Harvard Ave., 949-8643, boostdancefestival.org. $20. 8 p.m. SANDRA KURTZ SATURDAY, APRIL 5
Exterminator City
For the first time since the ’90s, Seattle is in the midst of an underground-comics renaissance. This explosion of new work comes in part thanks to the unifying power of the Short Run Festival and the monthly Dune Comics night at Café Racer. These two events aren’t necessarily breeding new comic artists; rather, they’re bringing disparate, secluded artists together in one place. All sorts of wonderful scribblers have been coming out of the woodwork and dazzling folks with their heretofore unknown talents, and we couldn’t be more excited. The newest alt-comix gathering is the inaugural Exterminator City, where 16 artists will show and sell their work all in one place. Members of The Intruder, the Ballard Sketch Team, Seattle Indie Comic and Game Artists, and participants in the Dune Comics night are among those who’ll be hawking their doodly wares. Half of the tables are reserved for women, so ladies need not worry that this will turn into a Comicon-style sausage fest. Push/Pull Studio
but also suspect peons to their employers. As Aleynikov told Lewis, the code in question was mostly open-source, and so outdated that he didn’t even use it at his new flash-trading firm; he wrote newer, faster code instead. What made Goldman Sachs so angry was the revelation that essentially any super-smart programmer, given enough servers, could do what it does. The genie, not the code, was out of the bottle; and for that Aleynikov had to be punished. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $27.63 (includes book). 7:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
TUESDAY, APRIL 8
Walter Kirn
Gallery (Greenwood Collective), 8537 Greenwood Ave. N., facebook.com/ExterminatorCity. Free. Noon–6 p.m. KELTON SEARS MONDAY, APRIL 7
TABITHA SOREN
Kirn’s pal Rockefeller turned out to be neither.
The more an Ivy Leaguer denies he or she’s hung up on that pedigree, the more secretly obsessed they are with the implicit prestige of having gone to college in New Haven or Cambridge or Providence. (It’s tacky to name the actual school, old sport.) But Kirn, who roots for the Tigers, freely cops to his class and status anxieties in his truecrime tale Blood Will Out (Liveright, $25.95). A longtime journalist and the author of Up in the Air, the now-Montana-based Kirn was raised of humble Minnesota stock; and even as a successful writer in 1998, he was slightly awed and intimidated to meet an eccentric Rockefeller heir. It’s one thing to grab society’s upper rungs—a topic Kirn explored in his 2009 Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever— and another to have been born at the top, behind a gilded door, sitting on a pile of silver spoons. Kirn wanted to be liked by Clark Rockefeller, so he did favors for him, went on strange social outings with him, and listened to long, rambling stories of lost wealth and powerful connections— all the while suppressing his usual reportorial skepticism. Ten years later, as Kirn subsequently related in The New Yorker, “Clark Rockefeller” revealed himself to be an invention, and not the Jay Gatsby/Horatio Alger kind of bootstrapping, class-jumping invention. Instead, as Kirn interweaves his own feelings of class insecurity and credulity, he introduces us to the German con artist Christian Gerhartsreiter, who tried on a few different guises (including Rockefeller) after reaching the U.S. in the ’70s. And the deeper Kirn digs, the greater his shame at being hustled by a man who also has murder in his past. Town Hall, $5. 7:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER E
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SEATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 2 — 8, 2014
Previously the author of Liar’s Poker (about Wall Street in the ’80s), Moneyball (the NFL and salary caps), and The Big Short (the 2008 financial crash), Lewis knows a thing or two about money and its pernicious effects. He’s America’s pre-eminent pop-financial writer (as opposed to a Krugman-level macroeconomist) because he identifies great characters to tell important stories. Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt concerns the same crew of high-frequency “flash” traders who’ve been upending the old market hierarchy. In one such instance, detailed in Lewis’ Vanity Fair story last year, Goldman Sachs arranged in 2009 to have criminal charges brought against one of its math-whiz programmers, Sergey Aleynikov, for allegedly swiping its code to take to a new employer. The notion, and supposed theft, has to do with cutting milliseconds off each computer-generated trade. That intermediary trading takes place—a thousand times over— Lewis is a contributing before you can editor at Vanity Fair. even pick up the phone when your broker calls. Lewis says such trades generate $10–$20 billion in profits for Wall Street. With the proliferation of new public and private trading exchanges, he writes, “A once sleepy oligopoly dominated by NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange was rapidly turning into something else.” In that dark new scheme, quants like Aleynikov are valuable
BEOWULF SHEEHAN
Michael Lewis
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