Monday, February 28, 2011

MARCH 2011: Coming Out, Coming Home; Melendez Jazz Duo; Edwin Frank & NYRB; Welsey Stace & Jonathan Coe; Schiff, Liss, Bondhus; Mike Bruno & Mattress

8 PM, Thurs. March 3
DR. MICHAEL LASALA
Reading/Signing
COMING OUT, COMING HOME

LaSala draws on years of working with families and their gay and lesbian children to write a warm and wonderfully compassionate book. With insight and wisdom, his study examines very real and honest stories of how gay and lesbian people cope with accepting their families and how parents and siblings work to love and protect their offspring. LaSala is the director of the MSW program and associate professor at the School of Social Work at Rutgers University. He recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship during which he taught family therapy courses at Tallinn University in Estonia and investigated the impacts of stigma on Estonian lesbians and gay men. LaSala has been a keynote speaker at national and international conferences in Sweden, Estonia, and Italy. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Sat. March 5
THE JOHN MELENDEZ DUO
Live Music

Fourteen year old jazz prodigy John Melendez is a ninth-grade student from Metuchen. He has been studying piano for six years and jazz for three at the Mason Gross Extension School at Rutgers and the Rutgers Summer Jazz Institute. Currently, John holds a Young Artists Program scholarship at Rutgers. He has studied with Oscar Macchioni, Andy Michalec and Brian Axford. John's influences include Stanley Cowell, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock. John will be accompanied by his father, Rob Pallitto, on trumpet. FREE! Comp wine.

8 PM, Thurs. March 10
EDWIN FRANK
Editorial Director of NYRB Classics
Discussion/Q&A

The NYRB Classics series is designedly and determinedly exploratory and eclectic, a mix of fiction and non-fiction from different eras and times and of various sorts (literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of). The series includes new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Dante, Balzac, and Chekhov; fiction by modern and contemporary masters such as Mavis Gallant, Daphne du Maurier, Stefan Zweig, and Upamanyu Chatterjee; tales of crime and punishment by George Simenon and Kenneth Fearing; masterpieces of narrative history and literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, cookbooks; and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Last fall they published their first graphic novel, Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati, translated into English for the first time. Two of their 2010 publishing highlights are William Lindsay Gresham’s noir masterpiece, Nightmare Alley; and The Road, the first English language translation of selected writings by Vasily Grossman. Taken as a whole, NYRB Classics is a series of books of unrivaled variety and quality for discerning and adventurous readers.

8 PM, Sat. March 12
WESLEY STACE & JONATHAN COE
Reading/Signing/Live Music
CHARLES JESSOLD, CONSIDERED AS A MURDERER & THE TERRIBLE PRIVACY OF MAXWELL SIM

Rolling Stone Magazine hailed John Wesley Harding, the first opening act for Bruce Springsteen in 20 years, as "a literate and ironic neo-folkie with enough bile to win over a younger, hipper audience not attuned to folk music." CREEM said "His eloquence can be gut-wrenching," and The Los Angeles Times dubbed him "one of the great rock artists of the 90s." His best known work includes "I'm Wrong About Everything", which was featured on the High Fidelity soundtrack. Under his real name, Wesley Stace, he wrote the international best seller Misfortune and 2007's by George, a multigenerational story about a performing British family and their ventriloquist's dummy. His latest book is Charles Jessold, a twisty tale of music and murder unfolding with Nabokovian precision during Britain’s early twentieth-century folk revival. And, yes, Stace/Harding will have his guitar.

A humane satire and modern-day picaresque, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by fellow Brit Jonathan Coe is a gently comic novel about the paradoxical difficulties of making genuine attachments in a world of advanced communications technology and rampant social networking. A product of the social media boom, the eponymous Sim is, according to Coe, "the sort of person with hundreds of Facebook friends but no one to talk to when his marriage breaks up." Coe has written biographies of both Bogart and Jimmy Stewart and his novels include The Rotters' Club, Dwarves of Death and What a Carve Up! The Rotters' Club was adapted for television and broadcast on BBC Two; Dwarves of Death was filmed as Five Seconds to Spare. Jeremy Dyson, founder/creator of British cult comic quartet The League of Gentlemen, is adapting What a Carve Up! for Channel 4. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Fri. March 25
SCHIFF, LISS, BONDHUS, NOWLIN
Poetry Reading

A former McGill classmate of Leonard Cohen, Morty Schiff, now the director of creative arts at CUNY Staten Island, enjoys the illustrious distinction of having Cohen once say of his work, "If I could write a poem like that, I'd never need to write again." David Liss, the current vice president of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, (not to be confused with David Liss, the Black Panther comic book writer and the author of Whiskey Rebels), when studying in Ireland, was grandly introduced to Samuel Beckett by a friend in a pub as the "American poet, David Liss." Ryan Nowlin, who has an MA in creative writing and a new chapbook, Banquet Settings, and Charlie Bondhus, who has an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in literature and whose rumination on violence and complicity, Monsters and Victims, was shortlisted for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award, have not, to my knowledge, had any memorable interactions with famously reclusive Canadian folkies or post modern avant-garde dramatists, but they're reading, too. FREE. Comp wine.

8 PM, Thurs. March 31
MIKE BRUNO & HIS BLACK MAGIC FAMILY BAND
w/Special Guest MATTRESS
Live Music

I might have met Mike Bruno in a dream. Maybe playing a waterphone atop a black cliff as a wine dark sea crashed white against the rocks and a light-blind moth thudded percussively in the narrowing shade of a left-on bedside lamp. Recently dubbed "opium den float rock," by the New York Post, Bruno's lo-fi late night tale-weaving is influenced by children's stories, weird spiders, glittering coyote eyes, and the krakken, and his rich, wistful croon, brother to a growl, cousin to a yowl, is backed by his Black Magic Family--April Heliotis, Paris Bierk, Sean Yenchick, Paul Christian, and Sally Burtnick (Glen "Styx" Burtnick's daughter), each contributing to a wonderfully strange symphony of sounds that include tin and wood flutes, wine glasses, Tibetan medicine bowls, and the mysterious vibrations of the theramin and, yes, waterphone. W/Special guests MATTRESS. FREE. Comp wine. CDs on sale at event. Not to be missed!

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

FEB/MARCH 2011: CATFISH; BOOKCOURT; JESS ROW & EMMA STRAUB; CIVIL WAR BUDDY HOLLIES; ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN; COMING OUT; J. MELENDEZ DUO; WES STACE

The Raconteur, The Forum Theatre, and The Metuchen Cultural Arts Commission present
8 PM, Sat. Feb 12
CATFISH
W/Special Guest Director Ariel Schulman
Film Screening/Q&A

We meet New York photographer Nev Schulman, brother of director Ariel, as he unwraps a painting of one of his photos by a young Michigan girl named Abby. They become Facebook friends, which eventually leads to Nev’s online romance with Abby’s older sister, Megan. But as he comes closer to meeting Megan in person, Nev uncovers some unsettling information.…I'll respect the studio's wishes by abbreviating the plot description, suffice it to say Catfish is a mash up of Blair Witch and The Crying Game in the world of Facebook. The Social Network is about origins, but Catfish, at once narrower and more universal in implication, is about consequences. Mr. Zuckerberg may be the genius who invented Facebook and cashed in on its success, but many of the rest of us live, at least some of the time, in the world he made, and on the evidence of Catfish, it can be a pretty creepy place. FOR TRAILER CLICK HERE. TICKETS: $12. TO PURCHASE ONLINE, CLICK HERE. THE FORUM THEATRE, 314 Main Street, Metuchen, NJ. GET HOOKED!

8 PM, Tues, Feb 22
BookCourt Reading

Rac prop Alex Dawson reads with acclaimed author Alice Mattison and other Benningtonians at Brooklyn's beloved BookCourt. More info soon. FREE!

8 PM, Thurs, Feb 24
JESS ROW & EMMA STRAUB
Reading/Signing
NOBODY GETS LOTS & OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY

Jess Row is the author of NOBODY GETS LOST (forthcoming from FiveChapters Books) and the acclaimed story collection “The Train to Lo Wu” (Dial Press). Granta named Row one of the 21 best young American novelists. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize and an NEA fiction fellowship. Emma Straub's debut story collection OTHER PEOPLE WE MARRIED is forthcoming from FiveChapters Books. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published by The Paris Review Daily, Barrelhouse, The Saint Ann’s Review, Cousin Corinne’s Reminder, and many other journals. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Sat. Feb 26
SAFE TRAVELS & CIVIL WAR BUDDY HOLLIES
Live Music

Safe Travels is a Phillie based indie/folk 4 piece (viola,
mandolin, guitar, and drums). Civil War Buddy Hollies is a Central Jersey indie/pop/fun group with a rotating cast of characters, some playing saxophones, flutes,and glockenspiel. FREE! Comp wine.

2 PM, Sun. Feb 27
THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN
Staged Radio Play
W/Carlyle Owens, Laurence Mintz, & Alex Dawson
The Metuchen Library

North of the Main Central Thrust, the highest ranges of the Himalayas rise abruptly into a realm of perpetual snow and ice. It is here, on the frozen slopes of the great mountain, terrified, caught in a blizzard, that our two headstrong heroes and their loyal Sherpa, Nah Song, realize that the hulking bear-like biped they've been doggedly hunting has suddenly...become the hunter! Theatrical lighting! Costumes! Sound FX! All Raconteur Radio Productions originate at The Raconteur.

8 PM, Thurs. March 3
MICHAEL LASALA
Reading/Signing
COMING OUT, COMING HOME

LaSala draws on years of working with families and their gay and lesbian children to write a warm and wonderfully compassionate book. With insight and wisdom, his study examines very real and honest stories of how gay and lesbian people cope with accepting their families and how parents and siblings work to love and protect their offspring. A remarkable look into the human condition of gay and lesbian struggles in the twenty-first century. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Fri. March 4
THE JOHN MELENDEZ DUO
Live Music

Jazz prodigy John Melendez is a ninth-grade student from Metuchen. He has been studying piano for six years and jazz for three at the Mason Gross Extension School at Rutgers and the Rutgers Summer Jazz Institute. Currently, John holds a Young Artists Program scholarship at Rutgers. He has studied with Oscar Macchioni, Andy Michalec and Brian Axford. John's influences include Stanley Cowell, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock. John will be accompanied by his father, Rob Pallitto, on trumpet.

8 PM, Sat. March 12
WESLEY STACE & JONATHAN COE
Reading/Signing
CHARLES JESSOLD, CONSIDERED AS A MURDERER & THE TERRIBLE PRIVACY OF MAXWELL SIM

More info soon...

UPCOMING: Oscar nominated animator Bill Plympton