WEDNESDAY 1/13
Carol Rosegg
Elizabeth Stanly at the Xanadu disco.
Joe Sacco/Metropolitan Books
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Nightlife: The Nice Price
The Capitol Club is a rare creature in a neighborhood crowded with hipster hangouts and gay dance clubs. Owing to its casual yet classy atmosphere, it attracts a diverse crowd, including intimate couples, drunken brides-to-be, musicians, and even belly-dancing troupes. On Wednesdays, the bar offers all wine bottles at half-price—drink one, get one free!—with prices beginning around $14 per. If you don't want to get too sloshed, nibble on Spanish tapas like calamari and pork skewers, available for $6 and under during happy hour (5–8 p.m.). It's rare and welcome these days when your evening feels far more lavish than the check indicates. The lineup of DJs varies weekly; they usually start spinning about 10 p.m. Capitol Club, 414 E. Pine St., 325-2149, thecapitolclub.net. Free (21 & over). 5 p.m.–2 a.m. ERIKA HOBART
Comics: The 50-Year Fuse
Political cartoons aren't generally reported from the front lines, but the work of Portland's Joe Sacco is an important exception. Beginning with his strip Palestine (collected in 2001), he's been exploring the violent history of the Middle East. In his latest, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan, $29.95), he ventures back a half-century, to when Israel was brand-new and the notion of Palestinians as a distinct nationality didn't exist. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, two refugee settlements near the Egyptian border were invaded by Israeli troops hunting for militants. Britain, France, and the U.S. looked the other way, preoccupied with Nasser and the canal, while possibly 275 male refugees—by Sacco's count—were massacred in Khan Younis and Rafah. His historical research during 2002–03, when Rachel Corrie's death is noted, is undoubtedly colored by events of the present. Sacco's sympathies are clearly with the Palestinians: He sketches their suffering, not their suicide bombers. But the value of his book is to communicate how their present misery—in Gaza especially—is rooted in past political calculations. Gaza was a problem first punted by Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, and more recently Israel, when it withdrew its settlers. Flip from one of Sacco's panels, depicting refugee mud huts in 1956, to the next, cinder-block towers arranged in the same "temporary" grid 50 years later, and the international community's inaction begins to look like a slow form of murder. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
FRIDAY 1/15
Film: Invented Adolescence
Beginning NWFF's "Required Viewing" series of lectures and classes is an opportunity to hear all about the 1955 Rebel Without a Cause from its 88-year-old screenwriter, Seattle resident Stewart Stern. As directed by Nicholas Ray, James Dean plays the now-iconic misunderstood teen, caught between his parents and his ardor for Natalie Wood. "You're tearing me apart!" he famously howls at his folks. Today the scene—like all the acting here—seems borderline grotesque melodrama; it makes you think more of Jim Carrey's old Dean impersonation than of any real emotion. The movie's no classic, but it's an essential document of its overblown, mom-hating, crackpot-Freud postwar era. Without it, there'd be no WB Network, no The O.C., none of our entire teen-based industrial culture. Blink fast and you'll miss Dean's crony Dennis Hopper, merely credited as "Goon." Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6–$9. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
SATURDAY 1/16
Comedy: No Sleep 'til Kandahar
Dave Attell visits just one week after co-hosting the AVN Awards in Vegas—recently enough that his porntastic recollections of the event should still percolate with fresh delivery. And a month ago, the well-traveled comic was entertaining the troops in Afghanistan, where he remarked, "No one has sex over here, but everybody smells like they just did." So expect a bumper crop of new material from someone who's never needed any help coming up with it. A comedian's comedian to the core (who counts Jon Stewart among his biggest fans), Attell has never cottoned to the Hollywood habit of morphing stand-up into sitcoms or movies. The stage is his medium, the microphone his muse, and—as his guttural, groundbreaking old Comedy Central show Insomniac proved—the road is his milieu. And speaking of hanging out with drunk fucks late at night, Attell still often frequents whatever watering holes happen to be near a venue he's just played. Whisky Bar and Shorty's, you've been warned: Better double this week's Jäger order. Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Ave., 877-784-4849, stgpresents.com. $28.50–$33. 8 p.m. ROSE MARTELLI
Opera: Whose Baby Is It Anyway?
"When they burned my mother at the stake, I vowed revenge—so I kidnapped their son, intending to throw him into the flames! But I was so crazed with grief I threw my own son in instead!!!" "But, Mom—you mean I'm not your son???" "No, what am I saying? Of course you are!" This paraphrase does not exaggerate the loopiness of the actual dialogue explaining the actual central plot point in Verdi's Il trovatore ("The Troubadour")—and it's not even the most preposterous contrivance in an opera notorious for them. (Not for nothing is it the piece destroyed in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera.) With Rigoletto and La traviata, Trovatore forms the trilogy of hits (premiered within a two-year span) that established Verdi's reign as the now-and-forever king of Italian opera; the crudest of the three both in its character portrayals and its music, it's still a lot of fun, though a taste for camp and a willingness not to think too much won't hurt. Seattle Opera's eight performances run through Jan. 30. McCaw Hall, Seattle Center, 389-7676, seattleopera.org. $25 and up. 7:30 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT
