12:15pm TV/MuseumSure, cartoons are for kids. Tell...

12:15pm TV/Museum

Sure, cartoons are for kids. Tell that to the Cartoon Network, which has been indulging the kid in all of us for 9 3/4 years. To celebrate, such an important anniversary, the Museum of Television & Radio is hosting the Cartoon Power! v screening series. The series starts Friday with “The Powerpuff Girls,” those “Chemical X”-enhanced kindergarteners who kick butt and take names. But it’s the weekend marathons where you can really get the scoop on what’s going down in Townsville: all 49 episodes will be screened in five-hour sessions, complete with “The Whoop-!#@ Girls!,”v Craig McCracken’s student film (made at CalArts) that introduced the little heroes. The Cartoon Power series continues through Sept. 15 with other screenings, including “Johnny Bravo,” “Grim & Evil,” “Samurai Jack” and a 30-episode marathon of the fabulously surreal “Space Ghost Coast to Coast.”

Cartoon Power! at the Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. Screenings Wednesdays to Saturdays, 12:15 p.m., through Sept. 15. “Powerpuff Girls” marathons, weekends, 12:15 to 5:15 p.m., this Saturday through July 12. (310) 786-1000.

7:30pm Pop Music

Nina Nastasia lives in Manhattan and records in Chicago (with storied producer Steve Albini), but the folk-with-strings and folk-with-rock-band songs on her current album, “The Blackened Air,” are more evocative of Appalachian roots and an inner landscape that’s distinctly her own.

Nina Nastasia, with Distortion Felix, Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 7:30 p.m. $15. (323) 463-0204.

5pm Museum

Looking for a 1948 Tucker automobile? Only 51 were made. How about Fred Astaire’s Imperial coupe or Tom Jones’ Mercedes? Or that 1932 Ford driven by David Lee Roth in the Van Halen music video “Hot for Teacher.” These and almost 200 other classic cars, rods and motorcycles will be part of the second annual Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction this weekend at the Petersen Automotive Museum. The museum’s “Million Dollar Cars” exhibit also opens Friday and will run through next January.

Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction, Petersen Automotive Museum, 6060 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Friday and Saturday previews begin at 10 a.m.; Friday auction, 5 to 9 p.m.; Saturday auction, noon to 7 p.m. $10 per day. (480) 421-6694.

8pm Music

A family friendly concert by the Los Angeles Flute Quartet--Lisa-Maree Amos, Colleen Carroll, Peter Sheridan and Eileen Holt-Helwig--brings together music by L.A. film composer Christopher Caliendo, Mark Latham and J.S. Bach.

L.A. Flute Quartet, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, 958 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica, 8 p.m. $10 to $15. (310) 391-9854.

8pm Theater

Brazil’s Pia Fraus Teatro presents “Farsa Quixotesca/Quixotic Farce,” Hugo Possolo’s broad satire of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote of La Mancha” flavored with circus, vaudeville and live percussion. The open-air production, performed in Portuguese with projected English titles, kicks off the Los Angeles debut of Miami’s International Hispanic Theatre Festival.

“Farsa Quixotesca/The Farce of Quixote,” John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood, 8 p.m. Also Saturday and Sunday, 8 p.m. $20. (323) 461-3673.

8pm Theater

With visual installations that include 40-foot video projections and a suspended car wreck, the Center for New Theater at CalArts’ site-specific production of “King Lear” is one of the most unusual theatrical events of the season. Directed by Travis Preston with an all-female cast and a text adapted by Royston Coppenger, Shakespeare’s tragic epic, about a king undone by age and arrogance and a royal power struggle fed by familial conflict, is staged in six locations in the Brewery Arts Complex.

“King Lear,” Brewery Arts Complex, 650 S. Avenue 21, L.A., 8 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends June 23. $45. (877) 407-7499.

all day Movies

John Sayles, who was alternative before it was hip, gets a four-film retrospective this week at the Nuart. The series, “John Sayles: An American Indie Pioneer,” features twin double bills of the New Jersey filmmaker’s early work. His 1984 sci-fi satire “Brother From Another Planet,” starring Joe Morton, with Sayles and David Strathairn as intergalactic bounty hunters, and the 1983 drama “Lianna,” starring Linda Griffiths as a young housewife who falls in love with another woman, will be shown Friday through Sunday. Starting Monday is Sayles’ 1980 feature directing debut, “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” a pre-”Big Chill” drama about a group of ‘60s student-radicals reuniting only to find that it was their own lives that had changed radically. Screening with it is “Matewan,” an acclaimed 1987 labor drama about strife among coal miners in 1920s West Virginia, featuring Chris Cooper as a serious union organizer and James Earl Jones as a miner called Few Clothes, with cinematography by Haskell Wexler.

“John Sayles: An American Indie Pioneer,” Nuart, 11272 W. Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A. “Brother From Another Planet,” Friday, 7:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 2:50 and 7:30 p.m., with “Lianna,” Friday, 5:10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 12:30 and 5:10 p.m. “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” Monday to next Thursday, 7:30 p.m., with “Matewan,” Monday to next Thursday, 5 and 9:50 p.m. (310) 478-6379.

8pm Theater

Sarah Kane’s plays were beyond edgy in their use of explicit sex, violence and mutilation as metaphors for humanity’s capacity to indulge its dark side. The British writer was both reviled and celebrated (with Harold Pinter a chief champion) before her 1999 suicide at age 28. Productions in the U.S. have been extremely rare, but now comes the West Coast premiere of “Cleansed,” a litany of horrors wreaked upon the inmates of a mental hospital. The play asks whether love and a spark of humanity can endure despite utmost suffering. It comes from Rude Guerrilla, a Santa Ana company with a fondness for playwrights who transgress.

“Cleansed,” Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, 8 p.m. Regular schedule: Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Also July 3, 8 p.m. Ends July 7. $15. (714) 547-4688. No one under 17 admitted.