Can't Miss It: Monday
FOREVER WAR: Dexter Filkins, the Pulitzer Prize-winning NY Times reporter comes to Town Hall tonight to read from his new book The Forever War, recounting his experiences covering the war in Iraq. Filkins actually had a piece in yesterday's "Week in Review" section about returning to Iraq for the first time in two years, finding it a changed if uneasy place, balanced on a knife's edge of peace following the much ballyhooed troop surge, but still capable of slipping back into chaos. With the economy in the tank, most people are probably less interested in Iraq, but Filkins' trenchant analysis is worth the time of anyone truly interested in understanding the realities on the ground in Iraq and figuring out how to move forward.
7:30 p.m. // Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave. // $5
DAS AUSLANDERS: Slovenian industrial/synth-rock outfit Laibach are capable of transforming the sappy and the vapid into a terrifying symphonic cacophony of pseudo-fascist ideology mixed with a nihilistic rage. The group formed in 1980 as part of an art collective in the then-Yugoslav Slovenian town of Trbovlje, and they bear witness to the strange deconstructive experiments of that decade's avant-garde. Their concerts are as much works of art as their music, often given the overtones of a political rally, which is precisely why the band's slippery-slope political leanings leave many observers uncomfortable: is the energy in the room about to explode into an anarchist riot or a kristallnacht? Whatever the case, it's apparently not a show to be missed, and to the best of our knowledge, the band is not, in fact, fascist, so assume it's all ironic and enjoy losing yourself in the collective energy of the crowd. That's healthy.
8 p.m. doors // Showbox-Market, First & Pike // $20 door, 21+
HIP LIT: We admit it: We can dig Chuck Klosterman. Yes, he's too hip for his own good (anyone who goes to The Believer at the top of their game is), but Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV were good, even if the shtick felt like it was getting a bit self-aggrandizing. But now Klosterman's journeyed out of the world of pop culture writing and rock criticism and, like so many writers who thought they could make that jump before him, has written a novel which probably sucks. It's called Downtown Owl, about life in a fictional town in Owl, North Dakota. It's like Garrison Keillor with more sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Or something.
7:30 p.m. // Elliott Bay Books, 101 S. Main // free!
