Tonight, the banjos will be taking over Benaroya Hall. We think there's a banjo joke in there somewhere, but it's too early on a Monday morning to come up with it. Instead, we'll just sell you on the legendary Earl Scruggs, who's responsible for that three-finger picking style Seattlest prefers when attacking the famously untunable instrument. We caught Scruggs at the IBMA awards last year, and we can vouch for the fact that he's still......

UNDER DA SEA: If, like Seattlest, you are fascinated with underwater life, tonight's your night to revel in the glories of the deep ocean. Seattle Symphony will be playing as a giant screen shows you images from the BBC series The Blue Planet. 7:30 // Benaroya Hall // $17-75 B.Y.O.B. (BRING YOUR OWN BAG): City Council will be discussing this whole bag tax thing tonight at their meeting, and you should go help them discuss......

G IS FOR GEORGETOWN: There are few parts of Seattle we love more and know less about than gritty and glorious Georgetown. We were smitten from the moment we walked into Jules Maes Saloon three years ago and have never looked back. Adding considerable wonderfulness to the neighborhood is the Georgetown Music Festival—Seattle's most under-appreciated music festival—happening this weekend. If you love local music like we do, you will be spending Friday and Saturday......

TRASH TALKING: Not totally through with film after SIFF? Tonight, trash cinema provocateur John Waters appears at Seattle Arts & Lectures. From groundbreaking indie work like Pink Flamingos to cult classics like Hairspray to contemporary satire like Pecker and Cecil B. Demented, Waters has been pushing the boundaries of the cinema for about 40 years, and has moved from the indie fringes to the mainstream with popular stage musicals of his classic films. 7:30 p.m.......

Once again, SIFF is upon us. Even though there are still three weeks until opening night, with today's press launch, things are gearing up for the 34th Seattle International Film Festival. Running a full 25 days, SIFF will present 191 narrative features, 57 documentary features, and 170 short films from 69 countries, including 43 World Premieres (16 features, 27 shorts), 38 North American Premieres (19 features, 19 shorts) and 19 US Premieres (10 features,......

MUSICAL: Just you wait, 'Enry 'Iggins! Lerner & Loewe's proto-Pretty Woman fantasia, My Fair Lady, opens at the Paramount, starring British theatre actors Christopher Cazenove and Lisa O'Hare as Professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. The production unites the original U.K. artistic team with Trevor Nunn (director), Matthew Bourne (choreography and musical staging), and Anthony Ward (production design). 7:30 p.m. // Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine Street // Tickets: $25-$72 MUSIC: Peter Morén, the lead......

JOBS: What with all the layoffs recently (wow, there's a lead-in good for any occasion), you may want to hot-foot it down to the Seattle Weekly job fair at EMP. If nothing else, go to pick up a free Zipcar membership so you can get to interviews on time and in style. Recruiters will include the Auburn Regional Medical Center, UPS, Clearwire, Seattle Goodwill, Tect Aerospace, Seattle Peace Corps, Solid Ground, City of Everett,......

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from......

BOOKS: Novelist Richard Powers reads tonight at Benaroya Hall for Seattle Arts and Lectures. The former computer programmer's latest book, The Echo Maker, is "a haunting novel about memory, identity, and the boundaries of neuroscience," (Booklist), and won the National Book Award and all sorts of "Best Book of the Year" awards in 2006. He's a novelist of "ideas"; David Foster Wallace is a big fan. Here's an interview in the P-I. 7:30pm //......

Documentary: Los Angeles and art don't have the strongest association. (Glen Hansard at the Oscars, shaking his statue at the audience, "Make art! Make art!") But it's more of a signal-to-noise problem. The documentary The Cool School explores the lives of the founders of L.A.'s artistic "cool." Regina Hackett describes the situation: Back to L.A. in the early 1950s: Progressive artists had nothing going for themselves except themselves. New York didn't bother to spit......

Could we be any vaguer? No, but that doesn't mean there's still not any reason to get excited. With In Rainbows making its formal debut atop the Billboard charts, Radiohead is set to cover North America in two tour legs, one prior to and one following their recently announced European summer tour (June 6 in Dublin through July 8 in Berlin). There's no exact dates or venues just yet, but the band has confirmed......

Joshua Roman, for those of you more concerned with what's going on at Neumo's than what's happening in Benaroya Hall, is the star cellist in Seattle Symphony. He's also 23, has hair like a young Bob Dylan, and seriously kicks ass. This Thursday, he'll be joined at Town Hall by three other instrumentalists of his choosing for what's sure to be the best thing happening in classical music this week, if not the best......

It's not that development in itself sucks; it's that our county and city government doesn't believe in development for art's sake, despite all those studies about the half billion the arts return to the community. When we look around, we don't see a lot of public investment in the single most expensive thing that artists and smaller arts organizations have to face: a place to work, rehearse, show, perform. We did see this notice that......

We're sure a lot of people bought tickets to Friday night's Symphony Legacy concert strictly to see Ann and Nancy Wilson or Alice in Chains. We were there primarily to see how the rejuvenated grunge band would sound with a new singer and backing orchestra at Benaroya Hall. But the symphony, written by Mateo Messina, benefited Children's Hospital, and we like to think that by the end of the evening, everyone appreciated the composer's philanthropic......

Mateo Messina, a Seattle native, has been composing television and film scores and penning symphonies for 10 years. His most recent score is for the upcoming, buzz-magnet comedy Juno. His latest symphony will be heard tonight at Benaroya Hall's (sold out) Symphony Legacy concert. (That's him above, at last year's show.) Messina's Symphony--a benefit for Seattle Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center--features the combined musical talents of the Northwest Symphony Orchestra and the Northwest......

If you’re gonna make an album with orchestral arrangements care of living legend composer Van Dyke Parks, you’re gonna have to go all out to perform it right. That’s why the first half of super English major/elven queen Joanna Newsom’s grandiose show last night at Benaroya Hall featured the accompaniment of local 29-piece chamber orchestra the Northwest Sinfonia to cover her last full-length, the epic five-song masterpiece Ys ("ees"). It’s not hard to recreate......

Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is supposed to be awarded in recognition of a writer's entire oeuvre, it's become commonplace for Nobel-watchers to attribute the award to the Swedish Academy making a political statement. Thus when Orhan Pamuk won in 2006, cynical commentators attributed it primarily to a pair of novels, Snow and The White Castle. The novels explore the interaction between the Christian West and Muslim East and the struggle between Modernity and......

Are you there Seattle art world? It's us, Seattlest. We're trying our best to talk up your First Thursday openings, but it looks like you've crapped out on us this month. We understand: you're on vacation or something, it's kinda hot out, the BLUE ANGELS are in the sky ... We've got posts to post, however, and damned if we won't find something to recommend from your namby-pamby Art Walk offerings. Here's what we're going......

Monday CALL 911! CALL 911!: Political and economic commentator and White House strategist during the Nixon administration, Kevin Phillips talks about his book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. Phillips traces the set of related causes that caused the downfall of historical world powers. That same combination of ills he says -- global over-reach, militant religion, resource problems, and ballooning debt -- is......

Tons of classic Spiegelesque wit bombs dropped last night at the Benaroya Hall lecture/slide show/performance. Our favorite was the curt dismissal of Roy Lichtenstein's work at the very start: "He did for comics what Andy Warhol did for soup." Oh, Spiegelman, you dog... You get him! There were some unintentionally funny moments, like when befuddled old geezer Spiegelman segued from talking about Will Eisner's The Spirit to Jack Cole's Plastic Man, he kept pointing......

SPELLING BEES: The Re-bar's adult spelling bee was on Evening Magazine recently so there may be an even stronger turnout than usual. Doors at 7pm // Re-bar // $5 MOVIES: Seattlest and Mrs. Seattlest jumped in the car this weekend for a cruise up to the cheap theater for Academy Award winner The Departed. It was packed, with every single seat occupied by a warm ass--go early. Also, be careful on the drive home. We......

Monday SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES: Art Spiegelman's 1992 Holocaust tale Maus (based on a true story) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a comic book. Its success paved the way for the graphic novels thriving today and led to Spiegelman's ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) gathers his recent broadsheets of disenchantment with the war on terror. 7:30pm // Benaroya Hall // Tickets:......

One of the endlessly amusing things about arts orgs is how desperate they are all for cash -- big or small, there's no amount of money-grubbing that's beyond them. It's normal. You go to a show, pay $$ for a ticket, and then a little while later you get a letter or a phone call "informing" you that, you know, what you paid was "really" half-price and could you stand to kick in a......

Because we don't go out on school nights and we need to plan... SATURDAY: In addition to talks and tours, you and the kids can see live demonstrations of wood carving, drum-making, and weaving at the Opening Day Celebration for In the Spirit of the Ancestors, the Burke Museum's new exhibit of contemporary Northwest Coast Native art. 10:30am-4pm // Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture // All Ages // $8 general; $5 kids 5+;......

READINGS: Jonathan Raban continues his all-out assault on the bookstores of Seattle with a reading tonight at the University Bookstore in support of Surveillance. How many times can we say it: Go. 7pm // University Bookstore // free THEATRE/FUND RAISER: Book-It's raising the funds tonight at Seattle Center with a Guilty Pleasures style romp through material that people actually read, for a change. Not for the faint of wallet, however. Remember a few years ago......

POLITICS: Young Republicans meetup. "Can't be any more boring than Drinking Liberally, can it?" asks Seattlest Seth. "Six of one, half dozen of the other," we reply. 5:30pm // Nickerson Street Saloon // free MUSIC: Former Velocity Girl Sarah Shannon sings selections from her latest pop album, City Morning Song, for loyal listeners and new fans alike. 7:30pm // The Triple Door // $10 BOOK: May she have your liver? Liver transplant surgeon Pauline Chen......

Tuesday, February 6 >>> Spanish classical guitarist Pepe Romero at Benaroya Hall. The flying-fingered flamenco phenomenon, knighted by the King of Spain, plays several of his father's compositions and one of his own, plus other Spanish works. * video: Recuerdos de la Alhambra 7:30 pm // $29-$61 // Cheap seats are in the rear orchestra section. >>> From the North at High Dive. Seattle rock music history comes full circle in a way with......

Monday AIR SUPPLY: Eric Klinenberg’s new book, Fighting for Air, examines how corporate ownership and control of local media has remade American political and cultural life. Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, is interviewed by Michael Fancher, Seattle Times editor-at-large. 7:30pm // Town Hall // $5 Tuesday PANEL OF POETS: Sherman Alexie, Chelsea Rathburn, Richard Wakefield and Eric McHenry present "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rhyme": a roundtable discussion......

BAGPIPING: "We've got a piper doon!" Masters of Scottish Arts presents their 10th annual concert with the "world's very best" Scottish musical and dance artists. 7:30pm // Benaroya Hall // $23-$32 DANCE: Pappa Tarahumara's take on Chekhov's Three Sisters "unravels into a steamy meditation on female identity, coming of age, and the Japanese obsession with youth culture." We were told it involves little black net unitards and unbridled dancing. Then the room started spinning and......

BASKETBALL: It's a battle for first place in Kingco's Mountain Division when Roosevelt hosts Redmond. 7:30pm // Roosevelt High Gym (it's new!) [1410 Northeast 66th Street] // $6 ($4 with your ASB card)! SCIENCE: Spencer Wells, the Indiana Jones of DNA, tells you from whence you came. 7:30pm // Benaroya Hall's Taper Auditorium [3rd and Union] // Sold out, but maybe you can score some at the door? MUSIC: Johanna Sarad [myspace] and Hardison [myspace].......