Carrboro
Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad
DSI TheatreChristmas is the season for elves, reindeer, blinding store decorations, compulsory consumption and suicide-inducing music. Hanukkah is the season for, among other fun things, a bawdy comedy revue from a group of mostly Jewish female comedians from New York. Last seen in the area under the calling card of “Obama Girls of Comedy,” tonight’s act focuses on such seasonal gags as tap-dancing dreidels. Surely we can expect evergreen topics of Jewish humor, as well: Impresario Susannah Perlman has put together an ensemble of hardworking performers with many television and live performance credits, and she tells us to expect “a night of comedy and burlesque, told by the gals who learned to smoke at Hebrew School, got drunk at their bat mitzvahs and would rather have more schtuppa than the chupah.” Oh, and a “rendition of L’chaim with a fist in the mouth.” Tonight, they’re at Dirty South; visit dsicomedytheater.com for ticket info and www.nicejewishgirlsgonebad.com for performance samples. David Fellerath
Chapel Hill
Jack Rose
NightlightI’ve heard more than one person talk about Virginia acoustic guitarist Jack Rose as “the big guy.” Though Rose isn’t small in stature, the epithet mostly references his iconic status among the panoply of guitarists making long-form, Indian-and-American-influenced folk musicguys like Glenn Jones, Harris Newman and Eric Carbonara. Rose’s compositions are some of the most graceful in the world, and tonight, he sits in a small room in Carrboro and plays them. Tickets are $6, and Horseback opens at 10 p.m. Grayson Currin
Durham
A Room of Their Own
Nasher Museum of Art“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote in 1929. She was addressing the stumbling blocks women have faced throughout history, denying them the leisure and social acceptance to create great art. Any disparity between the sexes was a matter of logistics, not abilitya controversial argument at the time.
Now that the fabulous, though all-male, El Greco to Velázquez has left the Nasher, the museum presents a collection of modernist art and letters from a group of Woolf’s contemporaries. Artists Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington and Roger Fry joined such authors as Clive Bell and E.M. Forster, and economist John Maynard Keynes, to form the “Bloomsbury group,” an intellectual gathering in West Central London. Both sexes were welcome, and though Woolf wrote alone, she always kept good company.
A Room of Their Own features paintings, works on paper, decorative arts and book arts from 1910 through the 1970s, focusing on their reception in America. The exhibit opens today. Visit nasher.duke.edu. Matt Saldaña
Carrboro
Irata, Battle Rockets
The ReservoirWhile most of the indie rock world discarded new hope for the quiet-loud-quiet-explode instrumental post-rock template some years ago, a handful of regional outfitsincluding the wonderful Gray Young and, to an extent, the messianic Caltrophaven’t. Three of those acts convoke in Chapel Hill tonight for an evening of wordless progress: Raleigh’s Goodbye, Titan uses Mogwai’s Young Team as its lift, while Battle Rockets infuses the drift of an Ennio Morricone score into a heavier Slint-style arch. Most intriguing here, though, is Irata, a Greensboro trio that seems equally fueled by the more Baroque trips of Kraut rock and the more confrontational blends of instrumental metal. Tonight’s free show begins at 10 p.m. Grayson Currin
Durham
“How Star Wars Ruined Educational Films”
Center for Documentary StudiesI am more or less convinced that the Star Wars “prequels” destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation and plunged the decade of the 2000s into mediocrity. Just look at everything that happened after The Phantom Menace: the dot-com bust, George W. Bush, Sept. 11.
The AV Geeks, who have made a career of rescuing obscure instructional films from oblivion, come forth to share their latest treasures in their new retrospective, “How Star Wars Ruined Educational Films.” Yes, in an effort to “reach” kids, instructional films produced in the late 1970s incorporated myriad SF and fantasy elements, such as Verbstar, Freedom 2000 and Stay Away from Strangers. I’m not sure how the last one is SF, but prepare to find out, and prepare to discover the horrors wrought by the original Star Wars trilogy that proves even childhood memories have their, pun intended, dark side. For more information, visit www.avgeeks.com. Zack Smith
