Career, in which she recounts the true story of her investigation into workers' comp claims. In their words: "Angry and heartbroken, brimming with the outrageous contradictions of the modern world, The End of My Career embodies the comic nightmare of our times."

SUNDAY

FILM

Silent Movie Sundays: Charlie Chaplin
In 1940, Chaplin had the nuts (and wealth) to push forward with The Great Dictator, a film that aggressively lampooned Adolf Hitler and ended with a fourth-wall-breaking five-minute speech imploring the world not to accept fascism. It also represented a huge career risk, and he paid dearly for it. "I was determined to go ahead," he famously said of the film, "for Hitler must be laughed at." In just over a week, we will inaugurate a modern-day fascist, and we'd better be ready to laugh if we don't want to spend the next four years crying. Go get a stiff drink, revel in some top-notch physical comedy, and take some small pleasure in the thought of how ruthlessly Chaplin would roast Trump, were he around to do it. TOBIAS COUGHLIN-BOGUE

ART

Truth B Told Opening Reception
Onyx Fine Arts' 12th annual juried exhibit, Truth B Told, will reveal the truth about Black artists: their strength and fragility, the variety of their styles, and the uncategorizable nature of a broad, diverse group of artists. A section of the exhibit will focus on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a labor organization that was instrumental in the Civil Rights Movement.

Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app—available now on the App Store and Google Play.