• Anne Von Feldt, the western regional manager of Half Price Books, told us last week that the Capitol Hill Half Price Books on Belmont is closing on June 2. We will miss the unexpected beauty of the store, the excellent fiction and comics sections, and especially the cheerful and knowledgeable staff, who will hopefully all land safely in bookstore jobs elsewhere around town.

• There were four total pieces in the Seattle Symphony's "Love Stories" program. On Valentine's Day, the audience gave the symphony three standing ovations, including one before intermission. Granted, it was a good show, and visiting pianist Cédric Tiberghien was especially great, with his cartoonish and passionate solos guiding the symphony through lively performances of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major and Szymanowski's beautifully chaotic Symphony No. 4 for Piano and Orchestra, but come on. Seattle audiences are notoriously easy. You should give a standing ovation like you have only three standing ovations to give out in your entire life, people.

• In better Seattle Symphony–related news this week, Friday's late-night concert in the glassy lobby of Benaroya Hall was grandly freaky and basically sold out (500 people were spread on the floor, on the stairs, on the balconies). The players played a jazz-and-Arabic-music-influenced concerto for the bass trombone; a "hunting" quartet by the young composer Jörg Widmann, in which the players shred on their refined instruments as if they were cheese graters, scream bloodcurdling attack cries, and the cellist issues the distinct scream of the victim at the end; and Schoenberg's bizarre 1912 melodrama Pierrot Lunaire. In Pierrot, the singing is done in an unearthly, highly trained wail/drone. Kandinsky paintings were projected along with "sung" phrases like "Pierrot faints and imagines the moon slicing his sinful neck."

• The most recent entry in Hugo House's literary series Strong Female Leads was almost entirely excellent. Kelly Froh's cartoons about how she moved to Seattle as a woefully unprepared young person were hilarious, Katie Kate's new songs had us drooling for her upcoming album, and poet Arlene Kim's genius mixed- media PowerPoint erasures absolutely blew our minds. But the big disappointment of the evening was the headliner, Patricia Smith, whose uninspired work failed to examine the theme with any depth. Smith's tired slam-poet delivery felt telegraphed and painfully obvious, leaving many members of the audience feeling disappointed, like they just watched a bored nostalgia act stumble through its paces.

• Playing catch-up with Oscar bait? This past week at the new Ark Lodge Cinemas in Columbia City, a Saturday night screening of Silver Linings Playbook was nearly sold out and filled with people who knew each other. (Waves and chatter filled the preshow.) A Wednesday night screening of Argo had less than 10 viewers, in small groups, all bonded together in suspense. Both were exactly the type of experiences one hopes for from a neighborhood cinema. recommended