1. Tonight at 6, Historic Seattle and King County's 4Culture office are hosting an open house at Washington Hall, at 153 14th Ave, to talk about renovations and future plans for the building.



Washington Hall is a dilapidated Central District building that, in its heyday, was the epicenter of African American arts and politics in Seattle, and hosted the likes of W.E.B DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Mahalia Jackson. In June, a non-profit housing development group called Historic Seattle purchased the building from a black Masonic group called Sons of Haiti, quelling fears that the building would be bought and demolished by a less-sympathetic developer.

2. Ken Auletta, tech writer for the New Yorker, has a new book called Googled: The End of the World as We Know It , an inside look at the world-dominating search engine company. The most enticing parts of the book, from what I can tell, are the sections where Auletta interviews Google's youthfully-arrogant entrepreneurs, who rollerblade into meetings and have legal job candidates write up contracts selling their souls to the devil. It bills itself as something of an up-close retrospective on a corporate behemoth whose history, for the most part, still lies in the future.

Auletta will read tonight at 7 at the Central Library.

3. The Paramount Theater's Silent Movie Mondays continues tonight with The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The 67-minute animated film is directed by Lotte Reiniger, who as a 23-year-old Berlin art kid in 1926 invented a cardboard-cutouts-and-string technique that made her movies look like gangly shadows dancing on a microscope slide.

Later, Reiniger got into writing and directing live-action movies, but Prince Achmed is her crowning achievement (the world's oldest surviving animated film). FilmNerd heralded the silent film in January, when the Northwest Film Forum commissioned some indie artists to perform the score on banjos and glockenspiels.

The show starts at 7 pm at the Paramount Theater. The soundtrack will be played live on a Wurlitzer organ.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25SP4ftxklg[/youtube]

4. Tomorrow night, THEE Satisfaction, recently departed for NYC, is back in town to open up for Little Dragon (electro-soul phenoms in their own right). The show is at the Nectar club in Fremont.

Know about any important meetings, rad shows, weirdo lectures, or other noteworthy events? Please e-mail me at [email protected].