Can't Miss It: Monday

JUST IN CASE YOU'RE IGNORANT: There's something almost charming about books like Jonathan Curiel's Al' America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots, an earnest effort to demonstrate, through their contributions to American culture, that Arabs and Muslims are not such a scary Other but rather a part of the American cultural fabric, and have been so for a long time. There's a bit of "duh" factor to most of this, it sounds like, and we doubt that understanding how appropriation of Turkish music led to surf rock classics like "Miserlou" is going to sway your average Muslim-hater. Still, it's an interesting take and one little enough explored to justify heading up to Town Hall tonight to see Curiel speak.

7:30 p.m. // Town Hall, 1119 Eighth St. // $5

META-TASTIC: Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep is one in the long line of films to explore the processing of making a film, a sort of mixture of Living in Oblivion and Ararat (the director of the latter, Atom Egoyan, was actually an early collaborator on the project). Assayas plays himself trying to remake the silent horror classic Les Vampires ("Irma Vep" being an anagram of "vampire") starring Hong Kong action diva Maggie Cheung. The film's deeper resonances explore the process of exoticizing and eroticizing the cultural Other, giving the film an odd parallel to the above lecture, except, you know, this one's subtle.

7:30 p.m. // SIFF Cinema, 321 Mercer St. // $10 G.A.

MUSIC TO END A SLOW DAY: Mondays are slow in Seattle, we've found, since weekly we endeavor to find you at least a few things worth doing on a Monday night. An old standby that rarely disappoints is Nada Mucho's "New Music Mondays" out at the High Dive in Fremont. Tonight: Elect Becker, Mysterious Face, and God Gave Up the Ghost.

8 p.m. // 513 N. 36th // $6, 21+

Photo: Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep, a film by Olivier Assayas. By Isabelle Weingarten, courtesy Zeitgeist films.