Cars Grotto Nights presents Driving Obsession, a free night of reportage, science, and art in the form of a subversive Valentine to our cars at Mezzanine (444 Jessie St at Mint). This cabaret-style variety show features Bucky Sinister reading his show-stopping poem on NASCAR, Dr. Graham Fleming of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory explaining how he and others are using synthetic biology to create fuels for the future, Baghdad taxi driver/art student Mounaf Shaker's screens his documentary film Omar Is My Friend about his search for gasoline, a living, and hope in today's Iraq and the musical group The Loins (featuring writer Beth Lisick and her husband Eli Crews of Beaulah & Spezza Rotto) does a surprise performance of an car-based piece of literature, plus more! (7pm)

Jeans Screening at the Roxie (3117 16th St at Valencia), China Blue (Micha X. Peled, dir.) follows a pair of denim jeans from manufacture to sale, linking the power of the U.S. consumer market to the daily lives of a Chinese factory owner and two teenaged female workers. Filmed in the factory and the workers' faraway village, this documentary provides a rare, human glimpse at China's rapid transformation into a free market society. Shot clandestinely over a three-year period in China, China Blue is a poignant look at what both China and the international retail companies don't want us to see - how the clothes we buy are actually made. It follows a group of teenage girls as they leave their rural homes for work at a jeans factory in the big city. (7 & 8:45 pm)