• When Seattle last saw Pretty Girls Make Graves, they were accompanied by a lip-synching drag queen and a troupe of double-dutch jump ropers who parted the Block Party crowd to enhance the energetic rock performance. Whether you can count on that sort of spectacle tonight is uncertain, but even unaccompanied the band rarely fails to entertain. There are, however, four opening bands, making the show something of an endurance challenge. [neumos]
• Project Runway. One of them will be the winner, one will be out. Grumble with fellow fans about the judges and whether they’re keeping talentless nutjobs for the sake of drama tonight at Faire, a francophile gallery & cafe that opened this spring [mb] on Olive & Melrose (the old Fillipi’s books). Among other creative events (UNO tournaments, open mic nights), they also host 10 pm viewings of the best reality competition on the air. [bravo]

digression/follow-up: Last week, I alerted you to the NWFF premiere of the new Werner Herzog film, the Wild Blue Yonder and only got around to seeing it last night. Where I expected soothing and dreamy video collage in service of a science fiction fantasy storyline, I instead found a sad grumpy alien narrating a weird [internal] logic-defying story of cross colonization and fuzzy physics. In its own way, the film provides an interesting experiment in suspension of disbelief and ability to dissociate everything you know about science, math, aeronautics history, space travel, and exploration from the onscreen images. Where another movie might have used a comforting soundtrack to expedite this disengagement process, Herzog instead employs music written and performed for non-Western ears. For me, this made it all the more difficult to ignore pesky thoughts about bone atrophy during long exposure to microgravity and whether exhaled oxygen would actually bubbles in a liquid helium atmosphere instead of just delighting in the surreal undersea footage. Your mileage may vary. It plays through Thursday at 7 and 9 pm. [nwff]