THURSDAY MARCH 29
Faux Bang
(MUSIC/PERFORMANCE) I took a smart friend to Foxes’ gone-but-not-forgotten punk rock/drag cabaret, Pho Bang, a while back because he was stressed out and needed to cut loose. He had never been to one of the shows. Hostesses Ursula Android and Jackie Hell did a great opening skit where Ursula played a crazy baby (polymorphously perverse, degenerate) and Jackie played its crazy mother (polymorphously perverse, drunken). I watched my friend’s eyes get bigger and bigger as the violence on stage caterwauled, until he eventually lost all his cool (and stress). He screamed, girlishly pleased: “This is like the Lower East side, 1971, New York Dolls scene babaaaay!” Then a couple of excellent bands played really loud music. My friend really loved that part, and I did too. Tonight’s show is a one-off event because, sadly, Pho Bang doesn’t happen anymore. I wouldn’t miss this if I were you. JEFF DeROCHE
Sit & Spin, 2219 Fourth Ave, 441-9484, 9 pm, $6.
FRIDAY MARCH 30
Chungking Express
(FILM) In bustling, modern Hong Kong, a fluorescent-lit lunch counter becomes an anchor for two lovesick policemen. In the wake of their respective abandonments, each has come to depend on odd, comforting rituals: the first buys a single tin of canned pineapple every day, and the second lectures domestic objects (“You’ve lost weight,” he tells a bar of soap). Chungking Express is about these men and the odd women they encounter at this vulnerable moment in their lives, but it’s not so much a story as a style. Wong Kar-wai has a fluid, changeable conception of time and of the things that tie our days together, be it a song, a salad, or a can of fruit. The random elements become the most deliberate; the careful is routinely discarded. At the end, the hapless policemen are still alone, and what we’re left with is a slow-mo memory of two characters passing, a strain of “California Dreaming,” and a rip in our hearts. EMILY HALL
Egyptian, 805 E Pine, 323-4978, Fri-Sat at midnight.
SATURDAY MARCH 31
The Waterboys, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
(MUSIC) Not being from here, it was oddly comforting to look across the room that night and see the face of someone with whom I share a past. We met in the days when I used to pump the pedals of my thrift-store bike through an Oregon campus, my senses in tune only with the crisp smell of spring and whatever music was blasting through my headphones. In those days my playlist didn’t vary much: In uncomplicated rotation were the Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Jam, and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Fifteen years later as a new band called Black Rebel Motorcycle Club played here, I walked up to this person with whom I share a past and by way of greeting told him I was about to fall in love with what I was hearing. “You would,” he said. “They sound just like Jesus and Mary Chain.” KATHLEEN WILSON
Paramount Theatre, Ninth & Pine, 628-0888, 8 pm, $30.
Shawn Ferris
(ART) It’s been far too long since we’ve seen Ferris’ elegant, funny paintings gracing walls anywhere in town–she’s been too busy whipping CoCA into shape. But now there’s a show of her work up at the place that gives me a Pavlovian craving for a spicy sausage sandwich at mere mention of its name. Ferris has developed a most personal symbology that involves eggs, crowns, and pugnacious-looking chicks, in paintings that are part medieval miniature, part Mexican retablos. Followers of her work will be delighted by the new icons: hearts stuck full of pins, and eggs wearing little matador hats and brandishing red capes. (Budding collectors take note: The paintings are very reasonably–almost criminally–priced.) What it all means I have no idea, but the mystery is as tasty as a spicy sausage sandwich. EMILY HALL
Two Bells Tavern, 2313 Fourth Ave, 441-3050. Through April 4.
SUNDAY APRIL 1
Eat at Zesto’s
(CHOW) On the corner of NW 65th and 15th NW, Zesto’s has served burgers, fries, and fish ‘n’ chips to Ballardians (particularly students of Ballard High School, just across the street) for almost 40 years. Unfortunately, the place is succumbing to this year’s devastating landmark bug, to be replaced by an office building. The last remnant of an early-’50s ice-cream franchise, what you really want here are the shakes–the best are in August, when the blackberries ripen. But no one will ever stare out toward the Olympics on a late summer afternoon drinking a blackberry shake again… Zesto’s closes in June. Like a (good) counterpart to the late and unlamented Andy’s Diner in SoDo, Zesto’s has the atmosphere of old, pre-software, pre-money, invalidated Seattle. Our newer residents should go just to feel some of what that was like. GRANT COGSWELL
Zesto’s Burger & Fish House, 6416 15th Ave NW, 783-3350.
MONDAY APRIL 2
Art
(THEATER) This slip of a play examines what happens to three friends when one buys a white-on-white painting another thinks is crap. A slender but clever examination of friendship and taste, its success depends upon the cast–and this production features three of Seattle’s most canny professional actors: Laurence Ballard, John Procaccino, and R. Hamilton Wright, whose combined resumes would include half the plays done at the Rep, Intiman, and ACT over the past 10 to 20 years. All three excel at the kind of neurotic and verbally dexterous characters Art depicts; with Kurt Beattie (former artistic director of the Empty Space, former associate AD of the Rep, etc.) at the reins, this should be a tight, funny evening. BRET FETZER
Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St, 443-2222, Tues-Sun at 7:30, Sat-Sun at 2, $15-$42. Through April 28.
Close Up
(FILM) There are no words in the English language that can adequately describe what Abbas Kiarostami‘s greatest film, Close Up, is. We are forced to invent clumsy compounds like docudrama, real-realism, fictional-fact. Nothing seems to get it right–maybe it can only be said or expressed in Farsi. What I can say in English, however, is that the story is about an ordinary working-class man who, on a whim, claims to be the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a woman he meets on the bus. Instead of letting the lie end at the next bus stop, he follows it all the way to its final and comical conclusion. Though the film is complex (it’s a dense mixture of dramatic and documentary filmmaking, acting and reporting), it is very simple–lyrically simple. And this produces yet another paradox (common-complex) that exhausts the vast resources of the English language. CHARLES MUDEDE
Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St, 523-3935, Mon-Thurs at 5, 7, 9.
TUESDAY APRIL 3
Chick.com
(WEBSITE) You may have found one of Jack T. Chick’s religious pamphlets in a telephone booth, or been handed one by someone on the street. They’re short comic-book stories of pathological, convert-or-go-to-Hell Christianity, astonishing in their rabid narratives of prideful unbelievers, expurgated swear words (“Grrr–I hate that old @!!!**!” snarls the devil in Party Girl), crafty demons, and last-minute conversions–or the brutal failure to convert in time! Now you can find them, in all their fervid glory, on Chick Communications’ own website. My personal recommendations: The Assignment, Doom Town (about the homos of Sodom!), The Last Generation, This Was Your Life, Somebody Goofed!, and Somebody Loves Me (a wordless masterpiece of jaw-dropping sentimentality)–then there are the specialty pamphlets, explaining why Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Wicca, and especially Catholicism are actually tools of Satan. Don’t miss out on this enthralling bit of uniquely American culture. BRET FETZER
www.chick.com/catalog/tractlist
WEDNESDAY APRIL 4
Timothy Egan
(READING) Timothy Egan, author of the books Breaking Blue and Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, is a practitioner of that illustrative branch of investigative journalism that rings with the authority of “The Beat.” As The New York Times‘ Seattle bureau chief for many years, Egan worried issues like the Northwest’s environmental woes and small-town law until they birthed revealing narratives. Egan’s politics veer left–he doesn’t pretend otherwise–and he can come off as an NPR talking head, but for sheer passion of coverage of our pinched and particular corner and its peculiar characters, he’s a head worth listening to. TRACI VOGEL
Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 587-2447, 6 pm, $10.
The Soft Boys, the Minus 5
(MUSIC) “I feel it coming on again just like it did before,” Robyn Hitchcock croons on “I Wanna Destroy You,” from the reissue of the Soft Boys’ classic 1980 album Underwater Moonlight. The line could also be the throwdown for the band’s return. Like many bands relegated to cultdom, the Soft Boys barely registered at the time, but their influence has been felt across decades. In celebration of the reissue and its appended live tracks, the Soft Boys are making a return appearance. This newest reunion tour promises to be special because it will highlight the songs from Underwater Moonlight with the lineup of Hitchcock at the helm, Kimberly Rew on guitar, Matthew Seligman on bass, and Morris Windsor on drums. NATE LIPPENS
Crocodile, 2200 Second Ave, 441-5611, 9:30 pm, $15.