Wednesday, Nov. 5
Sebastian Junger
The author (The Perfect Storm) turned film director (Korengal and Restrepo) has now made his third documentary about the war in Afghanistan, though it takes place on East Coast railway lines and in the Allegheny Mountains. Produced for HBO, The Last Patrol documents Junger’s 300-mile trek, originally planned for his filmmaking partner Tim Hetherington, the famed photojournalist who was killed covering the Libyan revolution. Joining him instead are a couple of war vets (including Brendan O’Byrne from Restrepo) on a hobo-style march along an active railway line. Why take that route from New York to Washington, D.C.? Junger has said that “the railroad tracks go straight through the middle of everything—ghettos, suburbs, crumbling industry, farms, and swamps. You see America from the inside out.” The trek becomes the basis for Junger’s reporting on this forlorn corridor and the people he encounters along the way. It’s not without its dangers, but at least no one is shooting at his small company of hikers. The film debuts Nov. 10 on HBO. Junger will appear for a post-film Q&A tonight with local actor Tom Skerritt, founder of The Red Badge Project, which supports wounded vets. SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996. Free, but RSVP at siff.net. 7 p.m.
BRIAN MILLER
Thursday, Nov. 6
Ron Dakron
Tokyo is burning, and Devilfish is laughing. He’s a kaiju, one of those fake-looking rubber monsters running amok—a giant blue manta ray, in this instance—and the very amusing narrator of Dakron’s Hello Devilfish! (Three Rooms Press, $15.95). Devilfish claims to be an enemy not just of Tokyo, where he gleefully topples power lines and elevated trains, munching on their passengers, but also of the novel itself. “Join us in plot-maiming fun!” he exclaims in Manglish, a comic lexicon made up of odd advertising slogans, poorly translated Japanese, LOL-speak, and I Can Has Cheezburger grammar. Destruction is this manta ray’s mantra. Yet the more his sting-tailed protagonist inveighs against Big Lit, local writer Dakron begins to sneak in some structure and literary mischief. Devilfish has an unwanted paramour in pursuit of him: another kaiju he calls Squidra, a giant pink kraken with tentacles and laser beams that shoot from her eyes. So there’s a bit of a love story in Hello Devilfish!, and a chase through the city’s smoldering rubble, an abrupt transformation (hello, Doug!), and flourishes of humor that recall Mark Leyner. Quoth the Devilfish, “I spit on realism and all its cunning henchmen!” Here’s a creature intending not to enter the literary canon but to destroy the library. Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com. Free. 7 p.m.
BRIAN MILLER
Friday, Nov. 7
Director’s Choice
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s November production is usually designed as a contrast to the family-friendly sweetness of its Nutcracker, which comes right after, and this program fits that need. David Dawson’s neoclassical powerhouse A Million Kisses to My Skin, Nacho Duato’s Haitian-inspired Rassemblement, and a new-to-us duet by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa join a world premiere by rising star Justin Peck, recently named the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet. There’s not a sugarplum among them. (Ends Nov. 16.) McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 441-2424, pnb.org. $28 and up. 7:30 p.m.
SANDRA KURTZ
Saturday, Nov. 8
Chris Hadfield
He went into space a distinguished Canadian pilot and astronaut; he came back an international—one hesitates to say interplanetary—star. Following last year’s zero-G cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” which dropped on YouTube shortly before he came down from the International Space Station, Hadfield retired and began writing books: first an autobiography, now his You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes: Photographs From the International Space Station (Little Brown, $26). Aboard the ISS, apart from music, he did everything he could to evangelize for science and space exploration, and his new volume continues that noble mission. In a dumbed-down era of “I’m not a scientist” and teach-the-controversy subterfuge, Hadfield wants you—and your kids—to look at the Earth more seriously. The winking oil-well flares, the retreating glaciers, the spreading deserts, the cyclonic whirls of typhoons that bring devastation (and life-giving rain)—these are what he documented from high above our fragile planet. His book contains some 150 images from his 2,500 orbits, some of which he’ll discuss this evening. (Advance registration is strongly urged.) Also, he’s made mustaches cool again—here and throughout the galaxy. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, bookstore.washington.edu. Free. 6 p.m.
BRIAN MILLER
Tuesday, Nov. 11
Fidelio Trio
“While the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream. It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12-tone system.” This imperious admonition earned composer Charles Wuorinen no friends when he dropped it on the first page of the first chapter of his 1979 textbook Simple Composition. For decades (he’s 76), Wuorinen has held aloft the banner of modernism at its most uncompromising and cantankerous. What does his own music sound like? Well, the 1983 Piano Trio—which the Fidelio Trio is playing tonight—is as gnarly as the above edict suggests, but nowhere near as dry. Dazzling rather than recondite, its 10 minutes sweep along with an exhilarating rhythmic life; the violin, cello, and piano seem to sideswipe and strike sparks off one another as they hurtle forward. Sponsored by the Washington Composers Forum, the Fidelio will also play music by Johannes Maria Staud, Donnacha Dennehy, and John Harbison. Chapel Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., washingtoncomposersforum.org. $5–$15. 8 p.m.
GAVIN BORCHERT
