Entertainment

Avant-rockers the Flaming Lips will return Sunday to the Knitting Factory.

There is something about being a Blue Man.

Local author Colin Conway has largely kept a low profile for the majority of his writing career. But with more than 30 novels behind him, he’s decided it’s time to start talking about his craft.

Rounding out a politically polarizing week, the Spokane Symphony’s “Fire & Ice” masterworks concert will feature one of the classical music world’s most iconic crowd-pleasers.

Jane's Addiction vocalist Perry Farrell discusses his return to the stage after his band missed a few shows on its tour with Smashing Pumpkins, which stops Wednesday at the Spokane Arena. Farrell also reveals that his project Lollapalooza will make its debut in India in 2023.

November brings historical fiction, romance, tear-jerkers and books to make you laugh. Best-selling authors Michael Connelly and Anthony Horowitz both have something new to keep pulses racing this month – just the thing to fight off that tryptophan surge after Thanksgiving turkey.

When Christina Applegate looks back, she can recognize the signs. Filming a dance sequence during the first season of the Netflix wine-mom dramedy “Dead to Me,” she found herself off balance. Later, her tennis game began to falter. At the time, Applegate, an actress with an aversion to special pleading, didn’t make excuses. She had to work harder, she told herself. She had to try again.

By the late 1960s, international folk dancing and music held wide popularity on college campuses. That wave echoes today in a variety of cultural performers returning to the Spokane Fall Folk Festival this weekend.

Land acknowledgments – the practice of starting gatherings by reminding audiences that they are on lands stolen through bloody removals of Indigenous people – have become trendy in recent years, from weekly Zoom meetings to fancy art openings.

Mike Birbiglia has found that he can make a living off a personal crisis.Since 2008, Birbiglia, a longtime comedian and more recently an indie film director and star, has performed stand-up comedy shows on and off-Broadway about his struggles with sleepwalking, his recovery from bladder cancer and his path toward fatherhood. But his latest, “The Old Man & the Pool,” a monologue about confronting his own mortality, might be among his most candid. (The show opens on Broadway Nov. 13 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.)

Overwatch 2 formally launched on Oct. 4, and while the game is as fun as ever, absolutely nothing about it necessitates or even constitutes a sequel. All Blizzard did was introduce a fresh monetization scheme, add three new heroes, a couple of new maps and a new game mode. They migrated everything from the original into the sequel and shut down the old servers – a real slap to the face of everyone who bought the original.

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Smashing Pumpkins and Jane's Addiction will perform Wednesday at the Spokane Arena.

Glen Phillips is back with some optimistic material. The leader of Toad the Wet Sprocket will focus on songs from his latest album, "There is So Much Here."

Country sensation Walker Hayes will play the hits Thursday at the Spokane Arena.

Comic John Caparulo will return to the Spokane Comedy Club to deliver his observational humor.

Land acknowledgments have become almost perfunctory in recent years. It is the practice of beginning a public event by referencing and honoring Native American tribes whose people used to live on the lands where the event is held, before the colonization by white occupiers.

Between studying classical voice and working behind the scenes at local and national performing arts organizations, Melody Chang Heaton has learned there’s often more than one way to fulfill your passions.

Spokane Symphony music director James Lowe rarely conducts pops concerts. But, for John Williams, he had to make an exception.