Factory Showroom: Idleness @ Jacob Lawrence Gallery
The second installation in the Factory Showroom series focuses on the artist at rest. Much like the preceding installation, Industry (which focused on the artist at work), Idleness is videos of artists “in moments of pause, idleness, daydreaming, non-studio-time, convalescence, or spending time with friends.” Artists include Seattle’s Gretchen Bennett, Matt Browning, and Anne Fenton, and history’s Marcel Duchamp, Bertrand Russell, and Andy Warhol. Seattle architect Nicholas Bower Simpson created an outdoor deck “so that laziness could be practiced and perfected in the future.” Free meetings to talk about the show’s themes happen every Wednesday at noon at the gallery. JEN GRAVES
Midge Ure @ The Triple Door Theater
The only musician to play in both Thin Lizzy and Visage, Midge Ure is best known for fronting UK electro-pop prima donnas Ultravox in the ’80s and for co-writing the multi-platinum charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid. (Good cause, awful song.) As a vocalist, Ure projects large, utterly sincere emotions, and you either fall in love with him or laugh in his face. (I dare you to go up to him and belt out, “This means nothing to me!”) Still, there’s no denying this Scottish guitarist/singer’s ability to write a sweeping, blood-rushing tune that makes your every gesture seem terribly important while listening to it. Throughout his solo career, Ure has done nothing to rein in his melodramatic streak, but his capacity to write majestic, earworm melodies remains undiminished. DAVE SEGAL
Susanna Bluhm @ G. Gibson Gallery
The landscape is a lover in Susanna Bluhm’s juicy, semiabstract paintings. They’re made of “weird personal stuff,” she says, “abstract painting and sex… Green means something. Squishy means something.” These are the kinds of pieces that make you wonder how something could look so little like a place yet still take you there, right inside the cabins and trees and on the trails of Yosemite, for instance. Bluhm won this year’s Neddy award, and you should see why. JEN GRAVES
Psychological thrillers derive tension from their characters’ emotional states—from the intrigue of figuring out the subterranean motivations that drive behavior, decision making, and relationships. Foxcatcher is more of a physical thriller: The key interpersonal dynamics unfold in the mute interplay of male bodies rolling around on a wrestling mat. (Not in a sexy way.) (A little bit in a sexy way.) Foxcatcher tells a high-intrigue crime story, based on a 1996 murder. (If you aren’t familiar with the crime itself, I won’t spoil it—in the movie’s atmosphere of flat menace, it comes as a shock.) In adapting the story to the screen, however, director Bennett Miller (Moneyball) seems so determined to avoid salaciousness that he errs too far in the other direction. Miller’s reserve is both commendable and frustrating, and the result is a chilly, distant film that observes its characters without explaining them. ALLISON HALLETT
The Indian-born, Eastside-based tech executive who took Bill Gates to India for the first time has amassed a collection of Indian art, mostly photography, and Seattle Art Museum is featuring some of it for the first time. There are also a handful of sculptures, including a blood-red Gandhi on his iPod. These are works from cities so massive, it would be hard to say what constitutes spectacle from behind provincial American eyes. You definitely want to stand before these scenes for yourself. JEN GRAVES
