11 AM, Sun. Sept 7
Musicians Wanted!
TRANSATLANTIC WEB CAM JAM SESSION
Live Music
The first Sun of each month The Raconteur hosts a transatlantic jam session. The shop's session is concurrent with a very similar session occurring in Reading, England at a pub called The Retreat. Participants alternate, collaborate, and symphonize via a Google web cam. Web Cam Jam is more about the performers than the performance, but that doesn't you can't come in watch. Raconteur musicians drink coffee and play in the rear of the shop. Retreat musicians quaff pints (morning here, Happy Hour there) and are projected onto a movie screen behind local performers. All instruments welcome. Expect a triple necked guitar, electronic bagpipes, a jaw harp, two kazoos, a beer bottle organ, and something called a fluba, which appears to be a tuba-sized fluegel horn. NOTE: If you watched the Oscars this year, you heard Best Actress winner Kate Winslet mention this very same pub and the pickling contest her mother recently won there. Indeed, February's Web Cam Jam, Kate's mom, Sally Winslet (now known as the Queen of Shallots), was in the foreground eating bangers and in April’s Mr. Winslet sang the old broadside Darlin’ Old Stick. Seriously! FREE! COMP CORNBREAD (fresh from the oven)!
8 PM, Fri. Sept 11
WALKING WITH THE CAVEMAN
Live Music
More info soon...
5 - 8 PM, Mon & Tues, Sept 14 & 15
OPEN AUDITIONS
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: The Play
Males(18 - 25)
Males(35 - 65)
Female (18 - 30)
The Studio Theatre @ Middlesex County College
2600 Woodbridge Ave, Edison, NJ 08818
Prepared monologue and cold reading of sides
Belching smokestacks, colossal clock cogs, the ribbed wreckage of a crashed zeppelin, all under-lit by the blazing Fires of Industry, Dawson’s steam-punk version of Anthony Burgess’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE features a soundtrack of Beethoven symphonies screened through the fractious filters of punk, thrash, and techno, then scribble scratched by a goggle-eyed DJ sitting atop a scaffolded clock tower that rises fifteen feet above the boards. Using an aesthetic he describes as “Quadrophenia meets Brave New World,” Dawson collaborates with mod Finnish fashion designer Anu Susi, abandoning the sleazy seventies vibe of Kubrick’s film for a sort of industrial elegance: tailored suits, swine snouted gas masks, huge buckled boots and, of course, the iconic bowler. Coming this October! For more info, click Clockwork Orange: The Play.
8 PM, Fri. Sept 18
NIGHT OF THE CRYPTIDS
Staged Reading/Film Screening
THE BEAST OF BOURBON FLIP/FACES IN THE ROCKS
Cryptid is a term which refers to a creature whose existence has been suggested but lacks scientific support. This includes purported organisms such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, as well as extinct species claimed by cryptozoologists to be living today, such as dinosaurs.
THE BEAST OF BOURBON FLIP
By Alex Dawson
Performed by Dawson & Laurence Mintz
w/Live Sound Effects
Jules Verne meets John Steinbeck in this whale of a tale about a small town elbow bender named William Drinker Grant, who falls, one foul night, into the water adjacent to a divey hideaway known as Lakeside Lounge. After drunkenly choosing to swim the length of the lake and spend the night on its opposing bank, he returns the next day with a story no one can believe. With surprising commitment and fortitude, Drinker Grant trades out fixations, sobering up and dedicating his life to proving that something with "the head of a horse and the body of a snake" lives in the black, tarry water behind the bar.
FACES IN THE ROCKS.
A Documentary Directed by Randy M. Salo
World War II veteran Jim Green’s lifelong visions have led him to what he believes is evidence ("high-tech" fossils and tailed cadavers) of an advanced civilization of reptilian humanoids that predate man. Fulfilling a childhood promise to publicize his grandfather's unorthodox theories, filmmaker Salo brings the case to a skeptical, and frequently enraged, scientific community that insists Green's speculations are a danger to society.FREE! Comp wine & flips (a flip is a mixed drink containing a beaten egg).
8 PM, Sat. Sept 26
PADMA VISWANATHAN
Reading/Singing
THE TOSS OF A LEMON
Journalist, playwright and short-story writer Viswanathan's absorbing first novel, based on her grandmother's life, goes deep into the world of southern India village life. A novel set in the Indian subcontinent and published in the West bears the burdens of our preconceptions. It is easy to assume that a book about a high-caste child bride who becomes a widow will fix its sights only on the girl's woes and the deep injustices of caste. But while Padma Viswanathan's first novel, The Toss of a Lemon, has at its heart a 10-year-old Brahmin girl who marries an ill-fated man, its ambitions transcend culture and country to reach for the nature of fate itself. Viswanathan prefaces The Toss of a Lemon with an epigraph from the great Indian novel Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. Viswanathan's book, like Rushdie's work, aims for epic status. But it actually achieves something that is in many ways more nuanced than the broad brushstrokes of an epic: a meditation on fate's workings in a family dominated by the quiet rule of one woman -- and the struggle of her son against the strictures of her belief. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.
Mike Edison/Banned Books (Sat. Oct 3); Like Trains & Taxis (Fri. Oct 10); The Roadside Graves (Sat. Oct 11); A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: The Play (Oct 15 - 30).
