Tonight:
The Central Cinema is hosting the 20/20 Awards, offering a dose of perspective on films that saw wide release in 1990. The idea is to redo the Academy Awards, giving out the prize to the movies that actually deserve it.
Among the presenters, DJ Riz Rollins is presenting the “Best Song” award, the Stranger’s Lindy West is presenting “Best Actor,” former Northwest Film Forum Director Micheal Siewerath is presenting “Best Picture,” and PubliCola Editor Josh Feit is presenting the award for best documentary.
Tonight at 7pm at Central Cinema (1411 21st Avenue). Tickets are $7.
Tomorrow:
Ted Conover, maverick of New New (New?) journalism, is reading from his new book The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today.
Conover is part of that modern school of journalism in which writers make themselves active participants in the world they’re writing about (less Barbara Ehrenreich’s contrived and preachy Nickel and Dimed and more Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s masterpiece of the genre, Random Family).
Newjack, his last book, was fantastic, detailing his tenure as a guard at Sing Sing penitentiary in New York. In The Routes of Man, Conover travels around the world to discover what different roads mean to different people (the East African highways that facilitated the spread of AIDS, for example, or the roads in China bringing rural teenagers to urban factories). Seeing Conover in person would be awesome—I can hardly think of anyone else on Earth with more stories to tell.
Tuesday at 7 pm, at Elliott Bay Book Company (101 S. Main Street). Free.
Tomorrow’s Full Calendar:
Another day, another open forum on library services. Seattle Public Libraries is again inviting Seattlites to Beacon Hill to weigh in on the future of SPL. Tuesday at 6 pm at Seattle Public Library’s Beacon Hill Branch (2821 Beacon Avenue S).
There’s a “special” election tomorrow, for the King Conservation District board, and you can only vote at the library (any old King County library one of these six King County libraries will do).
The Sierra Club wants you to vote for Max Prinsen, an environmentalist with a group called Save Habitat And Diversity of Wetland, and they’ll reward you with an invitation to their party for Prinsen, across the street from the Central Library downtown. Tuesday, from 5 to 8 pm, at Sazerac (1101 4th Avenue).
The Crocodile is screening Under the Great White Northern Lights, the fantastic documentary of the White Stripes’ 2007 tour through the wilds of Canada (one scene features Jack and Meg White sitting in a circle of Inuit elders and eating raw caribou).
Tuesday at 8 pm at the Crocodile (2200 2nd Avenue). Free.
