Can't Miss It: Monday

PHILOSOPHY!: Slavoj Žižek occupies a place in the intellectual world akin to that of Noam Chomsky, at once both a (perceived) leading philosopher and theorist and a public intellectual who commands the respect of the educated masses, weighing in on the issues of the day in more accessible publications like the London Review of Books. So, after thirty-plus books in English, hundreds of articles and essays, a tabloid-style wedding to an Argentinian supermodel-cum-Lacanian theorist, and a celebratory film-about-film with the extremely misleading title The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, Žižek, occasionally derided as nothing more than a party-line Stalinist, has achieved the unthinkable: he's made the philosopher a rock star. Andy Warhol would be proud. Tonight at Town Hall, he speaks about violence.

7:30 p.m. // Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave. // $5

BATTLE O' THE BANDS: Struggling actors work as waiters; what do struggling rock musicians do? If you said "barista," that's what we thought, too. But no, turns out they sell pizza, which in retrospect makes sense (surely there's a reason those guys have so many tattoos and piercings...). Tonight, as a benefit for the Vera Project, Pagliacci Pizza has put together a line-up of local bands to battle it out for recording studio time, and every band features at least one member who works at Pagliacci.

8 p.m. // Neumos, 925 E. Pike St. // $5 door // all ages, bar w/ID

WEIRD FRENCH FILM: Closing out the Monday offerings is La France, an oddball French film from 2007 that balances deadpan naturalism and poetic humor as it follows a woman wandering through the zones of destruction, searching for her husband in the midst of the chaos wrought by the First World War.

7 & 9 p.m. // NW Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave. // $8.50 general public