Results tagged “noircity”

RIPPED-OFF: Journalist Pratap Chatterjee has seen the face of the beast, and it is Halliburton. Conniving and connected, the Texas oil company has secured itself a prize position in Washington even as its corruption and incompetence cost tax-payers and soldiers dearly. Chatterjee explains all this in a helpful book called , which he's talking about tonight up at Town Hall.

THE WHAT NOW?: The Master Musicians of Jajouka are the practitioners of (some claim) a 1,300-year-old musical tradition in the small Moroccan town of Jajouka. First brought to the attention of wider audiences by the Beats, who spent a large part of the Fifties in Tangiers, and later by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who recorded an album with them, it's a singularly rare opportunity to get to see the Master Musicians live. They take the stage tonight at Neumo's; tickets are still available.

DANCE DANCE DANCE: Pint-size Swedish ex-ballerina Lykke Li returns to Seattle for her largest venue yet, the Showbox at the Market. Last time we saw her, we said she has "an extra helping of cute and an idiosyncratic voice: breathy baby-girl ("Liddle bit in love wi' you," she sings, and your heart melts) mixed with Swedish soul. Her first full album is Youth Novels. Live, she's in perpetual motion, sashaying around the stage, swiveling her hips, one hand pushing the audience back, the other punishing a cymbal with a drumstick." We're not saying it's because her parents were hippies, but she's got a hell of an onstage work ethic.

SIFF Cinema's Noir City Festival has a double-feature not many of you have seen before: Moonrise / Night Has a Thousand Eyes. The festival benefits the Film Noir Foundation, whose mission is to find and preserve noir titles in danger of being lost or irreparably damaged.

, a seven-day festival of classic film noir, starts at SIFF. The shows are being introduced by "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller.

Not so long ago--even into the 1980s--it seemed certain that the Western would stand the test of time as quintessential American cinematic form. After all, the story of cowboys, outlaws and Indians on the great rolling plains between the coasts and the travails of those courageous families crossing the country in covered wagons is as much a part of our creation story as defeating the British; Independence and Manifest Destiny go hand-in-hand, and John Wayne, with his swaggering bravado, not only represented the embodiment of American masculinity, but his unwavering devotion to righteousness (even, perhaps especially, when begotten by violence) spoke to the American sense of our own virtue and uniqueness. Even when the Italians got their hands on the genre, and Clint Eastwood gave the cowboy a dark edge, that moral ambiguity never really changed the fundamental sense that there is a right and wrong; the innocents, after all, are still innocent. The change that Sergio Leone wrought was simply one of transforming the West into a wide open space into which the damned could escape their demons, even in death. The figure of the dying cowboy, gut-shot, riding into the sunset slumping atop his steed is still an image of freedom and hope.

Guns, booze, dames, and private eyes: The SIFF Cinema Summer Series (say that five times fast) kicks off tonight with their first annual Seattle Noir City Festival. Noir City's been taking place in San Francisco for five years now, and this is the first time it's made its way to the seamy underbelly of the Northwest.