Crawl Space is closing, which is cause for howling. This is the last opening. The show is Stranger Circumstances, featuring Seattle trio PDL, Italian artist Massimo Guerrera, Montreal's Alana Riley, and Vancouver's Ron Tran, focusing on encounters between artists and strangers. These encounters will happen at the opening. Things that have happened at past openings: beercycling, making out, ogling sewn fruit, art-encrusted toilets, Triscuit sponsorship, endless pathways to nowhere. Howl. (Crawl Space Gallery, 504 E Denny Way #1, 201-2441. 6–10 pm, free.)

Tonight, former Pedro the Lion frontman David Bazan returns home from a solo tour that has seen him playing private shows in people's living rooms and traveling in a van paid for with donations from fans. This humble touring scheme coincides with Bazan's most recent album, Curse Your Branches, his first full-length under his given name, which has been aptly described as a breakup album, only with God instead of a girl. The record details Bazan's falling out of faith with evangelical Christianity and his subsequent attempts to drown his newfound agnosticism with alcohol. (Neumos, 925 E Pike St, 709-9467. 8 pm, $13, 21+.)

Today brings two worthy opportunities to commemorate the man who would be King of Pop. The Kenny Ortega–directed film This Is It documents rehearsals for Jackson's would-be comeback shows and sloppily accomplishes the impossible: rehumanizing Michael Jackson, presented here as a tireless, meticulous, generous, and witty working artist. And at the Seattle Laser Dome, Laser Michael Jackson blasts the man's greatest hits over a high-quality sound system with entertaining lights. (For This Is It showtimes, see Movie Times: thestranger.com/film. Seattle Laser Dome, Seattle Center, 443-2850. 8 pm, $8.50.)

Though David Belisle is 10 feet tall, he has a unique knack for barely being there. The gorgeously unpretentious and intimate moments he captures make you feel like you're looking at someone's family album—if that family included Patti Smith, Karen O, Neil Young, and Fleet Foxes. This new exhibit includes candids and portraits, as well as landscapes taken during Belisle's time spent touring the world with R.E.M. and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The show will be extra sweetened with a live set by Tiny Vipers. (Easy Street Records, 4559 California Ave SW, 938-3279. 7 pm [Tiny Vipers at 9 pm], free.)

There's a scene in the addenda to Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in which the author, while kayaking, is overwhelmed by the sight of a killer whale leaping, Free Willy–style, out of the ocean in close proximity. That scene is all I can think of when trying to describe the impossible ebullience with which Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth yelps the words "Bitte orca!" halfway through the recent album of the same name, over an avalanche of avant-Afropop guitar. The album is a revelatory balancing act, as Longstreth's confounding arrangements coalesce again and again into irresistible melodies. (Neumos, 925 E Pike St, 709-9467. 8 pm, $15, 21+.)

The most enjoyable thing about Good Hair is not its (almost uncritical) exploration of the booming, recession-proof black-hair economy but its narrative of four hairstylists who are preparing to compete at the annual International Hair Show in Atlanta. Two of the hairstylists are black women, one is a white man, and one is a black man who wears high heels. It is impossible for the white hairstylist not to be a very curious character—he even looks a little like Bruno. The contest at the end is thrilling and presents an excellent mirror to a key Marxist insight about the limits of capital (more about this when everyone has seen the documentary). (See Movie Times: thestranger.com/film.)

First, Heather McHugh was a genius. In 2007, she became a Stranger Genius. Last month, she became a MacArthur Genius. If God gave Celestial Genius Awards, she'd be next in line. Her poems are nimble and clever, riddles that rhyme. Her newest book, Upgraded to Serious, contains letters to God and brooding comedy about the cosmos, such as her short poem "The Microscope": "Through petri dishes' rings/life is transmogrified. When we/look into things, we see/[blank line]/there's space inside." Even her typography has rhythm—and it's in on the joke. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600. 7 pm, free.)

Don't be misled: Blues Control won't be grinding out rote Muddy Waters or Willie Dixon covers. Rather, the Queens duo works in more hazily indefinable strata. Their self-titled 2007 album ran myriad avant-rock tropes through mutational and cosmic processes. This year's Local Flavor elevates Blues Control's game even higher, soaring into glorious Popol Vuh–like mantras and purveying a rarefied brand of dub that's unfathomably aquatic and deeply spacious. This paradox spotlights the distinctiveness of these atypical New Yorkers. (Funhouse, 206 Fifth Ave N, 374-8400. 9:30 pm, $7, 21+.)

Broadcast's and Atlas Sound's latest albums both explore what critic Simon Reynolds, borrowing from Derrida, has dubbed "hauntology" in music: "the paradoxical state of the spectre, which is neither being nor non-being." In general, this means lots of disembodied voices, echoes, blurs, and hazes of sound, and a kind of sinister nostalgia or longing. Broadcast plies heavy-lidded, vintage psychedelia that plays out like the faded but color-saturated film stock of some old Italo horror flick. Atlas Sound makes soft, breezy bedroom-pop with a troubled past. Both are teeming with ghosts. (Neumos, 925 E Pike St, 709-9467. 8 pm, $13.50, 21+.)

A very bad thing happens to a man, and when he comes to the studio of video artist Meiro Koizumi to recount this bad thing in a testimonial, an even worse thing happens—to the man and to us watching. Koizumi knows the evil a camera can do, and he is not afraid to use it. You have been warned. This artist doesn't pose as a good guy. (Hedreen Gallery, 901 12th Ave, 296-2244. 1:30–6 pm, free.)

All signs point to August: Osage County being face-scorchingly great. Tracy Letts's dark family romance, which won the Tony and the Pulitzer and had critics doing backflips from Chicago to New York, is a three-hour-plus epic with 20 actors and all the problems: Mom's on pills, Dad's a disappeared alcoholic, a 50-year-old is molesting his fiancée's niece, siblings are lovers. And it's a comedy—like Tennessee Williams crossed with T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men." As read by Jack Black. Or something. I can't wait. (Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine St, 1-800-745-3000. 8 pm, $23.50–$63.50. Through Nov 1.)

Greil Marcus brought serious intellectual ambition to rock-and-roll criticism—he also spawned a million pretentious rock critics. But you have to admire the ambition of Marcus's new book. In over a thousand pages, A New Literary History of America attempts to do for American history what Marcus did for rock criticism. Pieces by Jonathan Lethem and Sarah Vowell and other literary geniuses bring vivid life to American history (Edison! Tarzan! Alcoholics Anonymous!), with Marcus's unparalleled critical smarts nimbly guiding the whole monstrous book. (Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 624-6600. 7 pm, free.)

Matthew Offenbacher is a very clever artist, but he is also very sincere. Does art take itself too seriously? His paintings seem to ask this question all the time, while also having an almost spiritual dimension. Usually he paints wildlife—linking modernist abstraction with, say, beavers or otters or weasels—but in this show, he pushes the point further by featuring his lazy house cat as if the cat were any other muse-model. The cat is pictured at rest and in motion; there's even a view the cat might have had when it was once stuck up a tree. (Howard House, 604 Second Ave, 256-6399. 10:30 am–5 pm, free.)

Jonathan Lethem's best novels superimpose genre fiction onto what we might otherwise recognize as something like real life. In The Fortress of Solitude, a coming-of-age story passes through the panels of a superhero comic (and through the cocktail-party dilemma: flight or invisibility?); in As She Climbed Across the Table, a wry breakup story crawls into a sci-fi wormhole. Lethem's latest novel, Chronic City, sounds promisingly like more of the same: In an almost-real Manhattan, a former child star longs for a fiancée stranded in the international space station. Hosted by Stranger books editor Paul Constant. (Sunset Tavern, 5433 Ballard Ave NW, 634-3400. 7 pm, $5/free with book purchase at University Book Store, 21+.)

Rock 'n' Roll isn't one of Tom Stoppard's great plays (it's no Arcadia or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). But a merely good Stoppard still beats almost anyone for wit, intelligence, and the sticky warmth of human relationships. It begins in Oxford, 1968, as a Czech PhD student runs home after the USSR has invaded his home country. The play ping-pongs between London and Prague, fusty British Marxists and Czech longhairs who just want to make "socially negative music." Plus: sex, drugs, and you-guessed-it. The excellent cast (especially Anne Allgood as a cancer-stricken professor of Greek) elevates the script from merely good to glowing. (ACT Theatre, 700 Union St, 292-7676. 2 and 7:30 pm, $10–$55. Through Nov 8.)

SLGFF 2009 sprints to a close with another weekend of queer screen delights. Today's best bets: Stuck!, the jailhouse-noir dyke comedy starring the mighty Karen Black (4:30 pm at Admiral Theater); Prayers for Bobby, the Lifetime-TV weepie featuring Sigourney Weaver as the unforgiving Christian mom who drives her gay son to suicide, then spends the rest of her life atoning (7 pm at Central Cinema); and One Night Stand Up: Drag Queens, a filmed stage show featuring Jackie Beat, Miss Coco Peru, and Varla Jean Merman (9:30 pm at Cinerama). (Full schedule at www.threedollarbillcinema.org.)

Rebecca Brown is Seattle's smartest writer, and Seattle is home to tons of smart writers. If you've ever read one of her essays—which effortlessly bounce between Nathaniel Hawthorne and transubstantiation and the Beach Boys and sex—you're excited about this event already. Tonight, Brown and two other smart writers, poet Eric McHenry and playwright Keri Healey, will read brand-new pieces on the theme of "truth or dare." And for the first time ever, Hugo House has commissioned a hiphop artist—the up-and-coming Macklemore—to participate. Come for Brown, but expect to find a favorite new artist or two. (Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. 7:30 pm, $15–$25.)

Before Robert Mapplethorpe started pissing off the religious right—hell, before he even really knew how to be a gay man in the world—he shot Polaroids. They're nothing like the formal, neoclassical images he made later; these are raw, exploratory, sexily unsteady. Imagine the shivers that went through photo scholar Sylvia Wolf when she rediscovered them. Later, Wolf became director of the Henry, which is also celebrating four other new shows with this party. (Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave NE, 543-2280. 8–11 pm, $6–$10.)

Yo La Tengo are indie rock's steady marathon runners. They flex their post–Velvet Underground moves on absorbing albums every couple of years, and their fans follow them to sizable venues like the Showbox, even a quarter-century into the band's existence. Yo La Tengo's 12th album, Popular Songs, refutes the conventional wisdom that groups this old should be moribund. The tunes here are both melancholy and uplifting in that subtle, beguiling Yo La Tengo way, as comfortable and beneficial as your favorite running shoes. (Showbox Sodo, 1700 First Ave S, www.ticketmaster.com. 8 pm, $18 adv/$20 DOS, 21+.)

When Ellen Garvens last showed her sculptures at Davidson Galleries, they sat forlornly in rooms bathed in natural light and resembled prostheses under development—prostheses for bodies similar to ours but alien, their lost limbs familiar but charismatically unrecognizable. These uncanny creations were at a safe distance then: pictured in photographs. Now, in a new show, the University of Washington teacher/artist sets some of her creations in the same room with us, sharing the same air and light. They might make our bodies wonder about themselves. (Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington School of Art, 685-1805. Noon–4 pm, free.)

The underground-drag-chanteuse-turned-international-drag-sensation Joey Arias has had a glorious run of late, wrapping up a five-year stint with Cirque du Soleil and cocreating the award-winning stage show Arias with a Twist with visionary puppeteer Basil Twist. But tonight at the Triple Door, Arias returns to what first made him famous: his uncanny channeling of Billie Holiday, whose music he'll perform along with original works, accompanied by Eliot Douglass. (Triple Door, 216 Union St, 838-4333. 8 pm, $25, 17+.)

Shoegaze rock can be too airy, effete, and precious for its own good. Brooklyn's A Place to Bury Strangers counteract that tendency with mushroom clouds of caustically fuzzy noise that draws on the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy and the more overdriven moments of My Bloody Valentine's catalog. Their sound is more clamorous than glamorous, but A Place to Bury Strangers don't totally jettison melodies. They just bury them deep in the maelstrom, where their moody contours seem even more alluring. (Crocodile, 2200 Second Ave, www.thecrocodile.com. 8 pm, $10, 21+.)

Following Friday's opening-night gala screening of the Quentin Crisp biopic An Englishman in New York and last night's Peaches-Christ-and-Mink-Stole-enhanced late-night screening of the John Waters classic Desperate Living, the 2009 SLGFF marches into its first of two weeks devoted to state-of-the-art queer cinema. Today brings two worthy documentaries: Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement (4:30 pm at the Egyptian) and The Butch Factor (2:15 pm at NWFF). For the full schedule, visit www .threedollarbillcinema.org. (Oct 16–25, various locations.)

The blogosphere's ablaze about Kurt Vile, a Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter who makes low-fidelity nonchalance an asset. Believe the hype. Vile's 2008 collection Constant Hitmaker repurposes Lee Hazlewood's hazily touching, sung-out-the-side-of-his-mouth ballads and light rockers for late-'00s sensibilities. His new Childish Prodigy beefs up the production values and rocks harder, but it retains Vile's knack for poignantly deadpan melodies and acute, spare arrangements. Less is more, more or less. (High Dive, 513 N 36th St, 632-0212. 9:30 pm, $8 adv/$10 DOS, 21+.)

Wherever you mark their creative peak, Sunny Day Real Estate made one of the defining albums of mid-'90s emo with their debut, Diary, and its indelible opening combination of introvert anthems "Seven" and "In Circles." The press-shy band broke up amid frontman Jeremy Enigk's very public conversion to born-again Christianity, re-formed for two albums in the late '90s (minus bassist Nate Mendel, who was busy with Foo Fighters), and then went dark again. This tour marks the first reunion of the original lineup since 1995, and by all accounts the shows have been worth the wait. (Paramount, 911 Pine St, 467-5510. 8 pm, $25, all ages.)

Everybody loves Michael Chabon. Everybody. Stoners love Wonder Boys. Angry retail employees love The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Even nerds who haven't left the couch since the invention of Adult Swim love The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. In his newest book, Manhood for Amateurs, Chabon writes nebbishy, adoring love letters to the female superheroes he lusted after in his youth, and still women swoon over his thoughtful, erudite prose (and dashing good looks). If he weren't one of the most talented writers of our generation, I'd fucking hate his guts. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600. 5 pm, free.)

Howard Barlow takes base materials riddled with bullet holes (mini-kegs, say), coats them with luscious paint, then affixes to them antlers wearing knit antler sweaters. Ries Niemi cracks wise in embroidered handkerchiefs. Nathan DiPietro paints twisted idylls (one pictured at left), channeling Bruegel and Thomas Hart Benton. And those are just three of the dozen artist members of PUNCH Gallery. To raise money for the artist-run space, they've hung a group show, and every person who comes through the door can buy a chance to win the entire exhibition by these vital local artists—for only 10 bucks a pop. (PUNCH Gallery, 119 Prefontaine Pl S, 621-1945. Noon–5 pm, free to see/$10 for a chance to win.)

Why? frontman Yoni Wolf is one of the best lyricists in indie rock (or anywhere else) right now, a tongue-tying fast-talker who twists hiphop cadences and tightly-wound couplets to his own compellingly morbid, hyper-self-conscious ends. His band's latest, Eskimo Snow, was culled from the same recording sessions that produced 2008's Alopecia, but its songs are sentimental rather than sly, instrumentally looser and more live. Mount Eerie is the ongoing project of the Microphones' equally existentially concerned (though slightly more solaced) Phil Elverum. No Kids are a delightful chamber-pop trio from Canada. This is a flawless bill. (Vera Project, Seattle Center, 956-8372. 7:30 pm, $12/$13, all ages.)