Nothing says "Happy anniversary" like a group show, so that's how Kirsten Anderson and Roq La Rue are celebrating the gallery turning 10. Anderson didn't have any experience running a gallery when she started Roq La Rue, but she loved lowbrow (we don't think she'd coined "pop surrealism" yet) and thought it deserved an awesome venue. Mission accomplished. It's a gallery beloved by BoingBoing and Fodor's alike. Come celebrate tonight with cupcakes and beer and......

LOCAL LIT: Tired of living la vida loca after pride weekend? Sick of the sun and the heat? Want to retreat back into your dark, shade-drawn house and dream of the rain? Of course not, which is why it's so hard to recommend you spend your Monday at a literary reading. Still, local author and medical expert Carol Casella has a reading tonight down at Elliott Bay Books, for her debut novel Oxygen. Casella, a......

photo courtesy of Seattlest Flickr user kjten22 This just in: the sun is out! In honor of this rare and auspicious occurance, we think you should cut out of work early for a "doctor appointment," and head to the hill to look at some pretty VW buses. According to the press release: Seattle-based advertising agency Creature has created a fleet of hand-painted 1960s Volkswagen buses as part of the marketing campaign for Pacifico Beer,......

With news that long time Seattle Art Museum director Mimi Gates is retiring next year, we are hoping that the Mariners will fire current General Manager Bill Bavasi and hire Gates as his replacement. SAM Under Mimi Gates: Greatly renovated and expanded the downtown museum. Opened the Olympic Sculpture Park. Oversaw the acquisition of over one billion dollars in donated art. Bill Bavasi's Mariner Resume: Turned a team averaging 98 wins (2000-2003) into a......

Like it's not embarrassing enough to just trip and stumble in a public place. A young visitor to the Seattle Art Museum suffered even further embarrassment by tripping and falling into a world famous work of art. The stumbling Seattlite damaged Double Elvis, a piece by Andy Warhol. According to the Slog's report on the incident, the SAM's spokesperson said the piece had been dented and was sent to the museum's conservators for repair. While......

tribute by bamassippi Guitar overload is an appropriate image choice for this musically overloaded weekend. Plucked from the Seattlest Flickr Pool - keep on sharing.......

With two years' experience at the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards under our belts as of this weekend, we're seeing a pattern emerge: The really exciting work happens down in the studio, and the mainstage performances are more or less skippable unless you're really into that sort of thing. Saturday afternoon was a hard day to justify spending indoors in a small, dark (though thankfully cool) theatre, which left John and Anna......

Heading to Portland this sunny weekend? If you answered, "Why yes I am," then you're no doubt also paying a visit, as per usual, to Powell's Books. While you're there, be sure to head up to the Pearl Room (where the Rare Book Room is located), where you'll be met with a visual treat sure to please your campy, polyester-wearing soul. Portland's Velveteria Museum of Velvet Paintings has taken over the art gallery space......

If there's one thing you can say that the artists whose shows opens tonight at Roq la Rue have in common, it's that they both really like women. Esao Andrews, an NYC-based artist, likes to contort the feminine form into the oddest situations: stuck inside the bowl of a flower vase, riding a giant swan, or with a head blasting hot air into the sack of a hot air balloon. Japanese artist Fuco Ueda is......

LIVE MUSIC: If you're looking to start your weekend a day early, why not head to the Showbox Downtown for Minus the Bear. Fresh off the hottness of Coachella, the band's back in town to rock you hard. 8 p.m. // Showbox Downtown // $17.50 adv, $20 dos // all ages ART & WINE: Personally, we can think of no better pairing than art and wine, when it comes to nights out. The Frye will......

If you do happen to be craving some Japanese antiques, you better get in line now! According to Seattlest tipper and former editor Seth, who has apparently left his windowless office, there is a line around the block at Kyoto Art and Antiques on First Avenue near Qwest Field. The sale started officially at 11 and goes to 7pm according to a gigantic banner stretched across the building. If there's a line stretched around......

BOOKS: Mary Roach enjoys "bird-watching--though the hours don't agree with me--backpacking, thrift stores, overseas supermarkets, Scrabble, mangoes, and that late-night Animal Planet show about horrific animals such as the parasitic worm that attaches itself to fishes' eyeballs but makes up for it by leading the fish around." In her book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, she discusses how and why sexual arousal and orgasm can be so elusive and what scientists......

FACT: Founded in 1927, the Henry is the oldest public art museum in Washington State. Take that, SAM! FACT: Horace C. Henry was fond of French and American landscape paintings. He founded the Henry with his 172-piece collection, a hefty endowment, and his OK for the museum to move beyond the works he'd collected and showcase contemporary art. Fellow museum founders the Fryes, on the other hand, required their museum to display the works they'd......

There's some sort of primeval or subconscious part of our brains that remains fascinated with the potential magic of spaces we can't enter, whether it's down a rabbit hole, on the other side of a mirror, or the life of things within the walls of our home. The work of Dutch artist Femke Hiemstra, which goes on display at Roq la Rue tonight, captures that fascination with whimsy and wit. Her paintings demonstrate a miniaturist's......

MUSIC: The Hotel Cafe Tour at Neumo's is sold out, so why not change things up with internationally celebrated Irish pianist John O'Conor at Meany Hall. Impress your friends with an all-Beethoven recital including the "Pathétique," "Waldstein," and "Moonlight" sonatas, and Bagatelles, Op. 126. Melinda Bargreen calls him "spectacularly good." And Beethoven, hell, if Wikipedia is correct, that guy was no slouch either. 7:30 p.m. // Meany Hall, University of Washington // Tickets: $20,......

FRIDAY ART: Roq la Rue and its sister gallery BLVD are having joint openings tonight. At Roq la Rue, San Francisco artist Robert Burden explores the joys and soulless commercialism of the toybox. At BLVD, Wastelands and Wilderness features new work by Parskid and Chip 7. Parskid's work evokes the mystical dark forests of the Pacific NW, while Chip 7's work is a paranoid exploration of sci-fi fantasy and globalism. Plus, at BLVD you......

ART: We hear Goldmine Shithouse is visiting the Grey Gallery, but you wouldn't know it from either of their sites. The GMSH calendar ends in February, while the Grey Gallery still invites you to their January grand opening. Thank god they have booze to draw you in anyway. Now, about the scruffy guests they're expecting. Goldmine Shithouse is an artist cooperative: They focus primarily on painting, drawing and collage, and have extended into the......

The Tacoma soldier who is accused of killing a fellow army couple and kidnapping their infant has been transferred to the custody of the United States Army. The Army will prosecute Specialist Ivette Gonzalez Davila for the murders of Army medics Timothy and Randi Miller, who were doused in acid after being shot. Davila was transferred yesterday from Pierce County Jail to the brig at Bangor's sub base. The Army is expected to charge......

POETRY: Eavan Boland is from Dublin, Ireland, and we take it that "Eavan" is a girl's name there. It's not immediately obvious, it it? She carries more of a charge in her than that boggy, peaty, old Seamus Heaney. One of her poems, The Pomegranate, begins: The only legend I have ever loved is the story of a daughter lost in hell. And found and rescued there. Love and blackmail are the gist of......

Theatre: A production of Mr. Marmalade got introduced by Curtain Up thusly:If you've always associated marmalade with sweetness, you're likely to expect the title character of Noah Haidle's play to be a sweet, lovable guy -- just the sort of imaginary friend for a four-year-old moppet named Lucy. Well, think again. Playwright Haidle's Mr. Marmalade is a cocaine snorting, emotionally out to lunch businessman with a briefcase packed with kinky sex toys. Not a......

For the past few years, Aqueduct has been one of the most exciting bands puttering around the Seattle scene. More or less a one-man outfit by Oklahoma-transplant David Terry, supported in his endeavor by an ever-changing crew of musicians, Aqueduct delivers a catchy mix of rock with a pop sensibility (read: great hooks). Aqueduct's 2005 album i sold gold won them a bevy of fans on the indie circuit and their song "Hardcore Days......

Pinnacle Iceberg, East Greenland 2006 © Camille Seaman Over at the Seattle Times, Sheila Farr was knocked out by Camille Seaman's show, The Last Iceberg, at Photographic Center Northwest. You can preview some of her photos here. Like Edward Burtynsky's photographs of quarries and trash heaps, there's a troubling aesthetic at work. Reflected in the dissolving grandeur of Seaman's ice-scapes is global warming. Says Farr:A member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, born in 1969, Seaman......

Today SIFF hosts the Seattle opening of the documentary The Rape of Europa, about the efforts to save art stolen and/or desecrated by the Nazis in the runup to and during WWII. The Stranger loves it. The Seattle Times loves it. By all accounts, Seattlest shouldn't be as excited by this movie as we are, but we find something poetic about the preservation of culture in the face of war. For now we'll leave you......

We've been Ellen Forney fans since we read "I Was Seven in '75" -- back when it ran in The Rocket. Her latest project is Lust, a collection of the "Lustlab Ad of the Week" cartoons she does for The Stranger, published this month by Fantagraphics. We interviewed Forney about the cartoon at Georgetown's All City Coffee, just down the block from the Fantagraphics store where there will be a book launch party tomorrow night.......

It's the first Thursday of February, which means that the Seattle Art Museum is open "After Hours," and entrance is free. Their Art for All musical guest is okanomodé, and provokes this cross-pollinated promotional copy:Melding composition, style and genre with the skill of Basquiat blending color, okanomodé spins song into frenzy and makes magic with his tongue.If you've been meaning to drop in to see those three panels from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, why......

"getty-up!" by Dean Forbes, from Flickr via Creative Commons license. Yes, the irony is thick. Fremont's own Getty Images wants to auction itself off and could sell for up to $1.5 billion, reports the NY Times. The stock photo agency has had a rough go of it lately: But the rise of digital photography and the Web created a host of competitors that charged as little as a dollar for an image. Recent events......

When your band's roster (Gonzalez on trumpet and congas; Andy Gonzalez, bass; Larry Willis, piano; Steve Berrios, drums; Joe Ford, sax/flute) has been in place since 1990, you have time to develop the musical telepathy that makes jazz jazz. And when that telepathy communicates both the bebop-and-beyond mainstream and Puerto Rican popular music (via the Bronx), you have an unusually savory mix. We first heard the Fort Apache Band on a very early (1988)......

Our disillusionment with Spacecraft last year left us with flagging enthusiasm to look at street stickers. Far too many guerilla marketers, it seemed, were hawking their shit with cheap, mass-produced, vinyl stickers. It was enough to cause our eyes and mind to turn down the volume on sticker art. On the one hand, it gave us time to re-focus on paint. We eventually noticed some new and more elaborate pieces from 1+1=3 --stuff beyond......

If you heard only the NPR news blip on jazz pianist Oscar Peterson's death, you heard that he was "well known for having won many prizes." Not sure what skeleton holiday crew came up with that dismal description. Prizes were hardly the source of Peterson's fame. Musically, Peterson was in a class by himself--never quite a swing player, never quite a bop player. He didn't have a particular style. Art Tatum is known for his......

ReeBeckiSuperGirl loves the Wax Bar. We love her photo of it, "December 14, 2007." Thanks for throwing it in our Flickr pool!......