SEE SEE ME RIVER: If you can get yourself to walk beneath the frightening-toothed clown, nothing should stop you from checking out See Me River at The Funhouse tonight. Led by former Das Llamas front man Kerry Zettel, See Me River offers an audial version of American Gothic, crafting haunting acoustic songs that at once drone and soar. 9:30 p.m. // The Funhouse with Dead Western and Blood Red Dancers // $6 IN RESIDENCE:The Richard......

Last Friday we were at Shorecrest High School after-hours for "Coffeehouse," an open-mic put on by the school's literary journal Tattoo. It was our second time around, so we had a better idea of what to expect: the cafeteria was packed to the rafters. Seriously, Friday night and this is what the kids of today are up to? Near the end of intermission we were looking over the art gallery in the hall when this......

Austin-based band Monahans do to music what poetry does to words. Tonight, they'll bring their stylin' tunes to the Tractor. Also on the bill is local songwriter J. Tillman and the very pretty Zera Marvel. We called up Monahans frontman Greg last week during their brief stint with the Cowboy Junkies to find out why he thinks people should come to tonight's show. 9 p.m. // Tractor Tavern // $7 Where are you right......

POETRY: Seattle Arts & Lecture's Poetry Series welcomes Lucille Clifton to the Intiman tonight. Born in Depew, New York, in 1936, Clifton is one of the preeminent writers of her generation. Winning awards in about every genre she takes up (poetry, fiction, memoir, children's books), she often writes about family, race, and women's experiences. This is from her poem, "A Dream of Foxes": "so many fuckless days and nights / only the solitary fox......

POETRY: This is a bit of a hike, but former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is down in Tacoma at the Pantages Theatre. Collins is admired and reviled because people "get" his poetry, which is written largely in the key of sardonic. He sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” Friday 7:30 p.m. // Pantages Theatre, 901 Broadway, Tacoma // Tickets: $24-$46 FILM: This......

Saul Williams has done a little bit of everything. He’s an actor, a poet, a spoken-word performer, a musician and a writer. Since we first discovered him in the movie Slam -- which he helped write -- we’ve been fascinated by him, his energy and his words. Since then, we’ve seen him perform twice. Once after the release of his first album Amethyst Rock Star we saw him perform a full-on rock show. The last......

There are two more poets due in town for the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series, both in April. Lucille Clifton shows up at the Intiman on April 7, Edward Hirsch on April 21. We hadn't been to one of these poetry talks before, and since Irish feminist and poet Eavan Boland read from both her prose and poetry, we're not sure we got a typical experience. Whatever it was, we were happy we dropped......

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......

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......

You recall the other day we were mad as hell at the Washington State Ferries for running their boats until they rusted through, leaving everyone high and dry while new ones can be built. WSF is still dead to us, but Governor Gregoire could make our "holiday card" list if she keeps it up. First the viaduct course correction, now she's scrounged up $100 million to pay for three new ferries. Budget, schmudget! She's......

For some reason, though we are committed Capitol Hill brunchers, we had not discovered what wonders Monsoon has going on in their little 19th Ave E hideaway. Behold, the Monsoon brunch menu (pdf)! Last Tuesday night, Eric and Sophie Bahn, the chefs, invited a passel of foodie blogging folk over to try out the brunch menu. You had people like Matthew aka the rootsandgrubs guy, Angela from the Stranger -- and somehow we made the......

Sometimes the world really is a beautiful place. Specifically when there's beer involved. Jack's meeting friends on Saturday for a session of oak-aged beer tasting at Brouwer's Big Wood Fest. He'll then spend the rest of the day rubbing his tum tum and smiling a lot. Thrilled about the possibility of the year's first snow fall, Kim will spend as much of the weekend as possible getting over the cold that's been lingering for a......

Seattlest ventured into Belltown last night to attend the Buck 65 show at the Crocodile, mostly because Buck 65 is a divisive name in hiphop. You either love him or you don't, and we couldn't make up our minds based on the tracks he's got online. Our plan was to skip the openers. The guy touring with Buck 65 is named Bernard Dolan -- and, in the phrasing of Flight of the Conchords, what......

Retailers have been slopping their Christmas come-ons into the weeks before Thanksgiving since at least 1986--that's the earliest citation Word Spy has for "Christmas creep," the retailers' own term for the phenomenon. The exception: local customer-service nirvana Nordstrom. As reported on Consumerist and elsewhere, Nordstrom hasn't put up their Christmas decorations yet. But they have posted signs explaining why: "We just like the idea of celebrating one holiday at a time." Reaction is mostly positive.......

Andrew Le, known further and wider as Nam, is one of those artists Seattlest's been seeing over and over again at most of the local hip-hop shows we attend; sometimes he even ends up on stage, making the performance bang that much harder. We emailed him questions, he emailed back answers. Why hip-hop? Why Hip Hop? Why not? Hip Hop is the one of the best ways for people to express themselves. I got into......

Admittedly, the only reason we know this is because we submitted a poem and it's on a bus, and so we were invited to the party. Sadly there was never any chance that we were going to stand up in public and read it. Its only purpose is to disrupt the glances of bus riders lingering over the list of things you're not allowed to do on buses in Spanish, the announcement of whichever UW......

Musical hyphenate-extraordinaire Shawn Smith has been fronting bands and playing solo in Seattle for about 15 years. As recent, local music history goes, he’s as seminal a figure as Kurt Cobain—and more prolific—though not nearly as high-profile. He should be. Always busy, Shawn’s currently spending time with Kevin Wood, covering Malfunkshun tunes (and writing new ones) as From the North. His band Brad has a new album recorded and will, he’s confirmed, play in......

The Columbia Journalism Review has our number. It's not actually true that Baby Einstein videos "suck the vocabulary out of your kid's brain." Wea culpa. Baby Einstein has been playing dueling press releases with the UW for a few days. If they don't stop it soon, we're sending them to their rooms for a time out. Throughout the squabble and on their website, Baby Einstein is careful not to make any specific claims about what......

If you want to know what goes on in a particularly good creative writing workshop, the first half of First Class at ACT handily answers that question. As the brilliant bipolar poet Theodore Roethke, John Aylward delivers a blizzard of insights into the writing process, growling, stalking back and forth, and sounding like Team Poetry is down just by 10 at the half and ready to make a comeback. Poet/playwright (and former Roethke student) David......

The UW's David Wagoner, a poet and creative writing professor, has written a play about the UW's Theodore Roethke, a poet and creative writing professor. Roethke taught at the UW between 1947 and 1963, when he wasn't self-medicating his bipolar disorder by boozing it up at the Blue Moon -- and sometimes when he was. Wagoner was a student; his play takes the form of a creative writing seminar that Roethke is leading, and......

Last night at the Crocodile was one of those evenings you stumble on where things just keep getting better and better. We went down to see headliners Sea Wolf [MySpace] after hearing them do an in-studio bit at KEXP (not posted yet). About two songs in, the indie-folk melodies and lead singer's baritone duets with cello swept us and Shelves of Vinyl off our feet. They're a six-piece -- Alex Brown Church on vocals and......

The Seattle Weekly pulled feature writer Huan Hsu off the bashing-local-charities beat this week, and instead had him profile the coach of a high school girls tennis team. A coach who is now fired. Why? Well, let's take a look at the fourth word of Hsu' story: "Sexy." Hsu leads with the salacious details of a "sensual" poem coach Aaron Silverberg read to his Ballard High charges.Drinking you in. Melting you under my tongue. Touching......

Back when we were in college, one of our favorite theatre professors down at the University of Oregon was Grant McKernie. McKernie was an expert in experimental theatre and performance, and would occasionally tear up while recounting a particularly moving production by someone like Eimuntas Nekrošius. The challenge he always faced was convincing skeptical students that radical experimentation in performance wasn't just weirdness for weirdness's sake, or vapid pretension masquerading as high-brow art, but that......

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti......

Last Friday we had that nightmare where we go back to high school, only we were awake and wearing clothes. From what we read in the papers, high school is a nightmare that has to do with standardized tests leaving kids behind, but that's not the impression we left with. Our friend Marissa teaches at Shorecrest HS, and she invited us to the launch of the kids' literary and arts magazine, Tattoo. Now, we make......

Seattlest has a talk with the photographer from last week's "Segway Mom" and then experiences some dissension in the ranks over the question of wine vs. beer. It's not West Side Story, but about as close as they'll get. They're also still waiting on some inbox relief after a spammer is arrested. As Chicagoist counts down the days to its third anniversary party, they found all-organic pizza to be underwhelming amidst the hoopla, tried......

Over the weekend Velocity Dance Center was hosting SCUBA 2007, a national tour highlighting up-and-coming choreographers. (Next up for Velocity is their Annual Bash on June 3, hosted this year by Sarah Rudinoff.) Friday night the Velocity space was packed with modern dance fans -- we suspect that, like poetry readings, the modern dance audience is roughly congruent with the set of area performers and their partners. We'd say it was standing-room-only, but they......

Monday BOOK CRUSH: Librarian Nancy Pearl´s latest book is Book Crush, a guide to books you loved when you were growing up. How does she know? Head over to the launch party and find out. 7-8:30pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE PETER BEAGLE SPEAKS: For the Fantastic Fiction Salon, fantasy author Peter Beagle (The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song) teaches "Dialogue Says it All." 7pm // Hugo House......

Arcadia @ UW Playhouse Theatre Weds - Sun, through May 6 // Tickets: $15 general/$12 senior/$10 student The handy thing about the UW Drama Department producing Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is that you can pop over to the UW afterwards and register for a classes on fractal mathematics, Byron's poetry, English gardening, chaos theory, Romanticism and Classicism, thermodynamics, and maybe a refresher on Fermat's Theorem. There's a determinedly intellectual bent to the play, which revolves......

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......