Wednesday 2/15
(MUSIC) Wednesday night at Neumos is the Seattle release party for Black Belt Eagle Scout's new album The Land, the Water, the Sky and it's also the last local appearance before she (Katherine Paul) heads out to tour Europe for a couple of weeks and then the US for more than a month. My prediction? The Land, the Water, the Sky, released on Saddle Creek last Friday, is the record that will make Paul a star. A household name—in indie-rock-loving households at least—like Japanese Breakfast and Soccer Mommy. It's lush with expansive, experimental pop melodies and instrumentation that flirts with the ethereal ambience of shoegaze. She told Jarrett Werk of Underscore News, that the album only came to be after she moved from Portland, OR to her Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in LaConner, WA. “Paying attention to all of the sounds and the feelings I get when I am immersed in trails of cedar trees and canoeing out on the water deeply grounds me and strengthens my bond to my lineage of the Swinomish tribe,” Paul said. “I wanted the delicateness of these moments to meet the intense reality of the history of my people. I like to imagine my blood—all of my ancestors—running through our homelands freely and powerfully.” Read Werk's full interview with Black Belt Eagle Scout here. (Neumos, 925 E Pike St, 7 pm, $18-$20, all ages) MEGAN SELING
Thursday 2/16
(MUSIC) Yo La Tengo's new album This Stupid World is an alluring exploration of the forever-shifting human condition. Work on the record started in March 2020, back when Corona was still just a brand of beer to most Americans. The band didn't pick things back up again until late-2021, after working out all the shock of our new reality on 2020's instrumental improvised EP We Have Amnesia Sometimes and a covers EP Sleepless Night. The result is a full-length record that feels less like a pandemic time capsule (thank god) and more like a study of our new, post-pandemic world. For example, "Sinatra Drive Breakdown" is upbeat, by Yo La Tengo standards, with a reoccurring guitar line that recalls their 2000 pop gem "Cherry Chapstick." The familiar old melody breaks through the new song's distorted, directionless guitar shredding like a comforting nod to a time long before everything went to shit while Ira Kaplan sings about the frustration of watching life as we knew it slowly fade away. "I see my arms flail, I see the night alone / I see brief glimpses of clear sky / I see times I wanted, regained and lost again." Woof. As heavy as the lyrical themes are throughout, the record is balanced with the band's ability to make even gutwrenching grief feel light as a feather. The album is a contradiction, but a comforting one. Because life, especially today, is also a precarious, beautiful balance. (Neptune Theater, 1303 NE 45th St, 8 pm, $30-$45) MEGAN SELING
Friday 2/17
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
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(THEATER) Intiman's The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, the last play by the brilliant Black American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, is a mess. But much of this mess can be attributed to the fact that the play itself is a mess. Hansberry wrote the Window as she was dying at the young age of 34; and the full powers of her genius were needed to properly explore a subject that, in her time (the early 1960s), was radically new: the limits of white liberalism and cosmopolitanism. This was a completely different territory from the play that made her famous, A Raisin in the Sun. And if she had but world enough and time, much of the mess would certainly have been swept out of a play that still deserves our attention and the time of our times. (Erickson Theatre Off Broadway, 1524 Harvard Ave, multiple dates and showtimes through Feb 25, $65-$75) CHARLES MUDEDE
Saturday 2/18
(VISUAL ART) Midnight hours, for me, are a sacred time. It's the one moment of every day when the world feels somehow at its calmest and most deranged—in other words, full of possibility. That imaginative magical essence is deftly captured by Seattle-based artist Yongqi Tang in her new show Midnights/子夜 at Specialist. In her large-scale charcoal drawings, Tang depicts a bubbly, chatty meal or ghostly visitors in intimate spaces. The charcoal imbues each scene with a delicacy that reminds the viewer of wispy memories. Along with her ceramic reliefs, her works "blend allegories, myths, and symbols from both Western and Eastern Classicist traditions, creating a playful in-betweenness within which different identities are performed, made, and re-made." And it looks perfect inside of Specialist's sparse, white space. (Specialist, 300 S Washington St, Saturdays through Mar 4 by appointment, free) JAS KEIMIG
(FILM) Some of the most powerful images in all of Black cinema are to be found in a black and white movie Charles Burnett completed over 40 years ago: 1. Boys battling with rocks, concrete, and cardboard shields; 2. a girl with a dog mask on her head; 3. boys standing upside down with their legs against the wall of a house; 4. a car engine falling out of the back of a “skoroskoro” (a beat-up car); and, my favorite, 5. a young couple dancing to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” Killer of Sheep shows us the twilight of the Black worker, the man who labored too hard and too long for the small cuts of bacon he brought home. To obtain an adequate understanding of the film—which is about a sad man in a Black Los Angeles neighborhood who kills sheep for a living—you must watch it much more than once, which is why we recommend it every time it screens in Seattle. (Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St, Feb 18 and Feb 20, 7:30 pm, $5-$11) CHARLES MUDEDE
Sunday 2/19
Gorditx Plus Size Swap & Sell Market
(COMMUNITY) Finding cute, well-made plus-size attire can be really fucking hard. I can't tell you the number of times I've been excited for a clothing drop from a favorite designer or sifted through the racks at some place at the mall to discover they only carry up to a size 12. Boo! Do better! But this weekend, all the plus-size hotties in Seattle have a chance to shop the closets of some of the coolest people in the city. Musician Brujita XO organized Gorditx Plus Size Swap & Sell Market at Cherry Pit on Sunday, where local vendors will offer up clothes, flowers, and other various wares (like inhaler accessories!). I've found markets that cater specifically to plus-size people are so inspiring, affirming, and stuffed with tons of treasures. The event is free but be sure to RSVP as Cherry Pit has limited capacity. (The Cherry Pit, 2158 E Cherry St, 1-5 pm, free, RSVP here) JAS KEIMIG
Monday 2/20
(MUSIC) I will be honest. I'm a hiphop purist. This means simply this: a hiphop beat should never be alive. It must be processed by a sampler, like an MPC 2000. Hiphop music is, in its essence, artificial. There should be none of the sorry business of jamming or a guitar solo. Musicianship is thrown out the window. Real headz just press buttons. But, then, there is the Roots. They have been around since the 1990s. They are on television every night during the week (The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon). They exist as a contradiction in my mind: a hiphop band. Why do you need actual drums or horns or licks? Let the computer do everything. Nevertheless, the Roots are the real deal. And their track "Concerto Of The Desperado" is a masterpiece of '90s hiphop. (Showbox SoDo, 1700 First Ave S, 8 pm, $79.50-$85) CHARLES MUDEDE
Tuesday 2/21
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(FOOD) You don't have to go far—or even get out of your car!—to secure great cannoli outside of the East Coast. Kelly Cannoli has two drive-through locations—one in Ballard, just off the south side of the bridge, and another in Lake City—and both are owned by Kelly Wilson, a woman who learned how to make Sicilian-style Cannoli while growing up in New Jersey before relocating to Seattle years ago. The pastry shells are crispy and sturdy and filled to order with your choice of classic sweet ricotta mixture as well as espresso, mint chocolate chip, lemon, or chocolate filling. If you're a purist they'll leave your cannolis naked, but I recommend getting the ends dipped in one of their many toppings—mini chocolate chips, crushed pistachios, toffee bits, crushed Oreos, or candied lemon peel. They'll even put a cherry on top if you want! I groaned when I took my first bite of their coffee toffee cannoli—it is a dream. A two-bite mini cannoli is $4, the large is $6, and gluten-free shells are available for $7. They also have NY-style bagels and coffee served in New York's iconic Greek coffee cups, but honestly, I've never made it past the cannoli. They're everything I need. (Kelly Cannoli, 3457 15th Ave W in Ballard and 11310 Lake City Way NE in Lake City, daily 7 am-5 pm) MEGAN SELING
