Event Schedule

DEC 2011/JAN 2012: Alethea Black & David Gates; Groucho Marx Radio; By the Hand of Horace; R.I.P. RAC Bash; R.I.P. RAC Bash #2; American Teacher

2011-12-27T14:22:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Thurs. Dec 29
ALETHEA BLACK & DAVID GATES
Reading/Signing
ALETHEA BLACK was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College in 1991. Her father was a mathematician, and for a long time she believed her name, the Greek word for truth, was his way of tipping his cap to the idea of absolutes. Then one day her mother overheard her and said, “No, we got your name from a TV show.”Black's debut collection of short stories, I Knew You'd Be Lovely , was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and was an Oprah.com Book of the Week. Brimming with humor, irony, and insights about the unpredictable nature of life, the unbearable beauty of fate, and the power that one moment, or one decision, can have to transform us, I Knew You'd Be Lovely delivers that rare thing—stories with both an edge and a heart.

DAVID GATES is the author of two novels, Jernigan, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Preston Falls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a collection of stories, The Wonders of the Invisible World, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A staff writer for Newsweek, his stories have appeared in Esquire, GQ, Grand Street, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology, and elsewhere. His reviews have frequently appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

Raconteur Radio Presents
8:00 PM, Fri. Jan 6; 7:30 & 9:00 PM, Sat. Jan 7
FLYWHEEL, SHYSTER, & FLYWHEEL: A Staged Radio Play
Featuring acclaimed Groucho impersonator Ron MacCloskey (in full costume & makeup) and Welcome Back Kotter's Bobby Hegyes (Epstein) as Chico Marx!
Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel was the Marx Brothers radio debut. It first aired in 1932 and was written by the same writers who wrote some of their funniest film bits. Our production features short comedic skits broken up by several period songs sung live, including the notorious Groucho hit, "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady." Also with Michael Jarmus and Francesca Tedeschi. $10 (payable at the door). Theatrical lighting! Costumes! Sound effects! Raconteur Radio productions are staged performances of famous radio plays for live audiences. To find out how you can book Raconteur Radio at your library, school, or cultural venue, click HERE.

8 PM, Fri. Jan 13
BY THE HAND OF HORACE
Reading/Live Music/Mixed Media
A lonely ten year old boy confronts a violent grandfather as the extravagant hand shadows he casts onto the bare, blonde planks of his bedroom wall come to grotesque and explosive life. W/a live soundtrack by folk guitarist Bruce Donnola and a slide show of haunting b/w woodcut illustrations by artist Janice Fried.

8 PM, Sat. Jan 14
R.I.P. RAC BASH
Featuring The Roadside Graves, Francesca Tedeschi, and Lev Grossman
Join us in remembering, celebrating, and memorializing our almost bygone bookstore as Raconteur house band The Roadside Graves sings alt country folk songs from their Hinton inspired new album (think The Outsiders by way of the Bad Seeds); international fashion model Francesca Tedeschi strums and hums gorgeous originals (think Carla Bruni) and sings heart wrenching covers of Leonard Cohen; and Time Magazine senior writer, Lev Grossman, author of the New York Time bestseller The Magicians (think Harry Potter for adults), reads from its acclaimed sequel, The Magician King (recently featured on The Simpsons).

8 PM, Sat. Jan 21
R.I.P. RAC BASH #2
Featuring Shayfer James, Honor Amongst Thieves, FenFell, and Laurence Mintz
Join us again in remembering, celebrating, and memorializing our almost bygone bookstore as Shay Jay tickles his tusks while logging saws sing; the H.A.T. sideshow eats fire, swallows swords, and escapes from a glass box filled with water; FenFell conducts its junkyard orchestra, and my man Mintz exhibits fifteen factory scapes, a dozen rail yards, and ten nekkid ladies, all done in the deep shadowy shades of Mr. Eddie Hopper.

AND FINALLY:

The Raconteur, The Forum Theatre, and The Metuchen Arts Council Presents
8 PM, January 28
AMERICAN TEACHER
W/Special Guest: OSCAR WINNER VANESSA ROTH
$15; The Forum Theatre, 314 Main Street, Metuchen, NJ
Oscar winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth screens and discusses her powerful new documentary, American Teacher, a heartbreaking study of what it's like to teach in America today. Co-produced by Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari and narrated by Matt Damon, American Teacher is, according to the Washington Post, "a film about education that gets it exactly right," raising what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls, "important questions about American teachers," and sparking "a much needed conversation."

"Every policymaker should be required to see the new film American Teacher. Powerful, compelling!" Washington Post; "As we watch the individuals in American Teacher struggle with the burdens the system places on them, it's hard not to feel like crying, both for them specifically and for our national culture." Los Angeles Times; "This heartbreaking and essential look into the lives of those who put so much into educating other people's children ought to be seen by anyone concerned about the fate of the public school system, and the nation as a whole." New York Daily News; "Terrific, uplifting and heartbreaking study of what it’s like to teach in America today should inspire intense admiration and even more intense anger over what is revealed." Film Journal; "Sobering, Powerful!" The Village Voice. Click HERE for trailer.

DEC 2011: A Christmas Carol Radio Play; Busy Monsters; Clay Chapman; John Sayles; Brian Ralph; David Gates/Alethea Black; Who is Krampus? X-Mas Bash

2011-11-23T10:32:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Fri. & Sat.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL: A Staged Radio Play
Featuring Caryle Owens, Mike Jarmus, Laurence Mintz, Gwen Owens, and Alex Dawson
Adapted from the classic Charles Dickens' novella, the story tells of a misanthropic pinchpenny named Ebenezer Scrooge and his ideological, ethical, and emotional transformation after the supernatural visits of Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. To this day, A Christmas Carol remains extraordinarily popular. It has never been out of print and has been adapted to film, opera, and radio (natch). Reservations required! $10 (suggested donation). Sound Effects! Costumes! Theatrical Lighting!

8 PM, Sat. Dec 10
WILLIAM GIRALDI
Reading/Signing
BUSY MONSTERS
Memoirist of mediocre fame, Charles Homar has a problem: his bride-to-be, Gillian Lee, has nixed their nuptials and fled to the high seas in search of a legendary giant squid, unleashing an unholy heart wreck upon him. In a hell-bent effort to prove his mettle as an American male and win back Gillian's affections, Charlie crisscrosses the nation seeking counsel, confronting creatures both mythic and real—Bigfoot, space aliens, bodybuilders. Echoing a narrative tradition that includes Don Quixote and Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Giraldi's debut novel is a love story of linguistic bravado that explores American excess, the diaphanous line between fiction and fact, and what desperate men and women will do to one another. William Giraldi's work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, and Poets & Writers. A senior editor at AGNI, he teaches in the Writing Program at Boston University. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

6 PM, Sun. Dec 11
CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN & ALEX DAWSON
Reading/Signing
Now, as we approach the final curtain, I thought it fitting to invite back our very first guest, my good friend, the mesmerizing performer/playwright/author Clay Mcleod Chapman, who's been called "hauntingly poetic" by Time Out New York, compared to Lovecraft and Faulkner by the Times and the Voice respectively, and described as a "demon angel on a skateboard" by acclaimed author Tom Robbins.. Plus: I'll be reading a cheery, holiday piece about a pie-eyed deer hunter who, the day before Christmas, inadvertently kills what he thinks is a unicorn. Not to be missed, folks! FREE! Books on sale at the event. Complimentary wine & Jack Daniel minis.

The Raconteur, The Forum Theatre, and The Metuchen Arts Council Present
8 PM, Sat. December 17
AMIGO
W/Writer/Director/Producer JOHN SAYLES
Screening/Reading/On Stage Discussion/Audience Q&A
Oscar nominee, MacCarthur fellow, and the indisputable "Godfather of Independent Cinema," John Sayles, screens and discusses his 17th feature film, the acclaimed, historic war drama, Amigo, starring Chris Cooper and the legendary Filipino actor Joel Torre, and reads from his new novel, A Moment in the Sun, a spectacular work of fiction compared to both Doctorow and Deadwood.

$15 TIX NOW ON SALE! Click HERE to buy yours before it sells out!

PLUS: A special pre-event reception with John Sayles at The Raconteur from 6 - 7 PM. $10 (pay at the door). Have a complimentary cup (or two) of wine and some face time with the man himself!

Before Kevin Smith maxed out his credit cards, before there was an IFC or a Sundance film festival, and long before "independent film" became a marketing niche, there was John Sayles, making it happen with a combination of talent, shrewdness, and determination. An acclaimed novelist before he ever touched a camera, Sayles burst onto the film scene in 1980, when he wrote and directed the much praised social comedy, Return of the Secaucus 7. Three years later, Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship, using the money to partially fund his second film, The Brother from Another Planet, a fantasy flick about a black, three-toed slave who arrives from outer space and finds himself at home among the people of Harlem. Since then, Sayles has directed 17 features (Lone Star, Passion Fish, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Matewan), funding most of his award winning, oft Oscar nominated productions by penning low budget shockers like Piranha, Alligator, and The Howling. Recently compared to a "left leaning, baby boom John Ford" by the New York Times, John Sayles produces populous pageants, spinning fables of the American character out of the threads of myth, memory and ideology.

Click HERE for the New York Times review. $15.00 NOTE: At The Forum Theatre (314 Main Street) NOT The Raconteur.

7:30 PM, Weds. Dec 21
BRIAN RALPH & JOSH BAYER
Discussing & Signing
DAYBREAK: A GRAPHIC NOVEL & RAW POWER
Ralph's stunning debut was the wordless graphic novel Cave-In, created while he was one of the founding members of the influential Fort Thunder art collective. Drawing inspiration from zombies, horror movies, television, and first-person shooter video games, his brand new graphic novel, Daybreak departs from zombie genre in both content and format, achieving a living-dead masterwork of literary proportions."Brian Ralph's adventure stories combine the hand-crafted charm of indie comics with the well-thought-out thrills of good pulp." -The Onion, The A.V. Club

Josh Bayer (Raw Power) was listed among 100 outstanding cartoonists by The Best American Comics Anthology for 2007, 2008, and 2009. His graffiti-influenced drawings were featured in the 2006-2007 HBO series ROME and MTV videos for David Bowie, Metallica and Good Charlotte among many others.

8 PM, Fri. Dec 23
WHO IS KRAMPUS? X-MAS BASH!!
The Raconteur's Seventh Annual (and FINAL) Christmas Party!
As an alternative to your basic run-of-the-mill mall Santa (and what is The Rac if not an alternative to everything mall), The Raconteur bring you a holiday hybrid of St. Nicholas and the mythical Alpine figure known as Krampus, played by Michael Jarmus and designed by Tom Savini protege Dan Diana, who did the incredible makeup for our recent Haunted Bookshop and the Raconteur stage production, Nosferatu. According to legend, the ram-horned Krampus accompanies St. Nicholas during the Christmas season. Traditionally young men dress up as Krampus in Austria and southern Bavaria during the first two weeks of December, roaming the streets with chains and bells. $10, includes a supremely weird reading and performance by Krampus, a picture of YOU with Krampus, and a groaning board laden with homemade treats and three different kinds of punch (with and without alcohol). PLUS: from 6 - 8 there will be a special photo session with Krampus for just $5 a pop. Forget the mall this year, put your kid on different knee! All ages!!

8 PM, Thurs. Dec 29
DAVID GATES & ALETHEA BLACK
Reading/Signing
PRESTON FALLS & I KNEW YOU'D BE LOVELY
More info soon...

NOV/DEC 2011: Gertrude Stein; John Evison; Taylor Mali; Marty Jessen; By the Hand of Horace; John Sayles; Krampus

2011-11-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

8:00 PM, Fri; 7:30 & 9:00 PM Sat; Nov 11 & 12
GERTRUDE STEIN GERTRUDE STEIN
A Staged Radio Drama
Featuring Jane Hardy
The Raconteur cordially invites you to spend an evening with Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Isadora Duncan, Henri Matisse, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Salvador Dali at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Hosted by Gertrude Stein. A work of theatrical magic that captures the essence of an extraordinary woman, "Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein" is an imaginary monologue set on the eve of Stein's eviction from her famed Paris studio.

In the wake of Woody Allen's marvelously romantic Midnight in Paris and Kathy Bates' spot on depiction of Stein, Jane Hardy returns with her one woman portrayal of the dynamic matriarch and the (lost) generation of writers and artists she mentored. Raconteur patrons may remember Hardy from her riveting performance as a panicky invalid in the staged radio play "Sorry, Wrong Number," or the sadistically scientific Dr. Brodsky in the Raconteur/MCC stage production of "A Clockwork Orange." (Not for nothing, but those who have seen both Steins, Hardy and Bates, have preferred Hardy.) To reserve a seat for a particular performance, e-mail us your name, the number in your party, and the evening/time you wish to attend. Sound Effects! Theatrical Lighting! Reservations required! $10 (suggested donation)

6 PM, Sun. Nov 13
TEEN MIC Hosted/Curated by JOHN MELENDEZ
w/Special Guest JONATHAN EVISON
An ongoing series of teen mics hosted by an outstanding high school student who selects four participants and a favorite author who headlines via SKYPE. This time the host and coordinator is John Melendez, jazz prodigy, rapacious reader, noir writer, and MHS book critic. He's picked Jonathan Evison, who will beam in from Seattle, Washington. Evison's work, often distinguished by its emotional resonance and offbeat humor, has been compared to a variety of authors, most notably J.D. Salinger, Charles Dickens, and John Irving. His debut novel, All About Lulu won critical acclaim, including the Washington State Book Award, and landed on many year-end “Best of” lists. Editor Chuck Adams (Water for Elephants, A Reliable Wife, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England) has called his second novel, the electrifying epic West of Here, the best novel he's worked on in over four decades of publishing. In his teens, Evison was the founding member and frontman of the Seattle punk band March of Crimes, which included future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.

8 PM, Fri. Nov 18
TAYLOR MALI & MARIE-ELIZABETH MALI
Reading/Performance
Taylor Mali is the author of The Last Time as We Are (Write Bloody, 2009) and What Learning Leaves (Hanover, 2002) and has published five CDs and one DVD. He is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement and he travels the world teaching creative writing and performance skills. Marie-Elizabeth Mali is the author of Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) and co-editor with Annie Finch of the forthcoming anthology, Villanelles (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2012). She serves as co-curator for "louderARTS: the Reading Series" in New York City. Together they curate the "Page Meets Stage" reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club. They divide their time between NY and Western MA, and spend their days writing poetry, organizing slams, and taking care of their cats.

2 PM, Sun. Nov 20
MARTY JESSEN
Discussion/Signing
More soon...

8 PM, Sat. Nov 26
BY THE HAND OF HORACE
By Alex Dawson
Reading/Mixed Media
A lonely ten year old boy confronts a violent grandfather/retired logjack, and the extravagant hand shadows he casts onto the bare, blonde planks of his bedroom wall come to grotesque and explosive life. W/sound effects! And a slide show of haunting b/w illustrations by artist Janice Fried.

The Raconteur & The Forum Present
8 PM, Sat. December 17
AMIGO
W/Writer/Director/Producer JOHN SAYLES
Screening/Reading/On Stage Discussion/Audience Q&A
Oscar nominee, MacCarthur fellow, and the indisputable "Godfather of Independent Cinema," John Sayles, screens and discusses his 17th feature film, the acclaimed, historic war drama, Amigo, starring Chris Cooper and the legendary Filipino actor Joel Torre, and reads from his new novel, A Moment in the Sun, a spectacular work of fiction compared to both Doctorow and Deadwood.

Before Kevin Smith maxed out his credit cards, before there was an IFC or a Sundance film festival, and long before "independent film" became a marketing niche, there was John Sayles, making it happen with a combination of talent, shrewdness, and determination. An acclaimed novelist before he ever touched a camera, Sayles burst onto the film scene in 1980, when he wrote and directed the much praised social comedy, Return of the Secaucus 7. Three years later, Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship, using the money to partially fund his second film, The Brother from Another Planet, a fantasy flick about a black, three-toed slave who arrives from outer space and finds himself at home among the people of Harlem. Since then, Sayles has directed 17 features (Lone Star, Passion Fish, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Matewan), funding most of his award winning, oft Oscar nominated productions by penning low budget shockers like Piranha, Alligator, and The Howling. Recently compared to a "left leaning, baby boom John Ford" by the New York Times, John Sayles produces populous pageants, spinning fables of the American character out of the threads of myth, memory and ideology.

Click HERE for the New York Times review. $15.00 NOTE: At The Forum Theatre (314 Main Street) NOT The Raconteur.

AND JUST WHO IS KRAMPUS? FIND OUT!

OCT 2011: Green Drinks; Tom Davis; War of the Worlds; Hope for agoldensummer; Dirty, Dirty; Stake Land; Halloween; The Haunted Bookshop

2011-10-03T11:40:00.001-07:00

7:00 - 9:00 PM, Tues. Oct 4
GREEN DRINKS
It all started in 1989 at a pub called the Slug and Lettuce in Northern London when a handful of eco-conscious mates pulled some tables together and drank some beer. The concept evolved into Green Drinks and now it's global. Each city has an organizer who arranges meetings in bars and restaurants (providing the greenest beer possible, and by green we mean enviro-minded, not colored; in our case, Climax, locally brewed in Roselle Park). Green Drinks meets in fifty countries from Argentina to Zambia. And now, METUCHEN! Come have a beer and get green. FREE!

8 PM, Sat. Oct 8
TOM DAVIS
Reading/Signing
A LEGACY OF MADNESS
The story of a loving family coming to grips with its own fragility, A Legacy of Madness relays Tom Davis' journey to uncover, and ultimately understand, the history of mental illness that led generations of his suburban American family to their demise. "By sharing the story of his family history and his own personal journey, Tom Davis provides hope and inspiration to others." Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. FREE. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Fri. Oct 14
Live Music
More info soon. FREE.

Raconteur Radio Presents
7:30 & 9 Sat. Oct 15
7 PM, Sun. Oct 16
WAR OF THE WORLDS: A Staged Radio Play
Featuring Carlyle Owens, Michael Jarmus, Gwen Owens, Laurence Mintz, and Alex Dawson
RESERVATIONS REQUIRED!
War of the Worlds was first performed October 30, 1938 as the Halloween episode of "Mercury Theatre On Air." Narrated by Orson Welles, the episode, set in Grover Mills, NJ, is a loose adaptation of the H. G. Wells' novel, and begins as a dance band broadcast intermittently interrupted by news flashes about strange explosions on Mars and the landing of a cylindrical spacecraft on Earth. Incineration ensues. The simulated "news bulletins" of the original broadcast suggested to many contemporaneous listeners that an actual alien invasion was currently in progress and, as a result, there were instances of panicked evacuation throughout the US. Especially in New Jersey! 35 min. Theatrical Lighting! Sound Effects! Martian Props! This is our version of a "rent party" and, accordingly, there's a suggested donation of $10. That said, if you happened to be broke as a joke and still want to see it, you won't be turned away (as long as seats are available).

8 PM, Tues. Oct 18
HOPE FOR AGOLDENSUMMER & Special Guests
Live Music
TimeOut NY describes them as "part junkyard orchestra, part campfire song circle," and the Washington Post calls them “Haunting folksters.” Hope fronts, the sisters Campbell, hail from Georgia and write songs that play out like Flannery O’Connor stories sound tracked with singing saws, penny whistles, and cookie tin banjos. Barren yet evocative, ethereal and eloquent, this is strange, soulful, and deeply affecting stuff. Think a rural Cocorosie, an ornate Cat Power, or a female Arcade Fire. They've played in Peru, scored a Nick Nolte film, and toured with Man or Astroman. With special guests: fellow folkies Anthony Walker and Ryan Bing (of Glad Hearts). FREE! CDs on sale at event.

8 PM, Sat. Oct 22
MIKE EDISON
Reading/Signing
Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, An American Tale of Sex and Wonder
A wild and uncompromising history of four infamous magazines and the outlaws behind them, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! is the first book to rip the sheet off of the sleazy myth-making machine of Hugh Hefner and Playboy, and reveal the doomed history of Hefner’s arch rival, Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, whose messiah complex and heedless spending (a legendary film flop paid for with bags of cash, a porn magazine for women, and a pie-in-the sky scheme for a portable nuclear reactor) fueled the greatest riches to rags story ever told. Along the way we meet many unexpected heroes—John Lennon, Lenny Bruce, Helen Gurley Brown, and the staff of Mad Magazine—and villains—from Richard Nixon and the Moral Majority to Hugh Hefner himself, whose legacy, we learn, is built on a self-perpetuated lie. "Mike Edison can go toe to toe with some of the best writers of the (old) New Journalism. This is foul-mouthed popular history at its most entertaining. Plenty smart, too—and also, strange to say, poignant and loving."—Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. FREE. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Tues. Oct 25
STAKE LAND
W/Director/Writer Jim Mickle & Star/Writer Nick Damici
Screening/Discussion/Q&A
Compared to both Joss Whedon and Terrence Malick by The Village Voice, and cheered by NPR, The New Yorker, and Salon.com, Director/Writer Jim Mickle (and Star/Co-writer Nick Damici) screen and discuss their New York Times Critic's Pick, Stake Land, a smart, pitch perfect horror thriller set in a post-apocalyptic world somewhere between Romero and The Road. Half grind house, half art house, Stake Land is part of a new school of socially conscious horror, what The Voice calls "brains before blood," but rest assured its plenty gruesome, and with its dive bars and muscle cars, biker boots and buck knives, it all sort of plays out like a particularly acute Lynyrd Skynyrd song hopped up on supernatural steroids. Plus a special on stage conversation between Mickle, Damici, and Fangoria scribe/Fear Mongers host Clay Mcleod Chapman. $15. Presented in conjunction with Crystal Plumage Films and The Forum Theatre. NOTE: At The Forum NOT The Raconteur. Click for The New York Times review. Click for the trailer.

11:30 PM, Fri. Oct 28
HALLOWEEN
Hosted by New York Times film critic JASON ZINOMAN
Screening/Discussion/Q&A/Signing
Called "the most successful independent motion picture of all time," Halloween is also one of most frightening films ever made. New York Times critic Jason Zinoman, author of Shock Value, an account of the gifted and eccentric directors who gave us the golden age of modern horror, will helm a discussion of the film. Copies of his book will be on sale at the event. Click to read the New York Times review of Shock Value. Presented in conjunction with Crystal Plumage Films. NOTE: At The Forum (not the Raconteur). $10. Special reception before the film (10 - 11) at The Raconteur (all you can eat candy and a complimentary can of beer).

7 – 11:30 PM, Sat & Sun. Oct 29 & 30
THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP
After a two year hiatus, the Raconteur's popular Haunted Bookshop returns. The only "haunted attraction" of its kind in the world! This year features characters from Moby Dick, Titus Adronicus, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Woman in White, Dante’s Inferno, Metamorphosis, Don’t Look Now, Frankenstein, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. With make-up, prosthetics, and props designed by Tom Savini protege Dan Diana and soundscape by Bruce Donnola(who respectively did the makeup and music for The Raconteur's acclaimed production of Nosferatu). What goes on after a bookstore closes for the night? See Gregor Samsa turn into a clacking, black bug, see Captain Ahab, harpoon hoisted high, mad with the hunt, see the pulpy, tentacled snout and beating, bat wings of Lovecraft's most horrifying creation, feel the long gnarled fingers and barked bones of Dante's tree suicides, scrabbling your ankles as they struggle to climb up and out of the Seventh Circle, watch Dr. Jekyll's hideous transformation as The Dust Witch cackles in her balloon and a bound behemoth is jolted to lightning induced life! Plus a consumptive Annabelle Lee, a carriage crushed Woman in White, and is it an Italian dwarf killer or the return of a drowned daughter? Find out all this and more, for only$5. Guaranteed to scare you "lit-less!"

SEPT 2011: Green Drinks; ComeDina; Third Man Radio Play; Jeremy Benson; Accoustic Night; Bill Plympton @ The State; Banned Books in NYC; Raconteur 54

2011-09-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

7:00 - 9:00 PM, Tues. Sept 6
GREEN DRINKS
It all started in 1989 at a pub called the Slug and Lettuce in Northern London when a handful of eco-conscious mates pulled some tables together and drank some beer. The concept evolved into Green Drinks and now it's global. Each city has an organizer who arranges meetings in bars and restaurants (providing the greenest beer possible, and by green we mean enviro-minded, not colored; in our case, Climax, locally brewed in Roselle Park). Green Drinks meets in fifty countries from Argentina to Zambia. And now, METUCHEN! Come have a beer and get green. FREE!

7:30 PM, Thurs. Sept 8
THE COMEDINA SHOW! W/Special Guest Andy Pitz
The Rac's monthly stand up comedy show hosted by Rac volunteer Dina Hashem.Get it? ComeDINA? A roster of local jokesters (Gordon Baker-Bone, Max Lorenzi, Justin Flanagan) headlined by Andy Pitz. Pitz has performed on Late Night with Letterman and The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson and is a reg at Comic Strip Live, Stand Up NY, and the Gotham Comedy Club. Only $5!

8:00 PM, Thurs./Fri. Sept 15 & 16
THE 3RD MAN
A Staged Radio Play
Theatrical Lighting! Sound Effects!
Featuring Carlyle Owens, Laurence Mintz, Michael Jarmus, Alex Dawson, and introducing the new excitement of international fashion model Francesa Teschina as Anna Schmidt.

For those of you who couldn't afford the 75.00 prix fixe dinner (delicious, but steep) that accompanied our last presentation of The 3rd Man, good news! We're doing it again for the much more affordable price of a $10 suggested donation. And while we won't be doling out glasses of Austrian Gruner Veltliner, you can expect the usual comp cup of wine.

The atmospheric rubble and melancholy damp of war-smashed Europe is powerfully evoked in this thrilling radio play, based on Sir Carol Reed's 1949 film. Holly Martins is a "scribbler" of hack Westerns who arrives in postwar Vienna to land a job and join his old pal Harry Lime. Instead he finds himself drawn into a murder mystery and a network of deadly black-market racketeers.

This is our version of a "rent party" and, accordingly, there's a suggested donation of $10. That said, if you happened to be broke as a joke and still want to see it, you won't be turned away (as long as seats are available).

8:00 PM, Sat. Sept 17
JEREMY BENSON
Live Music
From his doleful dirges to his sweet, romantic blues, singer/songwriter Jeremy Benson serves up torchers, scorchers and languid back porchers bursting with woodland wisdom and street corner philosophy. In addition to being a solo performer, Benson is a member of the Jersey based Roadside Graves and the former front man for The Home Alaskan, The Takers, and DarkSongs. FREE!

7:00 - 9:00 PM, Thurs. Sept 22
ACOUSTIC NIGHT w/Sharon Goldman
Live Music
A monthly series spotlighting singer-songwriters, hosted by Metuchen-based singer-songwriter Sharon Goldman. This month, she invites NYC's Honor Finnegan and Paul Sachs to join her round-robin style, with each artist sharing original songs and discussing his/her approach to songwriting. Two sets with a short intermission. FREE!

The Raconteur & The State Theatre Present
8:00 PM, Tues. Sept 27
IDIOTS & ANGELS
W/Special Guest: Director BILL PLYMPTON
Screening/On Stage Conversation/Signing
Described by The New York Times as "ceaselessly imaginative, relentless and brilliant," and hailed simply as "God" by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, two time Academy Award–nominee Bill Plympton screens and answers questions about his latest feature film, Idiots and Angels, and reads and signs his new autobiography, Independently Animated. Plus a special onstage conversation hosted by cartoonist & Plympton fan Patrick McDonnell, the creator of MUTTS.“If The Nightmare Before Christmas, Barfly, and Wings of Desire had a menage-a-trois, their surrealist progeny would be this extraordinary film." - Interview Magazine. For more info, click HERE.

7 PM, Weds. Sept 28
MIKE EDISON'S FOURTH ANNUAL BANNED BOOK PARTY!!! FREE SPEECH, FREE SHOW!!!
Reading/Live Music
Housing Works Bookstore, NYC (Soho)
Former High Times editor and author of Dirty, Dirty, Mike Edison, hosts his Fourth Annual Banned Book Party celebrating the American Library Association's "Banned Book Week" and illuminating America's sordid past of banning and challenging great books. Guests this year include Soft Skull's Richard Nash, The Onion's Todd Hanson, memoirist Rachel Shukert, Alex Dawson of The Raconteur, and Melissa Petro, the elementary school art teacher who admitted in a Huffington Post article to having worked as a prostitute, all reading from their favorite banned books. With a live soundtrack provided by the INTERSTELLAR RENDEVOUS ALL-STAR BAND. All this plus another round of the legendary "Name That Banned Book" contest - come on down for some state-sponsored fear and fabulous prizes! After Party at Nolita's Botanica Bar. FREE!

8 PM, Sat. Oct 1
RACONTEUR 54
Our monthly DJ dance party. This month's theme: The Eighties. Outdoors. With DJ Circuit Bored and a montage screening of John Hughes classics. In conjunction with People Under the Stereo and Suite Beverly.

ON DECK: FEAR MONGERS @ THE STATE; "War of the Worlds" Radio Play; Outdoor Screening "The Cabinet of Caligari"; And THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP is back!

AUG 2011: Ted Alexandro; Geek Wisdom; Outdoor Film; Stairwell Art; The Third Man; War of the Worlds; Raiders: The Adaptation

2011-08-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Tues. Aug 2
TED ALEXANDRO
Stand Up Comedy
Alexandro has performed on David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, The View, and two half-hour specials on Comedy Central. He has also appeared on the television shows Oz, Dr. Katz and Louie, and has performed internationally in countries including Egypt, Kuwait, South Korea, England, Holland, and Israel. With: Gordon Baker-Bone, Matt Jenkins, Jimmie Allinder, Justin Flanagan, Max Lorenzi, Adam Mamawala, and event host, Dina Hashem. Don't like laughter? We've got used books and records! Dead inside? We've got free wine! Wow! There's something for everyone! FREE!

8 PM, Fri. Aug 5
Stephen Segal (NOT the martial artist/deputy sheriff)
Reading/Signing
GEEK WISDOM: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture
Computer nerds are our titans of industry; comic-book superheroes are our Hollywood idols; the Internet is our night on the town. Clearly, geeks know something about life in the 21st century that other folks don’t—something we all can learn from. Geek Wisdom takes as gospel some 200 of the most powerful and oft-cited quotes from movies, television, literature, games, science, the Internet, and more. Now these beloved pearls of modern-day culture have been painstakingly interpreted by a diverse team of hardcore nerds with their imaginations turned up to 11. Yes, this collection of mini-essays is by, for, and about geeks—but it’s just so surprisingly profound, the rest of us would have to be dorks not to read it. Stephen H. Segal is the Hugo Award winning senior contributing editor to Weird Tales, the world’s oldest fantasy/sci-fi/horror magazine (Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft were regular contributors), and an editor at Quirk Books. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

8:30 PM, Sat. Aug 6
METROPOLIS
W/Live Mixed DJ Soundtrack by CIRCUIT BORED
Outdoor Screening/Live Music
Our terrace screening of Fantastic Planet was such a success we decide to continue our outdoor programming with Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Metropolis belongs to legend as much as to cinema. It's a milestone of sci-fi and German expressionism. In the stratified society of the future, the son of a capitalist discovers the atrocious conditions of the factory slaves, falling in love with the charismatic Maria in the bargain, who preaches nonviolence to the workers. But even the benevolent leadership of Maria is a challenge to the privileged class, so they have the mad-scientist Rotwang concoct a robot double to take her place and incite the workers to riot. The story is melodrama, but it's the powerful imagery that is so memorable, with one of the most arresting images being legions of cowed workers filing listlessly into the great maw of the all-consuming machine-god Moloch. Again, the titled silent film will be screened outdoors on the back terrace of The Raconteur and will be accompanied by a live-mixed soundtrack courtesy of Circuit Bored, a DJ known for his minimal sci-fi inspired electronica. Folding chairs are available, but if you prefer something more comfortable (e.g. lawn lounger), bring it with you. Refreshments. FREE!

8 PM, Fri. Aug 12
STAIRWELL ART
Art Exhibition/Live Music
As many of you know, one of our shop volunteers, Ben Luckman, recently opened a record store, People Under the Stereo, in our basement. The stairwell down is a cavernous shaft with walls that run 15'x20', so, in keeping with our cultural utilization of nontraditional spaces (e.g. People Under the Stereo), we've decided to turn it into an art gallery. Grand opening this Fri! Featuring the work of Jason Stewart. Plus a range of special musical guests. FREE!

4 PM, Sun. Aug 14

BLAME
A Staged Reading of a New Screenplay by
QUINN SHEPHARD
Featuring Quinn Shephard, Lily Houghton, Jonathan Wierzbicki, Sherilyn Alyssa Morse, Natasha Thaler, Nicolette Pizzigoni, Laurie Shephard, Daniel Paul, Shelby Day, and Carlyle Owen

Set in an age of technology and disconnect, BLAME brings us into the lives of five teenage girls whose paths become tangled when envy and suspicion spiral out of control. After word gets out that one of the school's students may or may not be involved in a scandalous affair with her teacher, the line between truth and accusation blurs as the craze for information sweeps the school into a whirlwind of digital hysteria. Quinn Shephard is a 16-year-old film actress whose credits include Unaccompanied Minors (w/Lewis Black & Wilmer Valderamma), Harrison's Flowers (w/Andie McDowwell & David Straithairn)', From Other Worlds, and Assassination of a High School President (w/Bruce Willis & Mischa Barton). As a student filmmaker, her work has been showcased in multiple festivals, including the Garden State Film Festival. This is her first feature-length screenplay. FREE!

Raconteur Radio & Stage Left Present
6:30 PM, Thurs. Aug 18
THE THIRD MAN
Staged Radio Play/Themed Dinner
Featuring Carlyle Owens, Laurence Mintz, Michael Jarmus, Jackie Nuzzo, and Alex Dawson
The atmospheric rubble and melancholy damp of war-smashed Vienna is powerfully evoked in this thrilling radio play, based on Sir Carol Reed's 1949 film starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. Holly Martins is a "scribbler" of hack Westerns who arrives in postwar Vienna to land a job and join his old pal Harry Lime. Instead he finds himself drawn into a murder mystery and a network of deadly black-market racketeers. The story blurs the lines between what's comic and what's corrupt, melding melodrama and smirking frivolity with razor-blade noir tones and grave ruminations on the seductive nature of money and evil. Theatrical Lighting! Sound FX! Meet at the Stage Left bar at 6:30 PM to drink Austrian Gruner Veltliner before repairing to one of their private oak-paneled salons for the performance. Afterward dine on a luxurious dinner with choices appropriate to the time and setting. For more info/reservations, CLICK HERE.

Raconteur Radio & The Metuchen Public Library Present
7:30 PM, Aug 24
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
Staged Radio Play
Featuring Michael Jarmus, Laurence Mintz, Carlyle Owens, and Alex Dawson
The War of the Worlds was first performed October 30, 1938 as the Halloween episode of "Mercury Theatre On Air." Directed and narrated by Orson Welles, the episode, set in Grovers Mills, NJ, is a loose adaptation of the H. G. Wells' novel, and begins as a dance band broadcast intermittently interrupted by news flashes about strange explosions on Mars. A cylindrical meteorite lands in a field. A crowd gathers at the site. The meteorite unscrews, revealing itself as a spacecraft, and onlookers catch a glimpse of a tentacled, pulsating creature, its arms throbbing, but immobile, which then springs to life and incinerates the crowd. The simulated "news bulletins" suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. As a result, there were instances of panic throughout the US, especially in New York and New Jersey. There has been continued speculation that the panic generated by the broadcast inspired government officials to forever cover up subsequent unidentified flying object evidence. THEATRICAL LIGHTING! SOUND FX! FREE! NOTE: This at the Metuchen Library NOT The Raconteur.

The Raconteur & The State Theatre Present
8 PM, Fri. Aug 26
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: THE ADAPTATION
W/Special Guests: Director Eric Zala & Actor Chris Strompolos
Film Screening/Onstage Conversation/Q&A
It's the 30 year anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the summer of Super 8, which means it's the perfect time to see the homemade cult sensation Spielberg himself calls "hugely imaginative!" After seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, three 12 year old friends, Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb, began filming their own shot-by-shot adaptation in the backyards of their Mississippi homes. Vigilant, resourceful, and a little bit insane, these Mississippi tweens gained access to sacks of gunpowder, gallons of gasoline, a retired WWII battleship and a functioning Navy submarine. They broke bones, got grounded, burned down a garage, and got grounded again. Eric had to be hospitalized twice, once for having his hair set aflame, and once because shards of plaster from an exploding head "effect" had to be surgically removed from his scalp. Seven years later their film was in the can. Click HERE to read the Vanity Fair article on the boys' amazing movie-making adventure. THE ONLY WAY TO SEE THIS FILM IS TO CATCH ONE OF THE RARE INTERNATIONAL SCREENINGS HOSTED BY THE FILMMAKERS THEMSELVES. This August, Eric and Chris are flying into New Brunswick to screen and discuss their now legendary remake at the State Theatre! MORE INFO/BUY TIX!

ON DECK: Outdoor video game tournament w/DJ Circuit Bored; staged reading of Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein; two time Oscar nominated animator Bill Plympton screening/discussing Idiots and Angels at the State Theatre, 8 PM, Tues. Sept 26.

JULY/AUG 11: Write Your Own Adventure!; Fantastic Planet; Black Angel Revue; Outdoor Vid Games;Backpockets; Kosha Dillz; Ted Alexandro; Geek Wisdom

2011-07-11T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Raconteur & The Metuchen Public Library Present
7 – 8:30, July 14, 20, 27
WRITE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE!
Writing Workshop(Ages 10 and up)
Taking inspiration from both modern and classic YA books and from the lives of the men and women who wrote them, Raconteur proprietor/award winning author Alex Dawson (The Rapscallion Club) provides suggestions that will spark the imaginations of both children and teens, prompting them to pen their own rollicking yarns. Find out how Robert Louis Stevenson found inspiration for Treasure Island in his bowl of porridge, or how J. R. R. Tolkien's amazing fantasy world began with a childhood game of making up words, or how Dawson himself got the idea for his high spirited swashbuckler while visiting his archeologist brother at The South American Explorer's Club in Peru. Whether you have an idea you'd like to draft, have a draft you'd like to revise, or think, as many wrongly do, that your life is too ordinary and you have nothing exciting to say, this workshop is for you. Unfortunately, the workshop is fully booked, but if you'd like to be put on the waiting list or if you're interested in future workshops, contact raconteurbooks@gmail.com.

8 PM, Thurs. July 14
NEON TROTSKY
W/Special Guest Vincent Saulys
Live Music
More soon…

9 pm, Fri, July 15
FANTASTIC PLANET
W/Live DJ Soundtrack by CIRCUIT BORED
Outdoor Film Screening/Live Music
René Laloux's mesmerizing psychedelic sci-fi animated feature, Fantastic Planet, won the Special Jury Prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and is a landmark of European animation. Based on Stefan Wul's novel Oms en Série (Oms by the Dozen), Laloux's breathtaking vision was released in France as La Planète Sauvage, and immediately drew comparisons to Gulliver's Travels and Planet of the Apes. Today, the film can be seen to prefigure much of the work of Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) due to its palpable political and social concerns, cultivated imagination, and memorable animation techniques. The subtitled film will be screened outdoors on the back terrace of The Raconteur and will be accompanied by a live-mixed soundtrack courtesy of Circuit Bored, a DJ known for his minimal sci-fi inspired electronica. Folding chairs are available, but if you prefer something more comfortable (e.g. lawn lounger), bring it with you. FREE!

9 PM, Thurs. July 21
THE BLACK ANGEL REVUE
Novelist Steven Hart & Poet John Marron
Reading/Signing
WE ALL FALL DOWN & BLIPS
Hart, a Highland Park resident already noted as a historian for his nonfiction book The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway (2007), will read from his new crime novel We All Fall Down, which has been praised by novelists J.D. Rhoades and Kristy Kiernan as a compelling, twisty tale of murder and conspiracy in a small New Jersey town. Marron, a Highland Park resident, will read haiku, free verse, and unclassifiable poetic japes from his collection Blips. The book has already been hailed by Anne Waldman and a small army of poetic luminaries for its freshness and wit. Both Blips and We All Fall Down are published by the newly minted, small-press imprint Black Angel Press. FREE! Books on sale at event.

8:30 PM, Fri. July 22
OUTDOOR VIDEO GAME TOURNAMENT
W/Live Mixed Music by Circuit Bored.
Nintendo 64 projected on a ten foot wall under the stars. Our terrace screening of FANTASTIC PLANET was such a success, we've decided to continue our outdoor programming with a video game tournament similarly accompanied by Circuit Bored, a DJ known for his minimal sci-fi inspired electronica. Bring your lucky controller (we only have two). Bring a chair and any game you wish to play. Event presented in conjunction with People Under the Stereo, vintage clothes & vinyl under The Raconteur. FREE! Refreshments.

8 PM, Mon. July 25
THE BACKPOCKETS
Live Music
The Back Pockets is three girls, two boys, and one old geezer who looks like a cross between Dusty Hill and the guy with ripped flannel elbows drinking brekkie shots of Ten High who just stole your smokes. They play banjos and bongos, fiddles and flutes. Sometimes they lay electric guitars across their laps and saw on them with a violin bows. The girls dress like flappers, acrobats, or, on occasion, the Daryl Hannah android from Bladerunner. The boys wear Mexican wrestling masks and fencing helmets. They like sidewalks at night, homemade things, and carnies. They frequently rig and engage tightropes and trapezes during their shows, and have played whole songs hanging from their knees. The sound is folk, but the experience is Stomp. They're painters as well as musicians. They hail from Atlanta, GA. They sometimes describe themselves as Jefferson Airplane meets Blue Man Group. FREE! Complimentary wine. CDs on sale at the event (you remember their CDs, they come in little canvas pockets embroidered with doodles with flaps fastened by Velcro).

8 PM, Weds. July 27,
KOSHA DILLZ
Live Music
In 2009, Kosha Dillz won an MC battle at Giants Stadium and released his first solo album, Beverly Dillz. Dillz has since toured all over the world, most regularly with Flex Mathews and Matisyahu, and is the featured rapper on RZA’s new release Operation. RZA, widely considered one of the most influential and landmark hip-hop producers of all time, calls Kosha “one of the rawest Jewish kids I know.” FREE! CDs on sale at event.

JUNE/JULY 2011: JAILBOX; TRAVIS NICHOLS; PITCHAPALOOZA

2011-06-28T16:34:00.001-07:00

8 PM, Tues. June 28
JAILBOX (w/special guests)
Live Music
Jailbox may rep for Perryville, Missouri, but the quartet stakes a sonic claim to the melodic and sensitive British rock made popular by Coldplay, Doves and Starsailor. While Coldplay took cues from U2 and set its sights on stadium-rock, Jailbox prefers to keep things intimate. The strong, varied album, "One for Each of Us," works well thanks to equal parts restraint and inventiveness. Much of the first half of the disc centers on quiet songs that are pensive but never moody, evocative but not overwrought. The sweet, if oddly named, "Eyes Like a Farmer Tan" floats like an early Kings of Convenience track. "Taking it Slow Is So Dull" comes off as a breezy beach-bum jam, an unexpected bit of whistling, hand-clapping lightness from a record that prefers its hues the color of early summer storms. FREE! CDs on sale at event.

8 PM, Weds. June 29
TRAVIS NICHOLS
Discussing/Signing
THE MONSTER DOODLE BOOK
W/Live Music by THE LADY IN THE RADIATOR
Half-finished doodles of monsters and other creatures, featuring misshapen bodies, oodles of appendages, and all kinds of gross crud. Finish the monster-shaped alphabet, create a flip-book, comic strip, and more. Drawings can be scary, disgusting, cute, or weird. It's up to you. Nichols is a writer, artist, cartoonist, and Texan living in Brooklyn, NY. His comics appeared in Nickelodeon Magazine and Herbivore Magazine. He is the author and illustrator of Punk Rock Etiquette, which was awarded a Blue Ribbon by the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and was nominated by YALSA as one of the 2009 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults. He's played in more than a dozen bands, and he loves meteorites and eating watermelon over the sink. FREE! Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Fri. July 8
PITCHAPALOOZA
Authors Wanted!
The Book Doctors, aka, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, authors of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, want YOU to pitch your book at their acclaimed event, Pitchapalooza, which was recently featured in The New York Times, and in a mini-documentary for Newsday. Pitchapalooza is like American Idol for books--only without the Simon. Writers get one minute to pitch their book ideas to an all-star panel of publishing experts. The winner receives an introduction to an appropriate agent or publisher for his/her book. Plus, anyone who buys a book gets a free consultation worth $100.

Arielle Eckstut has been a literary agent for 18 years. She is also the author of seven books and the co-founder of the iconic brand, LittleMissMatched. David Henry Sterry is the best-selling author of 12 books, on a wide variety of subject including memoir, sports, YA fiction and reference. His last book appeared on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.

Together, they’ve helped dozens and dozens of talented amateur writers become published authors. They’ve appeared everywhere from NPR’s Morning Edition to USA Today, and have taught publishing workshops everywhere from the Miami Book Fair to Stanford University. FREE! Books on sale at event. Comp wine.

JUNE 2011: Teen Fest; Side Show/Roy Chambers/Roadside Graves; Something to Say; Treasure Hunt; Jailbox; Monster Doodle Book w/Lady and the Radiator

2011-05-31T13:51:00.000-07:00

7:30 PM, Weds. June 1
1st ANNUAL AWESOMESAUCE TEEN EXTRAVAGANZA
Special guest Fantasy YA author SHERWOOD SMITH
Featuring ten minute readings by John Melendez (15), Kathryn Sweatman (16), Emma Jacques (12), Whitney Xu (13),and Kayla Bashe (16), who organized the event. PLUS: L.A.'s Sherwood Smith, the author of a number of science fiction and fantasy novels, including the "Wren "series for Young Adults, the Exordium novels, the recent "Atlantis Endgame," a novel of the Time Traders series, and the Solar Queen novels, reads excerpts of her writing and answer attendees’ questions via SKYPE. FREE!

6:30 - 10 PM, Fri. June 10
BUG OUT!! @ The Rac
Featuring HONOR AMONGST THIEVES, ROY CHAMBERS, BEN LUCKMAN, JEREMY BENSON, & THE ROADSIDE GRAVES
Sideshow Performance/Sculpture Unveiling/Live Music
6:30 - 7:30 PM (outside, in front) Sideshow escapists Honor Amongst Thieves swallow mongol sabers, eat Edison light-bulbs, and spit fifteen foot flumes of flame into the blue black sky above Main Street, w/special guest Billy Bullwhip, a whip artist who, from ten feet away, can knock free a raisin from the ginger clench of his partner's teeth. 7:30 PM (outside, in front) Metal sculptor Roy Chambers unveils his 9' Don Quixote made from found objects and re-purposed metals (on permanent display in front of The Raconteur). Chambers effectively erased any memory of Allen Jones' fetishistic fiber-glass nudes with his steam-punk, milk bar cow-skull in The Raconteur's production of A Clockwork Orange (on display in the rear of the shop since the 2009 production). 8:00 - 9:00 PM (inside) Singer/songwriters Jeremy Benson & Ben Lukman. 8:30 - 10:00 PM (outdoor stage, in back) Rac house band The Roadside Graves (w/special guests) playing songs from their new S.E. Hinton inspired album "OUTSIDE" (stay gold, ponyboy!). All for FREE! Can u believe it? Note: Bug Out!! is our contribution to the town-wide, summer arts festival, Junebug, which occurs every Friday in June.

2 PM, Sun. June 12
Richard Klin/Lily Prince
SOMETHING TO SAY
Thoughts on Arts and Politics in America
Reading/Discussion/Slide Show,
In Something to Say, Klin interviews artists and thinkers as disparate as Pete Seeger, Howard Zinn, punk rock activist Franklin Stein, and Palestinian American stand up comedian Maysoon Zayid. Each interview is accompanied by a striking B/W portrait from Klin's wife, photographer Lily Prince. The fusion of art and politics is axiomatic in much of the world. In America, their relationship is erratic. What is art in the service of social justice? Is an artist obligated to address the political? This book profiles, in words and photos, disparate creative forces who offer thoughts on their point of engagement with the political sphere. FREE! Books on sale at event.

9:30 AM, Sat. June 18
3rd ANNUAL METUCHEN TREASURE HUNT
Ages 6 & up!
The Raconteur, in conjunction with the Metuchen Mt. Zion Masonic Lodge (and What's the Scoop), is again sponsoring a Metuchen based treasure hunt! In keeping with the rollicking spirit of The Man who Would be King, Freemason Rudyard Kipling's fantastic tale of two masonic scoundrels who set off from 19th century British India in search of gold and adventure and end up as kings of Kafiristan, and The National Treasure, in which hoard hunter Benjamin Gates follows a series of cryptic clues to find an ancient cache intertwined with the arcane history of Freemasonry, young adventurers (boys and girls 1st through 5th grade) work in teams, following clues and unraveling a variety of knotty riddles as they move from one mysterious location to another (various stores and outdoor landmarks) within the town limits of Metuchen proper. Each cracked conundrum will lead players ever closer to the final treasure! Expect anagrams, number puzzles, and a brass plated, cylindrical device known as a Cryptex. Raconteur gift certificates awarded to all participants. To sign up, click HERE. Space is limited. The hunt is completely FREE. Any questions, or if you would like to help, please click HERE.

8 PM, Tues. June 28
JAILBOX
w/special guests
Live Music
Think Radiohead meets The Police. More soon. FREE!

8 PM, Weds. June 29
TRAVIS NICHOLS
Discussing/Signing
THE MONSTER DOODLE BOOK
W/Live Music by THE LADY IN THE RADIATOR
Half-finished doodles of monsters and other creatures, featuring misshapen bodies, oodles of appendages, and all kinds of gross crud. Finish the monster-shaped alphabet, create a flip-book, comic strip, and more. Drawings can be scary, disgusting, cute, or weird. It's up to you. Nichols is a writer, artist, cartoonist, and Texan living in Brooklyn, NY. His comics appeared in Nickelodeon Magazine and Herbivore Magazine. He is the author and illustrator of Punk Rock Etiquette, which was awarded a Blue Ribbon by the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and was nominated by YALSA as one of the 2009 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults. He's played in more than a dozen bands, and he loves meteorites and eating watermelon over the sink. FREE! Books on sale at event.

MAY 2011: Jazz Guitar; William Lustig; Don't Burn It; Mark Jacobson; Comedy Show; Sloane Crosley; Pitchapalooza

2011-05-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Thurs. May 5
JOHN HARRITY
Jazz Guitar
Live Music
Harrity is the master guitar instructor at the Somerville School of Music. He has studied with Ronald Parker, Harry Leahy and Ted Dunbar for Jazz guitar, with Francis Perry, Thaddeus Robinson and Laura Oltman for classical guitar, and with Wanda Maximilien for classical piano. FREE!

8 PM, Fri. May 6
ROBUS 1 w/LADY IN THE RADIATOR
CD release Party
Live Music
More info soon...

6 – 7:30 PM, Sat. May 7
WILLIAM LUSTIG
Pre-MANIAC Reception
Some serious New York grit is about to get all up in Metuchen when legendary cult director and Blue Underground head honcho, William Lustig invades the The Forum with a brand new 35 mm print of Maniac. In 1980, Lustig found himself at the center of a storm of controversy when he made the grim and gorey slasher sleaze landmark Maniac, which boasts plenty of hideously gruesome make-up effects by horror genre icon Tom Savini. As the head of Blue Underground, he has overseen the release of some eminent cult horror films including City of the Living Dead, The Crazies and Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Lustig has also worked as an actor in his own films as well as in films by Sam Raimi, most notably Army of Darkness and Darkman. Join the Raconteur for a Dixie cup of comp wine and some up-close conversation with horror legend Lustig, then trot on down to theater for the 8 PM screening and Q&A. But be warned, this is strictly for fans of the genre. $5 (reception), $15 (screening).

8 PM, Sat. May 14
DON'T BURN IT
Directed by Dang Nhat Minh
W/Special guest DON'T BURN IT actor and Vietnam veteran MICHAEL JARMUS
Film Screening
Having won many of the top awards in its home country and honors in Japan’s Fukuoka Film Festival, Don't Burn It was Vietnam’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2010 Academy Awards. The film is the first Vietnamese feature to shoot scenes in the United States. It tells of the intersection of the life of Viet Cong medic Dang Thuy Tram with that of US Army Sergeant Frederic Whitehurst (Michael Jarmus). The sergeant recovered Dr. Dang’s diaries shortly after her death in 1970, was greatly moved by them, and managed to return the writings to her family thirty-five years later. A sensation when published in Vietnam, the diaries inspired director Dang Nhat Minh to write the screenplay. The film’s title is taken from what Whitehurst’s Vietnamese translator said after reading part of the diary, as captured documents were being destroyed: “Don’t burn this one...It has fire in it already.” At this rare US screening, Jarmus will introduce the film and helm a discussion afterward. FREE!

8 PM, Weds. May 18
PLEASE NOTE: Sloane Crosely's visit is postponed until Thurs, May 26 to accommodate her second appearance on The Late, Late Show w/Craig Ferguson. Sorry!

8 PM, Sat May 21
MARK JACOBSON
Reading/Signing
THE LAMPSHADE: A HOLOCAUST DETECTIVE STORY
“A disquieting yet utterly fascinating account, artfully told, studded with characters that would have been impossible to invent.” Jon Krakauer. Few growing up in the aftermath of World War II will ever forget the horrifying reports that Nazi concentration camp doctors had removed the skin of prisoners to make lampshades. In The Lampshade, bestselling journalist Mark Jacobson tells the story of how he came into possession of one of these awful objects, and of his search to establish the origin, and larger meaning, of what can only be described as an icon of terror. From Hurricane Katrina–ravaged New Orleans to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to the Buchenwald concentration camp to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, almost everything Jacobson uncovers about the lampshade is contradictory, mysterious, shot through with legend and specious information. Through interviews with forensic experts, famous Holocaust scholars (and deniers), Buchenwald survivors and liberators, and New Orleans thieves and cops, Jacobson gradually comes to see the lampshade as a ghostly illuminator of his own existential status as a Jew, and to understand exactly what that means in the context of human responsibility. One question looms as his search progresses: what to do with the lampshade—this unsettling thing that used to be someone? Jacobson is a Contributing Editor at New York Magazine and in 2000 he published a profile of Frank Lucas, "once the city's biggest, baddest heroin kingpin"; this formed the basis for the Ridley Scott film, "American Gangster", starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. FREE! Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Tues. May 24
COMEDY SHOW
Featuring a range of NJ and NY comics.

8 PM, Thurs. May 26
SLOANE CROSLEY
Reading/Signing
HOW DID YOU GET THIS NUMBER
David Sedaris calls her “relentlessly funny” Jonathan Ames calls her "Charming, elegant, wise, and outrageous, a 21st century Dorothy Parker,” and Jonthan Lethem calls her “another mordant and mercurial wit from the realm of Sedaris and Vowell.” She is also a weekly columnist for The Independent, a frequent contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered," and editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2011. Her essays, interviews, fiction and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Black Book Magazine, The New York Observer, The Village Voice, Vice Magazine, Elle , Glamour, Vogue, W, Salon.com, GQ, Spin, Esquire, Playboy Magazine, Self, Maxim Magazine, and Mirabella. FREE! Books on sale at event.

POSTPONED UNTIL JULY 8! Sorry!
PITCHAPALOOZA
The Book Doctors, aka, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, authors of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, want YOU to pitch your book at their acclaimed event, Pitchapalooza, which was recently featured in The New York Times, and in a mini-documentary for Newsday. Pitchapalooza is like American Idol for books--only without the Simon. Writers get one minute to pitch their book ideas to an all-star panel of publishing experts. The winner receives an introduction to an appropriate agent or publisher for his/her book. Plus, anyone who buys a book gets a free consultation worth $100.

Arielle Eckstut has been a literary agent for 18 years. She is also the author of seven books and the co-founder of the iconic brand, LittleMissMatched. David Henry Sterry is the best-selling author of 12 books, on a wide variety of subject including memoir, sports, YA fiction and reference. His last book appeared on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Together, they’ve helped dozens and dozens of talented amateur writers become published authors. They’ve appeared everywhere from NPR’s Morning Edition to USA Today, and have taught publishing workshops everywhere from the Miami Book Fair to Stanford University.

APRIL 2011: Green Hornet Radio; Johnny Porno; D'Meitz/Ilusha; Dan Naturman; Japan Benefit; East Cack/Shay James; Miranda Kennedy; MUTTS, Misha Angrist

2011-04-07T14:13:00.000-07:00

Tired of the everyday routine? Ever dream of a life of action and adventure? Want to get away from it all? Raconteur Radio’s staged presentations are designed to free you from the four walls of today, for a half hour of thrilling suspense with…THE GREEN HORNET!

8 PM, Fri. & Sat. April 1 & 2
THE GREEN HORNET
A Staged Radio Play
With Gwen Owens, Laurence Mintz, Mike Harvus, Peter Yao as Kato, and Carlyle Owens as the "Hornet."
ALL AGES!
The Green Hornet is an American radio and comic book masked vigilante created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker. Distinguished by its use of classical music, not least "Flight of the Bumblebee" for its title theme, it was one of radio's best-known and most distinctive adventure shows. Since his radio debut in the 1930s, the character has appeared in film serials (in the 1940s), a network television program (in the 1960s), multiple comic book series (from the 1940s on), and, just this past January, a feature film starring Seth Rogen. The Hornet is the alter ego of newspaper publisher Britt Reid. He is accompanied by his similarly masked partner, confidant, and chauffeur, Kato, who drives their technologically advanced Studebaker, the "Black Beauty." SOUND FX! COSTUMES! THEATRICAL LIGHTING.

8 PM, Thurs. April 7
CHARLIE STELLA
Reading/Signing
JOHNNY PORNO
With seven crime novels under his belt, Stella has received six starred industry reviews, has made two best-of-year-mystery lists (Publisher’s Weekly & Booklist, 2003 for Charlie Opera), and has been compared favorably to Elmore Leonard on sixteen occasions. His novels are hard-boiled, dialogue driven, and linked by recurring members of the Vignieri crime family. He's written countless short stories for such collections as Hard Boiled Brooklyn, Dublin Noir, and Bloodlines: A Horse Racing Anthology. His most recent book, the bluntly titled Johnny Porno, is set in New York circa '73, the same week a criminal court banned the adult film, Deep Throat. His books have been published here, the UK, Italy and Russia. Stella is also a screen writer, sometime jazz drummer, playwright, semi-pro powerlifter, opera buff, and every bit the raconteur. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at the event.

8 PM, Sat. April 9
D'MEITZ & ILUSHA
Live Music
Detroit's D'Meitz has won freestyle rap battles in Cleveland, Detroit, New York City, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. He is a regular competitor in GrindTimeNow, the world's largest Rap Battle league. D'Meitz is currently enlisted active duty in the United States Marine Corps and served in Iraq in 2008. While traveling with the Corps he released his first LP record in Japan, "Chivalry,Solemnity, and other bad ideas." He then teamed up with world famous DJ Mick Boogie to release "To Those with Wings," a free mixtape made available for download in November 2009. His just released full length LP, "Mortal" (April 1, 2011), is a collaboration with the multi-talented Modlovan pianist, Ilusha, who joins D'Meitz on his country-wide tour and performs with him (on our in-shop pub piano) tonight. W/Special guest.FREE! Comp wine. CDs on sale at event.

8 PM, Tues. April 12
DAN NATURMAN
Stand Up Comedy
Naturman was the favorite of celebrity judges Drew Carey and Brett Butler on Last Comic Standing Season 2 and has performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, The Late Show with David Letterman, and both The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien and Late Nite with Conan O’Brien. He is a regular at both The Comedy Cellar and Comic Strip Live! in New York. $5.00. Comp wine.

8 pm, Sat. April 16
BENEFIT FOR JAPAN
DAVID HEINLEIN & KYO MORISHIMA
Shodo/Photography Exhibit/Reading
Raising Funds for Earthquake Relief through Documentary Photographs and Shodo Calligraphy
David Heinlein will exhibit fifty of his Shodo works on ancient wood and mulberry paper, and read poetry in Japanese (with subsequent translation) from his book, "Wild Seeds." In 1969, at 22, Heinlein first went to Kyoto on The Amherst-Doshisha Fellowship. He became an Instructor of English at the university and traveled extensively in Japan and throughout Southeast Asia as well as in the Okinawa Islands. His first book, "Wild Seeds," bi-lingual essays and poems in English and Japanese, was written and published in 1984 while Heinlein, after a brief return to the US, was again working in Japan. In 1992 he began teaching Japanese at Middlesex and Union County Colleges. Heinlein is a Black Belt Third Degree in Martial Arts of Japanese Origin and has been doing Japanese calligraphy for more than twenty-five years.

“I take hundreds of pictures of quiet, personal, simple moments whenever I return home to Japan," says photographer Kyo Morishima. "At a time now when the word 'Japan' evokes a monumental tragedy and disaster, I thought the images of children playing, monks sweeping, people going about their everyday business would be a humanizing counterpoint to the headlines.” Morishima was a college student in the United States when the Kobe earthquake struck in 1995, destroying his parents' house and large swaths of his hometown.

Morishima will sell framed prints and Heinlein will sell books of Japanese poetry. Both will donate 100% of the proceeds for Japanese earthquake victims. Heinlein will also sell his Shodo work and donate a percentage to benefit Japan. Comp wine.

8 PM, Thurs. April 28
EAST CACKALACKY & THE SHAYFER JAMES SIDE SHOW
East Cack is a touring avant-folk duo from Klamath Falls, Oregon specializing in homemade electrical weirdness & a singing saw. Singer/songwriter/artful pianist Shayfer James writes songs that are dark, dense, Dickensian, and fingers the 61 keys of his Casio Portable with the dodgy subtlety of a Fagan street thief (also w/singing saw). FREE! Comp wine. CDs on sale at event.

8 PM, FRI. APRIL 29
MIRANDA KENNEDY
Reading/Signing
SIDEWAYS ON A SCOOTER: LIFE & LOVE IN INDIA
In the early aughts, Miranda Kennedy, a young reporter living in New York City, relocated to India, where a British great-aunt had served as a missionary and where her own parents had lived during the early years of their marriage. She stayed for half a decade, becoming a foreign correspondent for American Public Media’s Marketplace and National Public Radio. During her time there, Kennedy is drawn into the lives of several Indian women, including her charismatic friend Geeta—a self-described “modern girl” who attempts to squeeze herself into the traditional role of wife and mother; Radha, a proud Brahmin widow who denies herself simple pleasures in order to live by high-caste Hindu principles; and Parvati, who defiantly chain-smokes and drinks whiskey, yet feels compelled to keep her boyfriend a secret from her family. In her effort to understand the hopes and dreams that motivate her new friends, Kennedy peels back India’s globalized image as a land of call centers and fast-food chains and finds an ancient place where, in many ways, lives have scarcely changed for centuries. "If you liked Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, you have to read this book.” Susan Cheever, author of Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, John Cheever

Miranda Kennedy's articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Nation, and on Slate. Before moving to India, Kennedy worked as a magazine editor and a public radio reporter in New York, where she covered, among other things, the September 11 attacks. She recently moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an editor at National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and returns frequently to India. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

2 PM, Sat. April 30
MUTTS Creator PATRICK MCDONNELL
Chalk Talk/Reading/Signing
In 1994, McDonnell created the award-winning comic strip Mutts, which now appears in more than 700 newspapers in 20 countries and has been anthologized in books all over the world. It was described by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz as "one of the best comic strips of all time." A coffee table book of his life and work, Mutts: The Comic Art of Patrick McDonnell, was published in 2003. In 2005, McDonnell wrote his first children's book, The Gift of Nothing, which was a New York Times best seller. The Guardians of Being, a collaboration with Oprah endorsed spiritual teacher Eckart Tolle, was published in Oct 2009. Join Patrick as he reads from his eighth children's book, ME...JANE, the story of the young Jane Goodall and her toy chimpanzee Jubilee, and sketches Earl, Mooch, and dozens of other characters on a giant architect's pad, chronicling their creation and answering questions as he draws. Books on sale at the event. FREE! Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Sun, May 1
MISHA ANGRIST
Reading/Discussing/Signing
HERE IS A HUMAN BEING: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics

Once considered a fanciful topic confined to speculative fiction, DNA-based science has blossomed in the last decade to encompass a wide range of real world technologies. DNA technology has already changed our health care, the food we eat, and our criminal justice system. Unlocking the secrets of our genomes opens the door not only to helping us understand why we are the way we are and potentially fixing what ails us but also to many other concerns. What exactly will happen to this information? Will it become just another marketing tool? Can it help us understand our ancestry, or will it merely reinforce old ideas of race? Can personal genomics help fix the U.S. health care system? Angrist, a Duke University genetics professor with the added pedigree of an MFA in writing, is ideally suited for probing and explaining this often-befuddling field in crisp, accessible prose. His chief focus here is on the slice of DNA tinkering known as personal genomics and Angrist’s own participation in a Harvard-funded project to map the entire genomes of its human subjects. Along with providing a fascinating close-up view of cutting edge science, Angrist explores the many thorny questions provoked by genome sequencing, such as whether humans really want to know about their future infirmities, and whether everyone’s DNA blueprint should be freely posted on the Internet. A vitally important and timely study of a society-changing technology. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at the event.

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

2011-02-28T12:51:00.000-08:00

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!

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

2011-02-08T19:37:00.000-08:00

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

JAN/FEB 2010 William Burroughs: A Man Within; Wuhnderlust; Catfish; Jess Row & Emma Straub

2010-12-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

The Raconteur, The Forum Theatre, and The Metuchen Cultural Arts Commission present
8 PM, Sat. Jan 8
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: A MAN WITHIN
W/Special Guest Director YONY LEYSER
Film Screening/Q&A
Hailed as the grandfather of punk and the godfather of the beat generation, Burroughs was a bartender, a private detective, a factory worker, an exterminator, a heroin addict, and a writer. His novel, Naked Lunch, one of the last books to be banned by the U.S. government, remains one of the most recognized literary works of the 20th century. It celebrates William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is the first and only posthumous documentary about the legendary "Pope of Dope." Narrated by Peter Weller, who played a Burroughs-like character in David Cronenberg’s film version of Lunch, Leyser’s portrait of the formidable proto-Beat author is a kind of genealogy of hip that connects Burroughs with many currents of America’s outlaw cultural tradition. He was a close friend and sometime lover of Allen Ginsberg, an idol of the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, Iggy Pop and Sonic Youth. Featuring never before seen footage of Burroughs and exclusive interviews with John Waters (who calls him "a religious figure"), Patti Smith (who recalls having a crush on him), Gus Van Sant, Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, and David Cronenberg, with a soundtrack by Patti Smith and Sonic Youth, Leyser’s intimate documentary delves into the troubled and fascinating world of one of the greatest authors of our time. TICKETS: $12. TO PURCHASE ONLINE, CLICK HERE. THE FORUM THEATRE, 314 Main Street, Metuchen, NJ.

8 PM, Fri & Sat. Jan 28 & 29
THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN
Radio Play/Rent Party
Ages 8 & up!
Featuring Carlyle Owens, Jeff Maschi, and Laurence Mintz
More bad news is on the way for winter-weary New Jersey residents. Accuweather expects up to six inches to fall tonight and into Friday morning. This only days after Tuesday's ice storm and only a week after nearly a foot of snow was dumped on parts of the state. It goes without saying that this recent onslaught of "weather" has been horrible for business. Our staged presentation of the chilling radio play, "The Abominable Snowman," is an attempt to offset such wintry assaults and the woefully slow retail days they produce. 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 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! Sound FX! Complimentary wine (and juice). As noted above, this is essentially a "rent party," with a suggested donation of $10.00 (but no one will be turned away). Please note: our radio plays are among our most popular events and reservations are strongly suggested. To reserve a seat for either Fri or Sat, reply to this e-mail with your name, the number in your party, and the evening you wish to attend.

7:00 - 9:30 PM, Tues., Feb 1 - March 1 (no class 2/22)
THE RACONTEUR WRITING WORKSHOP
Register Now! Sessions fill quickly.
In The Spooky Art, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Norman Mailer talked about crisp words "clamping down…sticking." In an interview shortly before his death, noir author Raymond Chandler spoke of perfectly pitched sentences "walking off the page." Despite using opposing metaphors, they are obviously describing the same thing. Good writing. A key focus of the class is this acoustical quality. The profound difference between how a sentence sounds and its mute presence on the page. Participants should come prepared to revise/resolve a prior project or to draft a pre-existing idea. The workshop does not assign exercises, but rather use the students' own projects to instruct. The cost of the workshop is $200.00 payable at the beginning of the first class ($150.00 w/student ID). Returning participants may sign up for single workshops at a reduced rate of $25 per class. Individual instruction can also be arranged. Complimentary wine is served. For further information or to register, e-mail raconteurbooks@gmail.com with INFO or ENROLL as the subject.

8 PM, Feb 3
WAHNDER LUST
LA Funk Band
Live Music
From Pultizer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon to Peaches on Flavor of Love. I've always wanted to say that. And now I can. Wahnder Lust features Kim Manning (a.k.a. Peaches) and Lantz Lazwell. Manning has performed a decade as a featured vocalist for George Clinton and the P-Funk Allstars and on the Grammy Awards, the David Letterman Show, Jay Leno, and, of course, VH1's Flavor of Love. She can be heard on albums alongside Snoop Dogg, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and recently Sly Stone. Lantz Lazwell has drawn comparisons to Jimi Hendrix, Jack Johnson, and Stevie Wonder. He took home the LA Music Award for Best Rock Vocalist in 2007, and joined the all-star lineup of Trulio Disgracias which included members of Fishbone, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his future Wahnder Lust partner, Kim Manning. Fresh from performances at the House of Blues, San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, and SXSW, Wahnder Lust now plays your favorite bookstore. FREE! Comp wine.CDs on sale at event.

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. But the story Catfish has to tell, at least in part, is older than the Internet, and certainly not limited to the latest technology. You may have read The Confidence Man, by Herman Melville, or followed the strange literary career of J.T. Leroy, or you may cherish the lore of your own favorite frauds and hoaxsters and impostors, from Jay Gatsby to Don Draper. America is the land of spurious, seat-of-the-pants self-invention, and Mr. Joost and Mr. Schulman, a couple of young men with cameras and college degrees, find themselves in a real-life variation on a venerable American theme. TICKETS: $12. TO PURCHASE ONLINE, CLICK HERE. THE FORUM THEATRE, 314 Main Street, Metuchen, NJ

Upcoming: JESS ROW, EMMA STRAUB, WESLEY STACE, JONATHAN ROE, and BILL PLYMPTON

DEC 2010: Rac/Benn @ NYC's KGB Bar; Penny Dreadful; Holiday Hootenanny

2010-12-03T15:48:00.001-08:00

7 PM, Mon. Dec 13.
GET LIT!
The Raconteur presents BENNINGTON in MANHATTAN
The KGB Bar
85 East Fourth Street, NYC
(btwn Bowery and 2nd Ave),
Students/graduates of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars (ranked as one of the top three programs of its kind by Poets & Writers Magazine) read from recent work. Willa Carroll, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Liz Arnold, Jeremy Oldfield, Robert Hansmann, Lisa Alexander, Hannah Tennant-Moore, Jennifer Acker, Alex Dawson, and the acclaimed poet/Bennington professor Timothy Liu. The work of student participants has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Guardian, Tin House, n+1, The Sun, Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, Tricycle, Cimarron Review, Surface, The Best Buddhist Writing, Mary Magazine, Tuesday Journal, Ploughshares, One Story, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Oxford American, and the 2010 anthology New Stories From the South.

Timothy Liu is the author of For Dust Thou Art; Of Thee I Sing, selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Hard Evidence; Say Goodnight; Burnt Offerings; and Vox Angelica, which won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Liu edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry and his poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Labeled "Best Literary Venue" in Manhattan by New York Magazine and The Village Voice, the iconic KGB Bar, once the expat meeting house of Ukrainian socialists, has grown over the last decade into one of the choicest venues for literary talent. Ricky Moody, Susan Orlean, Michael Cunningham, Robert Bly, Jimmy Breslin, Budd Schulberg, Joyce Carol Oates, Luc Sante, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Jerry Stahl, and Jonathan Lethem have all appeared on its hallowed stage. FREE!

8 PM, Thurs. Dec 16
2,5 PENTYLSENTIRATE: THE PLAY
A Staged Reading/World Premiere
A New Steampunk Penny Dreadful by KAYLA BASHE
W/Carlyle Owens, Gwen Owens, Laurence Mintz, and Kristy Lauricella
The plucky young scientist, Ms. Anna Cartridge, and her bubbly best friend, the mildly famous actress Poppy Valdene, travel to a deceptively charming cliff side resort to save Dr. William Boyle, her fiancé and the ingenious inventor of 2,5-pentlyl sentirate, from the contemptible clutches of long-time rival and nefarious hypnotist, Charles Rawlingson, a would-be scientific mastermind. Running time: 45 min. FREE!

Kayla Bashe is one of my writing students. Witty, precocious, and sixteen, she self-published her first novel at thirteen, and was a recent runner-up in a poetry contest hosted by the Young Adult Review Network. Pentylsentirate is Kayla's first full-length play.

8 PM, Sat. Dec 18
HOLIDAY HOOTENANNY
Steve Kaplan/Guitar & Paul Caluori/Violin
Live Music/Party
400 years of music: from Gustav Holst's "In a Bleak Midwinter" to Coltrane's groovy "Greensleaves" to classic Zep (Led, that is), with detours into Celtic folk and Victorian dance hall. Steve Kaplan and Paul Caluori bring their love of traditional folk, classical music and acoustic jazz into sharp focus by using truly acoustic instruments to perform, exploring sonic possibilities without the "clutter" of other instrumentation. Their approach to the music is deceptively simple: wring out as much emotion as possible without losing the essential structure of the pieces they're playing. Expect a variety of spiked nogs, puissant punches, and a withering concoction called Yukon Cornelius, along with a range of baked, roasted and boiled dishes (capon anyone?), marinated tench, and an edible lifelike scene sculpted in colored marzipan. Plus Cream Wafers, Date Drops, Honey-Filled Biscuits, Cinnamon Stars, Zucker Hutchen, Fattigmands Bakkels, Drumkake, and Buttery Nut Rounds. FREE!

The Loom; The Hermaphrodite; Impossibly Funky; Erotic Open Mic

2010-11-08T08:06:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Thurs. Nov 11
THE LOOM
Live Music
The New York Times just labeled them "The Next Big Thing," The New Yorker regularly refers to them as a "beloved Brooklyn sextet" and nyctaper calls them "a revelation." Working heavily in gothic watercolors, The Loom kick out glow-in-the-dark folk wailers that flirt with the anthemic, but never abandon the quiet spaces they were born in. The Loom's rich amalgam of folk and americana-influenced indie rock features male and female vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, French horn, trumpet, piano, pedal steel, bass, drums, ukulele, accordion, and banjo. FREE! W/Ben + Vesper and Child of Dawn. CDs on sale at event.

8 PM, Tues, Nov 16
DANIEL GRANDBOIS
Reading/Signing
THE HERMAPHRODITE: A Hallucinated Memoir
Daniel Grandbois' writing has been described as "avant-garde stand-up," "Dr. Seuss for adults," and "between Brautigan's and Basho's." Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya's surreal and satirical woodcuts are collected by major museums all over the world. Together, they have created a happening as much as a book, one that notorious Beat poet/Fugs founder Ed Sanders simply calls, "A work of art." This is a book to be carried in the pocket, taken on journeys, opened to any page and consulted for its nutty brand of wisdom. Grandbois' other book, Unlucky Lucky Days, a collection of nonsense and absurdist tales praised by Lydia Davis as “funny, bizarre, moving,” was picked by Book Sense as an "Indie Next Notable Book." Grandbois' writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Fiction, Boulevard, Sentence, Del Sol Review, and the anthologies Freak Lightning and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, among others. Also a musician, Daniel has played in three of the pioneering bands of "The Denver Sound:" Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly.

8 PM, Thurs, Nov 18
MIKE WHITE
Read/Signing
IMPOSSIBLY FUNKY
w/a special screening of COCKFIGHTER
Harangue for Hollywood! From the urban blight of Detroit came enfant terrible Mike White and his mutant publication, Cashiers du Cinemart. For fifteen years the writers of Cashiers du Cinemart provided a treasure trove of passionate, often prickly writing on film and popular culture. This book collects the best articles from the magazine with sections dedicated to Quentin Tarantino, Star Wars, Black Shampoo, Charles Willeford, and much more. "Mike White and his Cashiers approach film writing from a point of the compass I never knew existed. It’s wild navigating out there in the film world and Impossibly Funky makes it a brisk and exhilarating trip while keeping one cool hand on the tiller!" – Guy Maddin, The Saddest Music in the World.

Followed by a rare screening of Cockfighter, an art film for an exploitation audience set in the gaming pits of the Deep South (White has written extensively about the oft banned Monte Hellman flick and its author, Charles Willeford, and Mike White’s Who Do You Think You're Fooling?, a full-motion montage highlighting the too-close-for-comfort similarities between Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 film, Reservoir Dogs, and Ringo Lam’s 1989 Hong Kong movie, City on Fire (White achieved notoriety in the early nineties for being the first to expose Tarantino's "homage.") Check out Mike’s Tale of the Tape for more on this saga. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

9 PM, Fri. Nov 19
PIECE OF TALE
Erotic Open Mic
Poetry, prose, songs, comedy, etc. All work must emphasize fornication or heavy petting. Reply to this e-mail to reserve a 5 min. performance slot. Every month. The bluer the better. How blue are you? FREE!

UPCOMING:
Oscar Nominated Animator Bill Plympton, best known for his Academy Award nominated Your Face, hosts a special Raconteur screening of Idiots & Angels, his brand new animated comedy featuring the music of Tom Waits. Don't miss the NJ premiere of the movie the New York Times is calling "relentless and brilliant." 8 PM, Sat. DEC 10. More info soon.

RAC in NYC, The KGB Bar (labeled "The Best Literary Venue in Manhattan" by New York Magazine and The Village Voice, 7 PM, Mon. DEC 13. People Under the Stereo, The Raconteur's vintage vinyle & clothing shop, opens DEC 15! The Raconteur Holiday Hootenanny featuring Steve Kaplan on guitar & Paul Caluori on violin 8 PM, Sat. Dec 18.

On Stage! NOSFERATU: THE FIRST VAMPYRE Oct 21 - 30 @ MCC; 7 SHOWS ONLY!

2010-10-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

Middlesex County College & The Raconteur present
NOSFERATU: THE VAMPYRE
8 PM, Thurs - Sat, OCT 21 - 30
(special midnight show on Mischief Night)
Based on the 1923 German Expressionist film by F. W. Murnau (in turn, based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula), Alex Dawson's stage adaptation additionally draws on Chinese shadow-play, Shakespeare, and explorer/orientalist Richard Burton's translation of Hindu vampire fables to tell the story of the moon-headed, rat-fanged Count Orlock looking for love even as he brings a boatload of Black Death to a German village. From the team that brought you last year's unsettling hit A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, with makeup by Tom Savini alumnus Dan Diana, the production, which opens with the terrifying image of the eponymous Nos suspended fifteen feet above the audience, will make even the swooniest Twilight fan forget RobPat and his teen beat vamps. The Studio Theater @ MCC 2600 Woodbridge Ave., Edison, NJ 08818. All tickets $10. Click HERE for more info and to purchase online.

CROPSEY: the scariest film you'll see this year! & NOSFERATU: THE VAMPYRE On Stage!

2010-10-01T12:01:00.001-07:00

8 PM, Sat. Oct 2
CROPSEY
W/Director Barbara Brancaccio
Film Screening/On Stage Conversation/Q&A
First Presbyterian Social Hall
A real-life multiple-murder tale that could have been called "A Guide to Recognizing Your Boogeyman," Cropsey is the scariest movie you'll see this year.

Growing up on Staten Island, filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio had often heard the legend of ‘Cropsey.’ For the kids in their neighborhood, Cropsey was an escaped mental patient who lived in the old abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution. He would come out late at night and snatch children off the streets. Sometimes Cropsey had a hook for a hand, other times he wielded a bloody axe or a gleaming machete, but whatever the implement, Cropsey was always out there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to get them.

Later as teenagers, the filmmakers assumed Cropsey was just an urban legend: a cautionary tale used to keep them out of those abandoned buildings and stop them from doing all those things that teenagers like to do. That all changed in the summer of 1987 when a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome, named Jennifer Schweiger, disappeared from their community. That was the summer all the kids from Staten Island discovered that their urban legend was real.

Now as adults Joshua and Barbara have returned to Staten Island to create CROPSEY, a feature documentary that delves into the mystery behind Jennifer and four additional missing children. The film also investigates Andre Rand, a former Willowbrook janitor/real-life bogeyman who lived in the tunnels under the school and was ultimately linked to the disappearances.

Embarking on a mysterious journey into the underbelly of their forgotten borough, the filmmakers uncover a reality more terrifying than any urban legend. Tickets on sale NOW. $10 & $15. Click HERE to purchase online. Click HERE for more info about CROPSEY. NOTE: This event is at the Social Hall of the First Presbyterian Church, 270 Woodbridge Ave (adjacent to the cemetery),Metuchen, NJ 08840.

Middlesex County College & The Raconteur present
NOSFERATU: THE VAMPYRE
8 PM, Thurs - Sat, OCT 21 - 30
(special midnight show on Mischief Night)
Based on the 1923 German Expressionist film by F. W. Murnau (in turn, based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula), Alex Dawson's stage adaptation additionally draws on Chinese shadow-play, Shakespeare, and explorer/orientalist Richard Burton's translation of Hindu vampire fables to tell the story of the moon-headed, rat-fanged Count Orlock looking for love even as he brings a boatload of Black Death to a German village. From the team that brought you last year's unsettling hit A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, with makeup by Tom Savini alumnus Dan Diana, the production, which opens with the terrifying image of the eponymous Nos suspended fifteen feet above the audience, will make even the swooniest Twilight fan forget RobPat and his teen beat vamps. The Studio Theater @ MCC 2600 Woodbridge Ave., Edison, NJ 08818. All tickets $10. Click HERE for more info and to purchase online.

Jazz Punk from Rome; Erotic Open Mic; Kevin Baker & Dreamland; Mike Edison & Banned Books; Horror Doc Cropsey

2010-08-31T14:19:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Tues. Sept 7
NEO & TRIBRACO (w/special guests The Lady & the Furnace)
Live Music
Neo & Tribaco are two jazz punk bands from the Italian avant-garde scene based in Rome. Seriously. During their fifty day stateside tour, Tribraco will introduce their new album, and Neo will record their next one with renowned Pixies/Nirvana/PJ Harvey producer Steve Albini. And they'll play here. For FREE!

9 PM, Thurs. Sept 16
PIECE OF TALE
Erotic Open Mic
Poetry, prose, songs, comedy, etc. All work must emphasize fornication or heavy petting. Reply to this e-mail to reserve a 5 min. performance slot. Third Thurs of every month. The bluer the better. How blue are you? FREE!

8 PM, Thurs. Sept 23
KEVIN BAKER
Reading/Signing
DREAMLAND
A "Dickensian epic" (Entertainment Weekly), "a wild ride" (The New York Times), "a populist masterpiece" (Publisher's Weekly), a "virtuoso performance" (Esquire), this vast, sprawling carnival of a book, set in turn of the century Coney Island, features prostitutes, dogfights, Bowery bars, opium dens, and characters with names like Trick the Dwarf, Gyp the Blood and Kid Twist. Plus Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Topsy, the elephant electrocuted by Edison. Dreamland opens with an act of misplaced--and very stupid--compassion. Eastern European immigrant and expelled member of the Jewish mob Kid Twist intervenes when villainous gangster Gyp the Blood is on the verge of murdering a young newsboy for sport. But surprise: that's no street urchin--that's Trick the Dwarf, self-proclaimed Mayor of Little City and a Coney Island tout, who dresses up as a boy, he says, as "a way I had of leaving myself behind." Trick hides Twist in the hind parts of the Tin Elephant Hotel, a place literally shaped like the great gray beast, and what follows is a remarkable, extravagantly plotted patchwork of bizarre stories and superbly drawn characters. All of it elegantly written and compassionate to the core. FREE! Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Tues, Sept 28
Former HIGH TIMES editor/blues keyboardist MIKE EDISON
Reading/Soundtracking
His Favorite BANNED Books
w/special help from BOSS HOG's Hollis Queens on drums
The American Library Association's Banned Book Week (BBW)is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982, with targets ranging from Harry Potter to Huckleberry Finn. Click here to see a map of book bans and challenges in the US from 2007 to 2009.

My first experience with a banned book was in tenth grade. I grew up on a horse ranch in Alabama and went to a private school forty minutes away called Macon Academy. My father, a writer who, divorced from my mother, lived in New Jersey, had sent me the Cabernet colored paperback of Catcher in The Ryefor Christmas (along with a Swatch that had a lime green band and a skeleton face of exposed gears). I was discovered reading it one day by my English Teacher, a bullied looking man named Mr. Edwards. He declared, with a sort of wooden vivacity, that if I persisted in doing a report on "the offensive book," I would get a an F. I consulted my Mom--a woman who, it should be noted, had recently backed my lobe with a wine cork and pierced my ear with a stove-flame sterilized sewing needle (to a rumpus of Academy demerits and suspension, natch). "Take the F," she said, "Once you read it, you'll understand." I did. And did.

Between 1985 and 1988, Mike Edison wrote 28 pornographic novels, reported on German whorehouses and Spanish coke dealers for Hustler, and published a series of erotic “confessions” for the legendary Penthouse Letters. In 1998 Edison became publisher/editor of marijuana counterculture magazine High Times. Following HT, he was named the editorial director for Jewish culture magazine HEEB, for whom he went undercover and exposed Jews for Jesus as a Baptist organization. He is the long-time drummer for New York cult-garage band the Raunch Hands and a frequent collaborator of infamous punk rocker GG Allin with whom he wrote a number of songs and recorded two albums. FREE! Refreshments served.

Web Cam Jam; Green Drinks; Jennifer Egan; Jaret Middleton; Sugarbabies; Roadside Graves; Schayfer James & Honor Among Thieves

2010-08-04T15:24:00.000-07:00

1 PM, Sun. Aug 2
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. 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. Web Cam Jam is more about the performers than the performance, but that doesn't mean you can't come and watch. NOTE: If you watched the Oscars last year, you heard Best Actress winner Kate Winslet mention this very same pub and the pickling contest her mother recently won there. Indeed, last April's Web Cam Jam, Kate's mom, Sally Winslet (now known as the Queen of Shallots), was in the foreground eating bangers and in January's Mr. Winslet sang the old broadside “Darlin’ Old Stick.” MUSICIANS WANTED! FREE! Comp cornbread (fresh from the oven)!

The only bookstore with a house band (the Roadside Graves), The Rac has hosted such music luminaries as Fugazi front man Ian MacKaye, Bouncing Souls front man Greg Attonito, poet/new wave punk Jim Caroll, 80s college radio darlings The Cucumbers, former High Times editor/GG Allin collaborator Mike Edison and his punk blues band Edison Rocket Train (featuring Boss Hog drummer Hollis Queens), and folk noir gangster John Wesley Harding, the first opening act for Bruce Springsteen in twenty years. Plus a slew of local bands: Like Trains and Taxis, Risk Relay, Glad Hearts, etc. YOU TOO CAN PLAY THE RAC! Your participation in the Web Cam Jam is your audition.

7 - 9 PM, Tues, Aug 3
GREEN DRINKS
It all started in 1989 at a pub called the Slug and Lettuce in Northern London, in which a handful of eco-conscious mates pulled some tables together and drank some beer. The concept evolved into GREEN DRINKS and now it's global. Each city has an organizer who arranges meetings in bars and restaurants (providing the greenest beer possible, and by green we mean enviro-minded, not colored; in our case, Climax, locally brewed in Roselle Park). Green Drinks meets in fifty countries from Argentina to Zambia. And now, METUCHEN! Jorge Szymanski, a Permaculture Design Consultant, will be on hand to moderate a round-table discussion on Permaculture and how you can use this design philosophy to plan, plant, and prosper with next year's garden. He will discuss the importance of composting, irrigation, micro-climates, and space planning to maximize garden yields while reducing chemical fertilizer use. Come have a beer and get green. FREE!

8 PM, Fri. Aug 6
JENNIFER EGAN
Reading/Signing
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
Expect to inhale Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Then expect it to lodge in your cranium and your breastbone a good long while. I expect this brilliant, inventive novel to become enshrined. Such rash speculation is foolish, I know—we live amid a plague of bloated praise. But A Visit From the Goon Squad is emboldening. It cracks the world open afresh. Would that Marcel Proust could receive A Visit From the Goon Squad. It would blow his considerable mind. “Pitch perfect. Shape shifting. Is there anything Egan can’t do?" The New York Times. "A profound and glorious exploration of the fullness and complexity of the human condition. An extraordinary new work of fiction.” The New York Press. "A triumph of technical bravado and tender sympathy“ The Washington Post. "Clever. Edgy. Groundbreaking." The Chicago Tribune. “It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.” The Los Angeles Times. Read the recent front page NY Times rave for Goon Squad HERE. FREE. Comp wine. The Keep (her Escherian last book and one of my favorite modern novels) and A Visit from the Goon Squad on sale at event.

8 PM, Sat. Aug 14
Who is An Danotomine Eerly??
JARRET MIDDLETON
Reading/Signing
AN DANTOMINE EERLY
With special guests Jonathan Andrew & Rev. P.A.S.
As the Irish-American poet Dallin lay dying he recalls the surreal geography and traumatic events that lead to his end. A wind-beaten house, a still-looming tragedy, a ghostly barroom, and the campus of a condemned university. The ailed poet and his beautiful, haunting wife Aìsling flee an obscure political persecution that culminates in her planned murder. The impact of her death afflicts Dallin in ways he cannot comprehend. All this ends in his meeting An Dantomine Eerly. As Dallin confronts his moment of death, the book assembles itself as a collage of the affinities, falsehoods, and absurdities of memory and reality. Think pre-fame Palahnuik and early David Foster Wallace. Books on sale at event.

W/live music by Jonathan Andrew, formerly of The Angry Monsters, currently in Mike Ferraro & the Young Republicans. Comparisons run from Pixie lead Frank Black to XTC.

Plus spoken word artist/old school punk Rev. Pedro Angel Serrano, just your average Puerto Rican gay skinhead. Rev P.A.S. is the subject of the quirky doc Driving Jersey and the host of Old Man Pedro on WRSU.

8 PM, Sat. Aug 21
SNOWBABIES
Live Music
Subterranean indie stars Snowbabies have been packing New Brunfus basements for the past year. The Raconteur (along with their upcoming Maxwell's gig) marks their move to above ground venues. Their sound is elusive, hinting at everything from alt art-rock to old-school country to the two finger frets of Django Reinhardt. But perhaps the biggest influence on the band is the city around them—listen closely, amidst the whirling guitars and vocal harmonies, the xylophones and singing saws, you just might hear a Robert Wood ambulance or a George Street jackhammer. Special guest: O Lucky Man. FREE! Comp wine. CDs on sale at event.

8:30 Thurs. Aug 26
ROADSIDE GRAVES
After Party (Following their MCAC performance in the Sr Ctzn parking lot)
Live Music/Special Guests
Their sweet-tempered country-rock is far more slippery than it might first appear and often conjures images of a roadhouse Bad Seeds. “I've drank enough to know that I've drank enough," announces front man Gleason on the world-weary “Live Slow,” the one song that comes closest to encapsulating the enduring spirit of the Graves. Performed with an uncommonly deft touch and subtle grace, their songs concern themselves primarily with the pause for breath that comes after reaching original destinations, and the long, careful glance at the atlas that comes before deciding where to go next. FREE! CDs on sale at event.

8 PM, Fri. Aug 27
SCHAYFER JAMES & HONOR AMONG THIEVES
Live Music/Escapism/Sword Swallowing
Singer/songwriter/artful pianist Shayfer James just shot a video on the greasy outdoor pianos that studded Manhattan street corners this past month. His songs are dark, dense, and Dickensian, and his fingers tickle the keys with the dodgy subtlety of a Fagan pickpocket. He's performing here with Honor Among Thieves, a group of sideshow escapists known for lightbulb eating and power tool insertion. No fooling. FREE! Comp wine. CDs on sale at event.

8 PM, Sat. Aug 28
BRYAN HANSEN & Co.
Live Music
I saw Hansen sing when he was still a senior at Edison High. He was in their production of Cabaret. He played the asexual emcee opposite my girlfriend's cousin (the reason we were there) who played Sally Bowles. I'm pretty unforgiving when it comes to community theater, let alone high school theater, but this production of Caberet, specifically this kid's idiosyncratic performance as the emcee, absolutely blew me away. Anyway. Fast forward one year and I run into him at one of those strip mall Halloween superstores where I'm getting some last minute cobweb fluff for The Raconteur's haunted bookshop. I find out he has a band. I book that band. They play. Fast forward one more year. They return.FREE!

6:30 PM, Sun. DATE TBA
DICTIONARY TOSS
Field Event
Summer's here, which means it's once again time for The Raconteur's annual Dictionary Put. $5 for three throws. Participants hurl a hefty 15 lb OED bound in duct tape. Farthest throw wins a $25 gift certificate to the Raconteur and gets their name written on the fore-edge of the dictionary, which remains in the shop. This event is more similar to Open Stone Put of the Highland Games than the Shot Put of the Olympic Games. The toss allows a run up to the toeboard or "trig" to deliver the dictionary, and the thrower is allowed to use any style of release. Most athletes in the toss use either the "glide" or the "spin" techniques. Oakland Park ball field (just off Grove). To register YOU MUST E-MAIL raconteurbooks@gmail.com. Entry fee payable at event. Followed by pints at the pub in our cleats and piped baseball pants.

JULY 2010: Roy Chambers; Green Drinks; Revolutionary Readings; Trains & Taxis/Jordan & Sphinx; Dictionary Toss; Sam St. Thom; Jennifer Egan

2010-07-03T13:06:00.001-07:00

8 PM, Sat. July 3
ROY CHAMBERS
Metalwork/Found Object Sculptor
Art Exhibition
Chambers effectively erased any memory of Allen Jones' fetishistic fiber-glass nudes with his milk bar cow skull in The Raconteur's production of A Clockwork Orange. He'll be exhibiting said skull along with forty other found object sculptures, including the horrifying orthodontic headgear for JAW, a five minute play by Alex Dawson, featuring Jeff Maschi as a retired-boxer-cum-side-show-freak who can remove the eponymous body part (think Rocky meets The Elephant Man), fully staged during the art show. FREE! Comp wine. Art on sale at event.

8 PM, Tues, July 6
GREEN DRINKS
It all started in 1989 at a pub called the Slug and Lettuce in Northern London, in which a handful of eco-conscious mates pulled some tables together and drank some beer. The concept evolved into GREEN DRINKS and now it's global. Each city has an organizer who arranges meetings in bars and restaurants (providing the greenest beer possible, and by green we mean enviro-minded, not colored; in our case, Climax, locally brewed in Roselle Park). The featured talk is by Joe Schaffer, engineer and co-founder of Green Environmental Associates. He'll give a brief (10 minute) technology review of gray water recycling, rainwater down-cycling, and composting toilets with a regulatory and practical overview of their use in New Jersey/New York. Green Drinks meets in fifty countries from Argentina to Zambia. And now, METUCHEN! Come have a beer and get green. FREE!

8 PM, Thurs. July 8
REVOLUTIONARY READINGS
Revolutionary Readings is a project conceived, directed, and performed by an ensemble of young theatre artists. The event comprises readings from Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, which collects poetry, essays, and theatrical sketches by LGBTQ high school students. Edited by Amy Sonnie, the book won the 2001 School Library Journal's Adult Books for High School Students award, but has just been banned in several New Jersey school districts having been deemed "pornographic" by a faction of Glenn Beck's 9-12 Project. RR's mission is to raise awareness of this book and to generate social and political pressure to combat its regressive banning.

7:30 PM, Fri. July 9
LIKE TRAINS & TAXIS
w/special guests JORDAN & THE SPHINX
One part pop, one part soul, one part jazz, LIKE TRAINS & TAXIS is one of the most appealing bands I've seen in a long time. As many of you know, I once tended bar and booked music at a sweaty little jughouse in NB. Every Weds through Sat. we slid over the slate pool table to make room for bands like 3 Piece & Biscuit, a lusty quartet that played some of the best original soul I'd ever heard. Until now. Upon the recommendation of Raconteur volunteer Mallory (you know her, she's the one with the Gilda Gray haircut and the tattoo owl that looks like a pineapple), I went to see LT&T play a gig at George Street Playhouse last year (Mal was playing accordion in a different band on the same bill). Backed by bassist Owen Susmen and drummer Mike Del Priore, Chris Harris (who styles himself as a modern-day urban love prophet in the tradition of Marvin Gaye) sat at his keys, porkpie askance, dancing in his seat like Little Stevie and crooning jazz pop grooves reminiscent of Maze's brightest days.

JORDAN and the SPHINX: this indie folk foursome from Arkansas almost called themselves Gary & Stupid, and occasionally play under the name Hairy Truman. They like glockenspiels and ukes, jaw harps, and shakes. They wear white framed sunglasses that they stole, along with a squeeze bottle of Coppertone, from a sorority emblazoned blanket in Fort Lauderdale. They have big, bushy beards that remind their fans of lion manes and Back in Black had the first licks they ever locked themselves in their room to learn. Their live performances include antics that stop just short of crotch-smashing eggs between Paco's scissoring legs. They will NEVER defecate on stage and set it ablaze. They describe their energetic sound as Southern opera freak out and cite a guy named Bob as their biggest influence. FREE!

8 PM, Sat. July 31
SAMUEL SAINT THOMAS
Reading/Live Music
Preacher-cum-blues singer Sam St. Thom reads from his memoir of Pentecostal Pennsy, Frying Spam, and growls out a handful of corresponding steel town songs. A child fascinated by speaking in tongues, the butchery of a Quaker goat, the exorcism of a gay demon, and the impending doom of the Rapture, Thomas fetches the fowl and explores a boyhood driven by a curiosity for all the things they said would land him in the lake of fire. FREE! Comp wine.

JUNE/JULY 2010: Web Cam Jam; Treasure Hunt; Welles Week; What's Your Exit?; Toenes Craig & His Dubious Repertoire

2010-05-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

1 PM, Sun. June 6
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. 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. Web Cam Jam is more about the performers than the performance, but that doesn't mean you can't come and watch. NOTE: If you watched the Oscars last year, you heard Best Actress winner Kate Winslet mention this very same pub and the pickling contest her mother recently won there. Indeed, last April's Web Cam Jam, Kate's mom, Sally Winslet (now known as the Queen of Shallots), was in the foreground eating bangers and in January's Mr. Winslet sang the old broadside “Darlin’ Old Stick.” MUSICIANS WANTED! FREE! Comp cornbread (fresh from the oven)!

The only bookstore with a house band (the Roadside Graves), The Rac has hosted such music luminaries as Fugazi front man Ian MacKaye, Bouncing Souls front man Greg Attonito, poet/new wave punk Jim Caroll, 80s college radio darlings The Cucumbers, former High Times editor/GG Allin collaborator Mike Edison and his punk blues band Edison Rocket Train (featuring Boss Hog drummer Hollis Queens), and folk noir gangster John Wesley Harding, the first opening act for Bruce Springsteen in twenty years. Plus a slew of local bands: Like Trains and Taxis, Risk Relay, Glad Hearts, etc. YOU TOO CAN PLAY THE RAC! Your participation in the Web Cam Jam is your audition.

9:30 AM, Sat. June 12
2nd ANNUAL METUCHEN TREASURE HUNT
Ages 6 & up!
The Raconteur, in conjunction with the Metuchen Masonic Lodge (and What's the Scoop), is again sponsoring a Metuchen based treasure hunt! In keeping with the rollicking spirit of The Man who Would be King, Freemason Rudyard Kipling's fantastic tale of two masonic scoundrels who set off from 19th century British India in search of gold and adventure and end up as kings of Kafiristan, and The National Treasure, in which hoard hunter Benjamin Gates follows a series of cryptic clues to find an ancient cache intertwined with the arcane history of Freemasonry, young adventurers (boys and girls 1st through 5th grade) work in teams, following clues and unraveling a variety of knotty riddles as they move from one mysterious location to another (various stores and outdoor landmarks) within the town limits of Metuchen proper. Each cracked conundrum will lead players ever closer to the final treasure! Expect anagrams, number puzzles, and a brass plated, cylindrical device known as a Cryptex. Raconteur gift certificates awarded to all participants. To sign up, click HERE. Space is limited. The hunt is completely FREE. On the same morning, the Mt. Zion Masonic Lodge is also sponsoring a Pancake Breakfast starting at 8am. Bring an empty belly! Start your adventure on a full stomach! Any questions, or if you would like to help, please click HERE.

8 PM, Fri, June 25
ROBERT KAPLOW
Introducing/Screening
ME & ORSON WELLES
NPR alum Robert Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles, a beautifully rendered and hilarious valentine to the burly thespian, was recently turned into a movie by indie filmmaker Richard Linklater (Dazed & Confused, School of Rock). Click HERE for film site. Set in 1937 New York, Kaplow's novel tells of a teenager hired to star in Welles' production of Julius Caesar. The film starred Zac Efron, Claire Danes, and Christian Mckay as Welles. The New York Times described McKay's performance as one of "seductive power and full bore charm," Roger Ebert called the picture, "one of the best movies about theater I've ever seen," the New Yorker's David Denby included it in his "Top Ten Films of the Year," and The San Francisco Chronicle, said: "Christian McKay, as Orson Welles in Me and Orson Welles, gives what I believe is the most exact and uncanny screen portrayal of a historical figure, EVER." Kaplow will introduce the film with a short reading from his book and follow the screening with an onstage conversation with The Star-Ledger's Peter Filichia. Find out how a cantankerous bouncer at a local New Brunswick band bar discovered the unagented actor playing Welles (seriously) and what exactly the "O" stands for in Robert O. Kaplow. Books on sale at The Raconteur and The Forum. Tickets $15. On sale online and at The Rac June 8. Presented in conjunction with The Forum Theatre.

Please Note: the event is at The Forum Theater, 314 Main Street, Metuchen, NOT The Raconteur. WELLES WEEK kicks of Tues with double feature screenings of beautifully restored 35mm prints of Touch of Evil, The Stranger, and The Third Man! Click HERE for schedule (show times TBA).

8 PM, Sat. June 26
WHAT'S YOUR EXIT?
A Literary Detour through New Jersey
Reading/Signing
We're called The Garden State because our soil is so rich that no matter how much we pave it or waste it, the land still calls to us. This recent anthology, edited by Alicia A. Beale and Joe Vallese, features new and previously published work from over 40 writers who get in tune with those echoes. Among the book’s contributors are Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Perrotta, Robert Pinsky, Jason Biggs, Alicia Ostriker, Paul Lisicky, and Sung J. Woo. Released by indie publisher Word Riot. I make no promises, but I'm told guest readers may include any or all of the emboldened names. FREE! Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Thurs. July 1
TOENES CRAIG
Reading/Signing
HIS DUBIOUS REPERTOIRE
If you've seen those toxic green/neon pink chapbooks in the shop, you may be familiar with Toenes' work. He's a poet with an affinity for hot colors and dubious prose. FREE! Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event. Please note: this is a rental and, accordingly, The Raconteur makes no claims regarding caliber.

MAY 2010: OSCAR winner Pam Boll; Creep Cycle; Chris Grabenstein; Calouri/Kaplan; 2010 Oscar Winner Roger Ross Williams & Prudence; The Backpockets

2010-04-24T09:11:00.001-07:00

8 PM, Sat. May 8
Academy Award Winning Filmmaker
PAMELA BOLL
Introducing & Screening
WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?
Georgia O'Keefe. Edith Wharton. Janis Joplin. Emily Dickinson. Amelia Earhart. None of these women had children. Who Does She Think She Is?, the new documentary by Oscar winning filmmaker Pamela Boll (Born into Brothels), explores the competing demands of muse and mothering and the struggle to make art while nurturing life. The film, which follows five fierce women who refuse to choose, is a call to arms (rise up ladies! with your chisels and brushes and pens!) and ultimately demonstrates that creativity and care-giving are not mutually exclusive, but deeply connected. Followed by an on stage interview btwn Ms. Boll and Emmy Award winning cultural arts journalist John Bathke (News 12's "On the Scene").For trailer, click HERE. Bring your Mom! What better way to spend Mother's Day weekend? 6:30 - 7:30 PM Raconteur Cocktail Reception w/Ms. Boll. Join Oscar winner Pam Boll @ The Raconteur (431 Main Street, Metuchen, NJ) for some complimentary vino and up-close conversation before the movie.The reception is FREE! for Raconteur Society Members. $10 suggested donation for non-members.

7:30 PM, Thurs. May 13
JOHN HAMMEL'S SERIOUS FUN
The Creep Song Cycle
John Hammel (vocals/harmonica/percussion), Anthony LaMort (keyboards), Michael Cohen (bass. Classic rock and soul strung together in a thematic song cycle Opening set of poetry and free form improvisation by Hammel/LaMort/Cohen. FREE Will Donation. Please Note: this is a rental (budding bands, authors, and filmmakers regularly rent our space).

8 PM, Tues. May 18
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN
Reading/Signing
ROLLING THUNDER: A John Ceepak Mystery
Trojan Man Grabenstein continues his chronicle of the NJ beach dick, rounding out his Ceepak six pack with a can of whup ass called ROLLING THUNDER. A prominent citizen dies on a brand new roller coaster's first trip around the tracks. Was it a heart attack or did it just look like one? And why is Ceepak's skeevy father back in Sea Haven? Hang on for the read of your life!

A former improvisational comedian (he and Bruce Willis were in the same Greenwich Village comedy troupe in the early 1980s), Grabenstein spent almost twenty years writing commercials. He was, perhaps most famously, the copy writer who created Trojan Man. His writing talent was first discovered by James Patterson, the Creative Director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising. He won the Anthony Award for "Best First Mystery" for his debut TILT A WHIRL, the first in a series of John Ceepak stories to be set "Down The Shore" in a New Jersey tourist town called Sea Haven. The second book, MAD MOUSE, was called one of the "Ten Best Mysteries of 2006" by Kirkus. The New York Daily News called the fourth Ceepak book, HELL HOLE, a "must-read." FREE! Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Fri. May 21
CALOURI(violin)/KAPLAN(guitar)
Live Music
400 years of music: from Gustav Holst to classic Zep (Led, that is), with detours into Celtic folk and Victorian dance hall. Steve Kaplan and Paul Calouri bring their love of traditional folk, classical music and acoustic jazz into sharp focus by using truly acoustic instruments to perform, exploring sonic possibilities without the "clutter" of other instrumentation. Their approach to the music is deceptively simple: wring out as much emotion as possible without losing the essential structure of the pieces they're playing. FREE! Complimentary wine.

8 PM, Sat. May 22
2010 OSCAR Winning Director
ROGER ROSS WILLIAMS
Introducing/Screening MUSIC BY PRUDENCE
Followed by a Q&A with Williams and a concert by PRUDENCE!
Roger Ross Williams, the first African American filmmaker to win the Academy Award, introduces and screens the film for which he won the Oscar. "Music by Prudence" follows Prudence Mahena, a severely disabled Zimbabwean woman born into extreme poverty and believed to be the product of witchcraft, who transcends hatred and superstition to form an Afro-fusion band called Liyan, in which all eight members are disabled. The screening will be followed by an onstage interview/conversation between News 12's John Bathke and Williams, an audience Q&A, and a concert by Prudence herself! who's in from Zimbabwe for a slew of interviews with Williams (O Magazine, CNN, NPR, Gail King Show, and pending appearances on The View and Oprah) and the HBO premiere of the film. Admission: $20. To buy a ticket online, click HERE. To see the trailer, click HERE.THE REFECTORY (adjacent to the First Presbyterian Church), 270 Woodbridge Ave, Metuchen, NJ 08840

COCKTAIL RECEPTION FOLLOWING THE EVENT
Join 2010 Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams and Prudence Mahena for complimentary wine, up close conversation, and an exclusive a cappella concert AFTER the event. Attendance limited to 65! Cash menu and bar. Novitas Lounge, 25 Pearl Street, Metuchen, NJ. 10:00 PM - 11:00 PM. Admission: $15.00. To buy a reception ticket online, click HERE. Reception tickets available at The Raconteur starting Sat 5/15.

8 PM, Tues. May 25
THE BACKPOCKETS
Live Music
The Back Pockets is three girls, two boys, and one old geezer who looks like a cross between Dusty Hill and the guy with ripped flannel elbows drinking brekkie shots of Ten High who just stole your smokes. They play banjos and bongos, fiddles and flutes. Sometimes they lay electric guitars across their laps and saw on them with a violin bows. The girls dress like flappers, acrobats, or, on occasion, the Daryl Hannah android from Bladerunner. The boys wear Mexican wrestling masks and fencing helmets. They like sidewalks at night, homemade things, and carnies. They frequently rig and engage tightropes and trapezes during their shows, and have played whole songs hanging from their knees. The sound is folk, but the experience is Stomp. They're painters as well as musicians. They hail from Atlanta, GA. They sometimes describe themselves as Jefferson Airplane meets Blue Man Group. FREE! Complimentary wine. CDs on sale at the event (you remember their CDs, they come in little canvas pockets embroidered with doodles fastened with Velcro).

APRIL/MAY 2010: Noah Baumbach; Qtet; D&D Tournament; John Ciardi; It Ends in a G; Lenny Bruce; Oscar Winner Pam Boll; Myra Ciardi

2010-04-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Fri. April 2
KICKING & SCREAMING
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Film Screening
The heavy anxiety that takes center stage in Noah Baumbach's just released Greenberg and his Oscar nominated Squid and the Whale is already waiting in the wings in his stingingly funny first feature. One of the highlights of the nineties indie film scene, Kicking and Screaming mines J. D. Salinger territory (to cite a writer often linked to screenplaymate Wes Anderson--they co-wrote Mr. Fox--as well as to Baumbach), speaking directly to a generation of would-be adults unable to reconcile their hermetic educational experience with workaday responsibility, and posing the eternal question: where do we go from here? FREE! Comp wine.

8 PM, Fri. April 9
QTET
Live Music
The music the Qtet plays is jazz-based but reflects the wide diversity of its co-leaders, Ware & Kaplan. Vibraphonist Bill Ware toured with Steely Dan on their live comeback tour in the mid 90s and was a founding member of the ground-breaking acid jazz group the Groove Collective, and the jazz/theater group the Jazz Passengers, which often featured ex-Blondie singer Debbie Harry. Saxophonist Mike Kaplan currently leads his 9 piece horn-proud jazz unit the Mike Kaplan Nonet, and has performed with the Joneses, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and the Chico Mendoza Latin Jazz Dream Band. Kaplan has had original arrangements and compositions performed and/or recorded by the Composers Big Band, Juan Oliva y sus Progressiva, and Orquesta Royal. Also with bassist Saadi Zain and drummer Lou Petto.FREE. Comp wine.

12 (noon) - 10 PM, Sat. April 10
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ROLEPLAYING MARATHON
Hosted by Peter & Ian Fairclough (his 13 year old son)
Beginners Welcome! (Ages 10 & up)
Before ergonomic gaming consoles and wireless controllers utilizing Bluetooth technology, there was twenty-sided dice and octagonal graph paper. Before Xbox 360, there was D&D. When I was ten, my mother and stepfather moved my brother and I from suburban NJ to a seven hundred acre ranch in Alabama. Apparently feeling we should be further isolated, they took us, every summer, cross country to Nebraska, where we camped and lived in a hybrid house/horse trailer so they could train gundogs on prairie grouse. It was here my brother and I discovered D&D, playing it the trailer's drop table, trying to kill those long flat days while our parents fieldworked and trialed the dogs. Though our D&D backgrounds differ (us, ten and twelve, on the plains of Nebraska; him, British, early twenties, throwing extravagant "D&D Fancy Dress Parties" in Eastern England), when Fairclough expressed interest in organizing an open-door D&D marathon, I immediately offered the shop as a venue. And with its museumized charms and medieval clutter (pig-faced helmets, basket-hilted swords), what better venue for the dice based fantasy game? FREE to participate (natch).

8 PM, Sat. April 17
FIVE BANDS hosted by IT ENDS w/a G
Live Music
Can't say much except the front man for the organizing band has an Abe Lincoln beard and thick black glasses and sort of looks like a Civil War Buddy Holly, and one of our shop volunteers, a twenty-something muppety hipster I call O' Lucky Man after the Lindsay Anderson film (his last name is Lukman), is playing a short set, and it will likely be loud, and crowded with those kids you usually see boarding (skate, not water) in the Pearl Street parking lot.

7 PM, Weds, April 21
LENNY'S BACK! (& Boy is He Pissed)
A One Man Show Starring General Hospital's RONNIE MARMO
I know, groan, General Hospital. But c'mon, it's LENNY BRUCE! And maybe this dude's no Dustin, but he looks just like Lenny. Immortalized on the cover of Sgt. Pepper and in songs by Simon & Garfunkel, Nico, Frank Zappa, and Bob Dylan ("he was bad, he was the brother you never had"), Lenny Bruce fancied himself an oral jazzman and worshiped the gods of Spontaneity, Candor and Free Association. His tongue would often outrun his mind and he would say things he didn't plan to say, things that surprised him, delighted him, cracked him up. His provocative stand-up paved the way for such comic greats as Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Robin William, all of whom cite Mr. Bruce as their primary influence. Recently performed in Hollywood to rave reviews ("The performance is flawless," Teller (of Penn & Teller); "Thoughtfully funny...poignant," L.A. Times; "Perfectly paced," LA Weekly, LENNY'S BACK moves to NJ for a three day run at Edison Valley Playhouse (where Ronnie got his stage start fifteen years ago). Why? Who knows. Something to do with a soap opera convention at the Meadowlands Hilton. But Ronnie is doing a TEASER of the show for FREE at The Raconteur before the EVP opening on April 22.

8 PM, Sat. May 8
Academy Award Winning Filmmaker
PAMELA BOLL
Introducing & Screening
WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?
Georgia O'Keefe. Edith Wharton. Janis Joplin. Emily Dickinson. Amelia Erhardt. None of these women had children. Who Does She Think She Is?, the new documentary by Oscar winning filmmaker Pamela Boll (Born into Brothels), explores the competing demands of muse and mothering and the struggle to make art while nuturing life. The film, which follows five fierce women who refuse to choose, is a call to arms (rise up ladies! with your chisels and brushes and pens!) and ultimately demonstrates that creativity and caregiving are not mutually exclusive, but deeply connected. Followed by a Q&A with Ms. Boll and video updates of the five mother/artists in the film. For trailer, click HERE. Bring your Mom! What better way to spend Mother's Day weekend? Cooler than a pot of poppies! General Admission: $15 (tickets on sale soon). Note: Screening is at The Forum NOT The Raconteur.

Date TBA
Myra Ciardi
The late John Ciardi's daughter discusses her famous father. More info soon

MARCH 2010: Svankmajer's ALICE; Welcome Back Kotter's Bobby Hegyes

2010-03-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Fri. March 19
ALICE
Directed by Jan Svankmajer
Film Screening
Think Burton is gloomy? Well, comparing him to Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Svankmajer is like comparing Chuck Jones (the creator of Pepe Le Pew) to, say, Chuck Palahniuk. Svankmajer, previously acclaimed for his short subjects, made his feature-film debut with ALICE, a grotesque adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic starring Kristyna Kohoutová, the only human character in the film. The other roles are variously filled by animated taxidermy, disarticulated skeletons, clay figurines, puppets, and slabs of dancing meat (yes, meat). After falling asleep beside a stream, Alice follows a stuffed rabbit (not stuffed in a plush, propped-on-your-pillow sort of way, but stuffed in a shot dead, posed-on-peice-of-wood sort of way), bristling with mounting pins and trailing sawdust, into a nightmarish world where she encounters a menagerie of other stop-motion monsters (including a tube sock with teeth), all of which might have emerged from the triptychs of Heironymus Bosch. It's not 3-D, but it's one of the most inventive films I've ever seen. Not for kids (unless you're progressive, arty parents and your children are fearless and sleep without nightlights or those sticky glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling). FREE! Comp wine.

8 PM, Fri. March 26
Former Sweathog ROBERT HEGYES
Q&A
Since my very first associations with Metuchen I've heard marveled murmurs about three celebrities with erstwhile Metuchen addresses: John Ciardi, a poet/translator so popular he was on Johnny Carson twice; David Copperfield, a magician famous for epic stunts like disappearing the Statue of Liberty and levitating over the Grand Canyon; and Bobby Hegyes, best known for his portrayal of Juan Epstein in the 1970s television series Welcome Back, Kotter. Ciardi's long deceased. Copperfield lives on a secluded Musha Cay island. But Hegyes, after a thirty-five year absence, has come home. Following his five year run on Kotter, Hegyes starred as series regular "Manny Esposito" in the Emmy Award-winning drama, Cagney & Lacey, and has since appeared in more than 30 television shows, including Saturday Night Live with Quentin Tarantino (who, on the set of Pulp Fiction, reportedly sat on the floor and played the Kotter board game with Travolta). Hegyes will talk about the Kotter years, Cag & Lace, his enduring friendship with John Travolta (he's the godfather of his daughter), and babysitting Bon Jovi (they're cousins). Plus assorted Kotter memorabilia, including a foot tall Epstein action figure and Hegyes' pride and joy, his Mad Magazine cover. FREE. Comp Wine.

8 PM, Tues, March 30
BEARCUBES (with special guest)
Live Music
Known for the distinct penetrating sound of their twin oboes (an instrument that sounds sort of like a duck, if a duck were a songbird), The Bearcubes' deceptively straightforward music(literate, witty lyrics and catchy compositions) embody timeless qualities of humanity, optimism, emotional insight and a boundless sense of humor, untainted by cynicism or transient notions of hipness. Essentially poppy songs played by folk instruments. Not cool enough for you? Well, maybe their too cool. Maybe they're so cool, their hot. Free. Comp wine. CDs on sale at the event. FREE!

FEB/MARCH 2010: HELP! A Concert for Haitian Relief; BENN @ RAC

2010-02-26T10:13:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Sat. Feb 27
HELP!: A Concert for Haitian Relief
Featuring The British Invasion (more than just The Beatles) and emceed by yours truly
I've never seen The British Invasion perform and, generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of tribute bands (Sack Blabbath aside), but Hard Days Night is a favorite flick, and these pseudo-Merseybeaters have opened for the likes of Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Glen Burtnik, The Rascals, and John Cafferty. They cover everything from Beatles to Zep, have played everywhere from Six Flags to CBGBs, and keyboardist Mick Seeley was a member of Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes. And hey, it's for a good cause. The Forum Theater, 314 Main Street, Metuchen, NJ 08840. Tickets: $20.00 (available at the Raconteur). All proceeds go to Episcopal Relief and Development, a charitable group with boots on the ground in Haiti.

8 PM, Sat. March 6
BENN @ RAC
Readings/Live Music
In keeping with my previous efforts to bring accomplished Bennies to Metuchen (Pultizer Prize finalist David Gates, South African author Sheila Kohler, travel writer Rolf Potts), I've extended an open call to my fellow MFAers. Bennington is a place where the students are almost as accomplished as the faculty and this weekend seven of my Bennington College colleagues will be descending on The Raconteur from various Seaboard states for a night of poetry, music, and prose. The evening will include such illustrious guests as Steve Lafond, a roller derby mascot (seriously, his day job has him wearing a red astronautical jumpsuit and elaborate Planet of the Apes-style latex to play a Soviet chimp called Drago) married to a pig-tailed, ink-armed skater nicknamed "Monster," who writes stories inspired by his life in monkey make-up and the rink; Willa Carroll, an acclaimed Manhattan modern dancer-cum-poet recently published in Tin House and labeled an "angel who stirs up trouble" by the Village Voice, whose onstage unicorn-horned wrestling was praised by the New York Times; Jeremy Oldfield, an apropriately surnamed former farmer once dedicated to rejuvenating fallow land who sings songs about, among other things, compost; and myself, reading a very funny story which begins with the kneeslapper, "When I was ten my stepfather hit me in the head with an axe." Also with Jennifer Acker, Jamie-Lee Josselyn, Robert "Vee" Hansmann, and Sue Repko. Plus a surprise guest. Free. Comp wine.

UPCOMING: National Book Critics Circle finalist Martha A. Sandweiss (Passing Strange); Raconteur Haitian Benefit w/Mike Edison; Oscar winning documentarian Pamela T. Boll screening her latest doc "Who Does She Think She Is?"; literary rappers FUSE; D&D Marathon; scrap metal sculptor Roy Chambers (of Clockwork Orange cow skull fame); STEREO (Chris Pastras & Jason Lee) skateboard exhibit; Mutate #9601 (a one man show about the comic book character Wolverine); "League of Gentleman" radio play

FEB 2010: Web Cam Jam, more events TBA

2010-02-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

11 AM, Sun. Feb 7
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 mean you can't come and 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 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 last year, you heard Best Actress winner Kate Winslet mention this very same pub and the pickling contest her mother recently won there. Indeed, last April's Web Cam Jam, Kate's mom, Sally Winslet (now known as the Queen of Shallots), was in the foreground eating bangers and in January's Mr. Winslet sang the old broadside “Darlin’ Old Stick.”

MUSICIANS WANTED! FREE! Comp cornbread (fresh from the oven)!

The only bookstore with a house band (the Roadside Graves), The Rac has hosted such music luminaries as Fugazi front man Ian MacKaye, Bouncing Souls front man Greg Attonito, poet/new wave punk Jim Caroll, 80s college radio darlings The Cucumbers, former High Times editor/GG Allin collaborator Mike Edison and his punk blues band Edison Rocket Train (featuring Boss Hog drummer Hollis Queens), and folk noir gangster John Wesley Harding, the first opening act for Bruce Springsteen in twenty years. Plus a slew of local bands: Like Trains and Taxis, Risk Relay, Glad Hearts, etc. YOU TOO CAN PLAY THE RAC! Your participation in the Web Cam Jam is your audition.

JAN 2010: Sherlock Holmes Radio Play, Web Cam Jam, Sheila Kohler, Blues Singer Carol Sellick

2009-12-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Sat. & Sun. Jan 2 & 3
THE FINAL PROBLEM
By Arthur Conan Doyle
Theatrical Adaptation by Alex Dawson
With Carlyle Owens, Jeff Maschi, and Laurence Mintz
Like your Sherlock Holmes bucking and brawling (a la Guy Ritchie's flagrant makeover)? Or perhaps you prefer your detective more faithfully portrayed. Either way, this loyal adaptation of Holmes' most famous dustup is for you! With several attempts on his life having already taken place, Holmes asks Watson to accompany him on a roundabout Continental "holiday" designed to thwart the relentless pursuit of the Napoleon of crime himself, Professor Moriarty. The story, which was to be, as the title implies, Doyle's last, culminates with a fateful square off at "a dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam" known as Reichenbach Falls. Although Moriarty appeared in only of one of the sixty Doyle adventures featuring the consulting detective, Holmes' attitude towards the criminal genius gained him the popular impression of being Holmes' arch-nemesis. Indeed, as "The Final Problem" clearly states, Holmes spent months in a private battle against Moriarty's criminal operations. "Never have I risen to such a height, and never have I been so hard pressed by an opponent...if I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit." Period Costumes! Theatrical Lighting! Live Sound Effects! FREE!

Please Note: Our staged radio plays are among our most popular events i.e. in order to guarantee yourself a seat, RSVP w/the number in your party and the night (Sat. or Sun.) you'd like to attend. Ages 9 & up welcome!

8 PM, Fri. Jan 22
Sheila Kohler
Reading/Signing
BECOMING JANE EYRE
As many of may know, I'm getting my MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Bennington College. Ms. Kohler, who I hosted at the shop in August, is one of my professors and I had the pleasure of hearing her read again at my January residency. Being South African, she pronounces her English phonemes with a strong Dutch inflection, which makes her an absolutely exquisite reader. It's been said that actor Christopher Plummer could captivate an audience by reading the phone book and, indeed, so could Sheila. But instead she'll be reading from her brilliant new novel BECOMING JANE EYRE. The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children dead. A father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate. Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent. So unfolds the story of the Brontë sisters. Delicately unraveling the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, BECOMING JANE EYRE will appeal to fans of literary fiction and, of course, the millions of readers who adore Jane Eyre. BECOMING JANE EYRE is Kohler's 10th book. Her novel Cracks, a feverish mash-up of Lord of Flies and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was recently turned into a film starring Eva Green. FREE! Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event. To read the recent NY Times review of Becoming Jane Eyre, click HERE. To watch Sheila's August reading at The Rac, click HERE.

8 PM, Fri. Jan 29
BLIND LEMON CELLO
Featuring Carol Selick and guitarist Felix Buccellato. With cellist Eric Jorgenson.
With a keen instinct for finding suitable material, Selicks's wonderfully lush, blues-rimmed voice, Buccellato's sinuous slide guitar, and Jorgenson's aching cello wrap themselves around a a dozen or so potent covers culled from a shrewd mix of writers ranging from Memphis Minnie to Bonnie Raitt. Blusion--it all grows out of the blues, just doesn't always end there.FREE! Comp wine.

HOLIDAY PARTY TONIGHT !! SNOW OR SHINE

2009-12-20T09:42:00.000-08:00

Like gold medal boudin noir? How about prunes soaked overnight in cognac? Or a terrine of apples and pig tongue set in a warm bath and cooked in a gentle oven? No? Well, how about cookies? Lots and lots of cookies...

7:30 PM, Sun. Dec 20
THE RACONTEUR HOLIDAY PARTY
Featuring Robert Kaplow.
NPR alum Robert Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles, a beautifully rendered and hilarious valentine to the burly thespian, was recently turned into a movie by indie filmmaker Richard Linklater (Dazed & Confused). Set in 1937 New York, Kaplow's novel tells of a teenager hired to star in Welles' production of Julius Caesar. Opening wide in a week, the film stars Zac Efron, Claire Danes, and Christian Mckay as Welles. The New York Times described McKay's performance as one of "seductive power and full bore charm," Roger Ebert called the picture, "one of the best movies about theater I've ever seen," and the New Yorker's David Denby just included it in his "Top Ten Films of the Year." The most recent review, from The San Francisco Chronicle, said: "Christian McKay, as Orson Welles in Me and Orson Welles, gives what I believe is the most exact and uncanny screen portrayal of a historical figure, EVER." (the buzz is that McKay will snag an Oscar nom). Naturally, Kaplow will read and sign, but he'll also narrate a slide show of unseen production/opening night photographs and field questions about the book and film. Find out how a cantankerous bouncer at a local New Brunswick band bar discovered the unagented actor playing Welles (seriously) and what exactly the "O" stands for in Robert O. Kaplow. The film's period music has also received a lot of praise and Kaplow promises to burn a CD of swing hits from the film to soundtrack our party. Books on sale at event. Signed books make great holiday gifts! To read the Times review of the film, click HERE.

Expect a variety of spiked nogs, puissant punches, and a withering concoction called Yukon Cornelius, along with a range of baked, roasted and boiled dishes (capon anyone?), marinated tench, and an edible lifelike scene sculpted in colored marzipan. Plus Cream Wafers, Date Drops, Honey-Filled Biscuits, Cinnamon Stars, Zucker Hutchen, Fattigmands Bakkels, Drumkake, and Buttery Nut Rounds. FREE!

NOV/DEC 2009: The Earrings of Madame De; Bluegrass; MUTTS; Ivy Pochoda; Swan Dive; Memoir of Mozambique; Me & Orson Welle

2009-11-21T13:55:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Fri. Nov 27
THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...
Film Screening
Introduced by Ophuls scholar Laurence Mintz
To celebrate our recent influx of Criterions, we're screening this sumptuously restored print of French master Max Ophul's most cherished work. The Earrings of Madame De...is an emotionally profound, cinematographically adventurous tale of false opulence and tragic romance. When the aristocratic woman know only as Madame de (the extraordinary Danielle Darrieux) sells her earrings, unbeknownst to her husband (Charles Boyer), in order to pay personal debts, she sets of a chain reaction, the financial and carnal consequences of which can only end in despair. Ophuls adapts Louise de Vilmorin's incisive fin de siecle novel with virtuosic camera work so elegant and precise it's been called the equal of that of Orson Welles. Followed by a discussion. FREE!

8 PM, Sat. Nov 28
ACROSS THE STREET
Live Music
In addition to original blues, gospel, and bluegrass tunes, you'll hear fingerstyle covers of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Reed, Merle Haggard, and Hank Williams. Expect some outstanding slide work and a handful of banjo jokes that may only be funny to pickers (what's the difference between a banjo player and a little boy? One knows his pick, the other picks his...well, you get the idea).

2 PM, Sun. Dec 6
MUTTS creator PATRICK MCDONNELL
Reading/Signing/Chalk Talk
In 1994, McDonnell created the award-winning comic strip Mutts, which now appears in more than 700 newspapers in 20 countries and has been anthologized in books all over the world. It was described by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz as "one of the best comic strips of all time." A coffee table book of his life and work, Mutts: The Comic Art of Patrick McDonnell, was published in 2003. In 2005, McDonnell wrote his first children's book, The Gift of Nothing, which was a New York Times best seller. The Best of Mutts, a ten year celebration of the strip introduced by acclaimed novelist Alice Sebold. In 2007. McDonnell again returned to the New York Times bestseller list with Hug Time, featuring a kitten named Jules who goes around the world hugging endangered species. His sixth children's book, WAG, a tale of wiggling and waggling, fwipping and fwapping, and GUARDIANS of BEING, a collaboration with Oprah endorsed spiritual teacher Eckart Tolle, were just released this fall. All of his books are printed on recycled paper. He is involved with many animal and environmental charities, and is a member of the Board of Directors for both The Humane Society of the United States and the Fund for Animals. Books on sale at the event. Books on sale at event. FREE!

8 PM, Fri. Dec 11
IVY POCHODA
Reading/Signing
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING
In keeping with my previous efforts to bring accomplished Bennies to Metuchen (Pultizer Prize finalist David Gates, South African author Sheila Kohler, travel writer Rolf Potts), I've invited Ivy Pochoda to read at The Rac. Bennington is a place where the students are almost as accomplished as the faculty, and Ivy, like Rolf, is a fellow MFA candidate. She was in my workshop during the June residency and we were teammates during a softball game played on the Commons Lawn (Prose vs. Poetry). Here's the intro paragraph from her recent Vanity Fair interview: "Ivy Pochoda is the best squash player in history to ever to pen a novel. Pochoda, a sharpshooting southpaw, grew up at the Heights Casino in Brooklyn, played No. 1 at Harvard for three years (where she majored in classical Greek and English), and won the national intercollegiate title her senior year. After college, she was based in Amsterdam and played on the international pro tour, reaching a world ranking of 38. For many years she was one of the top U.S. players, coming in third at the nationals in 2007. Last month, St. Martin’s Press published her debut novel, THE ART OF DISAPPEARING. Following a magician and his muse in Las Vegas and Amsterdam, it brillantly blurs the line between reality and the imagination." ART, which has been compared to The Time Traveler's Wife, has been called "wonderful and wonder-filled," by The New York Daily News, "Terrific!," by Elle Magazine, and "Wistful," by The New York Post. Author Peter Hedges (What's Eating Gilbert Grape) said, "It's a magical story, full of passion, heartbreak, and wonder." FREE! Books on sale at event. To read Ivy's VF interview, click HERE.

8 PM, Sat. Dec 12
MICHAEL BURKE
Reading/Signing
SWAN DIVE
This is the first novel by Michael Burke, a sculptor famous for silvery, spare pieces filled with singular geometries. Burke, a son of the prolific literary critic, philosopher, and writer Kenneth Burke, grew up in a radically creative, intellectual household. The elder Burke called himself an “agrobohemian” and moved his family to northwestern New Jersey when Michael was young. Musicians, writers, and artists visited frequently, including poet William Carlos Williams, novelist Ralph Ellison (who read excerpts from what would become Invisible Man on the back lawn), and literary critic Malcolm Cowley, a longtime family friend who entertained with bawdy songs after dinner. There was no electricity, running water, or telephone, but they did have an Alexander Calder in the outhouse. “He made us a holder for the toilet paper,” Michael Burke says. “It was one of his bent-wire hands, with the middle finger raised." In SWAN DIVE, Burke has shown a remarkable ability to connect contemporary hardboiled crime tropes with ancient mythology (the nude-nuzzling swan on the cover telegraphs the Greek conceit of his debut).The result is sexy, thought-provoking, insightful, and a damned good read. FREE! Books on sale at event. Signed books make great holiday gifts!

8 PM, Thurs. Dec 17
DOUGLAS RODGERS
Reading/Signing
THE LAST RESORT: A MEMOIR of ZIMBABWE
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, travel writer Douglas Rogers escaped a dull future clerking at his parent's game farm/backpacker lodge for far-flung adventures abroad. But when Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim white-owned land and Rogers' parents were caught in the cross fire, everything changed. Lyn and Ros, the owners of Drifters–one of the most popular budget resorts in the country–found their home and resort under siege, their friends and neighbors expelled, and their lives in danger. But instead of leaving, as their son pleads with them to do, they haul out a shotgun and decide to stay. On returning to the country of his birth, Rogers finds his home transformed: pot has replaced acres of pruned white roses; hookers, not backpackers, occupy the beds; and soldiers, spies, and teenage diamond dealers guzzle beer at the bar. Rogers' decision to write about his parents' lodge and the people who find refuge there as violence erupts and the economy turns catastrophic brings him close to all kinds of people, black and white, from war veterans and politicians to farmers and squatters. Travelogue, adventure yarn, political intrigue, tragedy, and high-wire journalism, Heart of Darkness by way of Groucho Marx, THE LAST RESORT is a corrosively funny love story about the author and his homeland, Zimbabwe. She is by turns ineffably beautiful, unspeakably hideous, insanely rich, desperately poor, democratic, brutally autocratic, violent, corrupt, dysfunctional, and absurd, even though, in person, her people seem to be, one and all, hardscrabble heroes and survivors. FREE! Books on sale at the event.

7:30 PM, Sun. Dec 20
THE RACONTEUR CHRISTMAS PARTY
Featuring Robert Kaplow.
NPR alum Robert Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles, a beautifully rendered and hilarious valentine to the burly thespian, was recently turned into a movie by indie filmmaker Richard Linklater (Dazed & Confused). Set in 1937 New York, Kaplow's novel tells of a teenager hired to star in Welles' production of Julius Caesar. Opening wide in a week, the film stars Zac Efron, Claire Danes, and Christian Mckay as Welles. The New York Times described McKay's performance as one of "seductive power and full bore charm," Roger Ebert called the picture, "one of the best movies about theater I've ever seen," and the New Yorker's David Denby included it in his "Top Ten Films of the Year." The most recent review, from The San Francisco Chronicle, said: "Christian McKay, as Orson Welles in Me and Orson Welles, gives what I believe is the most exact and uncanny screen portrayal of a historical figure, EVER." Meet Kaplow and find out how a cantankerous bouncer at a local New Brunswick bar cast the man playing Welles. Naturally, Kaplow will read and sign, but he'll also narrate a slide show of unseen production/opening night photographs. Books on sale at event. To read the Times review of the film, click HERE. Plus: food, wine, and egg nog marbled with gold swirls of Barbancourt. (The film's period music has also received a lot of praise and Kaplow has promised to burn a CD of swing songs from the film to soundtrack our party). FREE!Signed books make great holiday gifts!

Sheila Kohler (Fri. Jan 22)

NOV 2009: McCarter's Emily Man; Arts/Crafts Fair; Still Tickin' (Clockwork doc); Postively Main Street; Travel Writer Rolf Potts; O' Lucky Men;

2009-11-02T10:35:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Fri. Nov 6
EMILY MANN
Playwright/Artistic Director of the McCarter Theater
Reading/Signing
MRS. PACKARD & TESTIMONIES
Recently selected as one of the 101 most influential people in the Garden State by New Jersey Monthly, Emily Mann, now in her nineteenth season as the artistic director and playwright in residence at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, has brought fame and notoriety (and even a Tony Award) to the university theater program. Mann, 56, has overseen 90 productions at McCarter—including shows from playwrights such as Edward Albee, Joyce Carol Oates, and Nilo Cruz. She has directed Jimmy Smitts in Anna of the Tropics, Amanda Plumber in Uncle Vanya (which she also adapted), Avery Brooks in The Cherry Orchard (also adapted), Frances McDormand and Linda Hunt in Three Sisters, Dylan McDermott in The Glass Menagerie, and Rosemary Harris in All Over (for which she received an Obie). In addition to several other acclaimed Broadway plays, Ms. Mann wrote/directed Having our Say, from the book by Sarah and Elizabeth Delaney, which had its premiere at McCarter prior to a successful Tony-nominated run on Broadway and a national tour. Her new play, Mrs. Packard, premiered at McCarter in May 2008. A recipient of the prestigious Hull-Warriner Award, the Edward Albee Last Frontier Directing Award, and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Princeton University, Ms. Mann is a member of the Dramatists Guild and serves on its Council. Both Ms. Packard and Testimonies, a collection of four plays, will be on sale at the event. Click HERE for more info regarding the McCarter Theater. FREE! Complimentary wine

8 PM, Sat. Nov. 7
STILL TICKIN’: The Return of Clockwork Orange
Documentary Film Screening
A Clockwork Orange drew record audiences for nearly a year before Warner Brothers and Stanley Kubrick (who was troubled by the extreme, nation-wide reaction to the movie) abruptly withdrew it from British distribution. Popular belief was that several vicious copycat attacks led Kubrick to rescind the film, but, in this rarely seen BBC documentary on the ban-and-return (27 years later) of the cult classic, his widow, Christine, confirmed rumors that Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange on police advice, after violent threats were made against him and his family. FREE! (Natch)

Got Clocked? Orange you glad you did? We'd love to hear your feedback. Send us your review of The Raconteur/MCC co-production of A Clockwork Orange!

8 PM, Sat. Nov 14 (that's this Sat.)
POSITIVELY MAIN STREET
Hosted by JIM TESTA
Live Music w/John Raido and Jonathan Andrew. Plus picking prodigy, 15 year old Kaitlyn Raido (the best uke picker since George Harrison)! Musicians from all over New Jersey jam locally. Hosted by celebrated music zinester/Jersey Beat editor Jim Testa. Testa published the first issue of his Jersey Beat in 1982. It covers a wide cross section of the Garden State music scene, but most particularly Punk and its many off-shoots, including Hardcore, Old-Skool, Pop Punk, Synth Punk, Anti-Folk, etc. Several well-known zine writers have contributed to Jersey Beat over the years, including Donny The Punk, Jim DeRogatis, Ben Weasel, and Tris McCall. FREE! Click HERE for JERSEY BEAT.

8 PM, Tues. Nov 17
Peripatetic raconteur ROLF POTTS
Reading/Signing
VAGABONDING and MARCO POLO DIDN'T GO THERE
As some of you know, I'm getting my MFA in creative writing and literature at Bennington College in Vermont. A local byproduct of this is my inviting professors to Metuchen to read and perform at the shop. Many of you turned out to hear Pulitzer Prize finalist David Gates sing Shel Silverstein, and South African author Sheila Kohler read from her feverish novel-cum-film Cracks. Rolf Potts, despite his acclaim, is actually a fellow student. Rolf and I, both first termers, became good friends during the June residency, sharing a love for travel lit (Paul Theroux) and getting lit (Woodford Reserve). When Rolf is stateside (which is rare), he bunks at his 30 acre farm in Kansas, but a recent trip to Italy, where he scooped up the prestigious Bruce Chatwin award (becoming the first American author to receive this honor), has him returning by way of New York and he suggested a stop at The Rac.

A veteran travel columnist, Rolf Potts has reported from more than fifty countries for the likes of National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, Conde Nast Traveler, Outside, The Believer, The Guardian (U.K.), National Public Radio, Salon.com, World Hum, and the Travel Channel, . His adventures have taken him across six continents, and include piloting a fishing boat 900 miles down the Laotian Mekong, hitching across Eastern Europe, hiking Israel on foot, bicycling across Burma, and driving a Land Rover from Sunnyvale, California to Ushuaia, Argentina. Rolf's essays have appeared in over twenty literary anthologies, and sixteen of his stories have been short-listed for The Best American Travel Writing, including "Storming The Beach,'" which Bill Bryson chose as a main selection in 2000, and "Tantric Sex for Dilettantes," which Tim Cahill selected in 2006. Each July Rolf can be found in France, where he is the summer writer-in-residence at the Paris American Academy. Click HERE to read yourself some ROLF. FREE! Comp Wine. Books on sale at the event."Jack Kerouac for the Internet Age" —USA Today; "Potts is the kind of guy you wish the pubs had more of: well traveled, generous with funny stories, eager to listen to yours." —Washington Post

8 PM, Fri. Nov 20
O LUCKY MEN & IT ENDS IN G
Live Music
Like the sound of drunken pirates setting fire to their ship? Or a bottle of flaming poteen being hurled through a dead man's window? Then this night is for you. FREE!

8 PM, Fri. Nov 27
THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...
Film Screening
Introduced by Ophuls scholar Laurence Mintz
To celebrate our recent influx of Criterions, we're screening this sumptuously restored print of French master Max Ophul's most cherished work. The Earrings of Madame De...is an emotionally profound, cinematographically adventurous tale of false opulence and tragic romance. When the aristocratic woman know only as Madame de (the extraordinary Danielle Darrieux) sells her earrings, unbeknownst to her husband (Charles Boyer), in order to pay personal debts, she sets of a chain reaction, the financial and carnal consequences of which can only end in despair. Ophuls adapts Louise de Vilmorin's incisive fin de siecle novel with virtuosic camera work so elegant and precise it's been called the equal of that of Orson Welles. Followed by a discussion. FREE!

8 PM, Sat. Nov 28
ACROSS THE STREET
Live Music
Blue Grass

GET CLOCKED TONIGHT @ MIDNIGHT!!!

2009-10-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

What better way to spend Mischief Night than with Alex and his wayward droogies. And because the show starts at midnight, you still have plenty of time for your own misconduct. So confetti lawns, egg windshields, toss spooling rolls of tp into trees, then head over to MCC for a night of mischief you'll never forget.

FINAL SHOW! MIDNIGHT! MISCHIEF NIGHT!
CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS! (Note: get to the theater by 11:30 PM for best seats.)

Already seen the show? See it again! We promise a few special surprises for our Mischief Night audience.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
A Play by Anthony Burgess
Directed by Alex Dawson
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 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. All tickets ONLY $10! The Studio Theatre @ Middlesex County College. For more info, click ClockworkOrangeThePlay.

Emily Mann (8 PM, Fri. Nov 6) In-store Arts/Crafts Fair (2 - 6 PM, Sat. Nov 7), Still Tickin': The Return of Clockwork Orange (8 PM, Sat. Nov 7), Positively Main Street (8 PM, Sat. Nov 14), Travel writer Rolf Potts (8 PM, Tues. Nov 17), O Lucky Men (Live Music, 8 PM, Fri. Nov 20); Bennington MFA group reading (8 PM, Sat. Dec 5); Ivy Pochada/The Art of Dissappearing (8 PM, Fri. Dec 11)

OCT 2009: Banned Books; Like Trains & Taxis; The Roadside Graves; A Clockwork Orange;

2009-10-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Sat. Oct 3
Former HIGH TIMES editor/blues keyboardist MIKE EDISON
Reading/Soundtracking
His Favorite BANNED Books
w/special help from BOSS HOG's Hollis Queens on drums
October 3 is the last day of the American Library Association's Banned Book Week (BBW). BBW is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. It highlights the benefits of free and open access to information (even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular), while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted book bannings across the United States. BBW was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982, with targets ranging from Harry Potter to Huckleberry Finn. Click here to see a map of book bans and challenges in the US from 2007 to 2009.

My first experience with a banned book was in tenth grade. I grew up on a horse ranch in Alabama and went to a private school forty minutes away called Macon Academy. My father, a writer who, divorced from my mother, lived in New Jersey, had sent me the Cabernet colored paperback of Catcher in The Rye for Christmas (along with a Swatch that had a checkered band and a skeleton face of exposed gears). I was discovered reading it one day by my English teacher, a bullied looking man named Mr. Edwards. He declared, with a sort of wooden vivacity, that if I persisted in doing a report on "the offensive book," I would get a an F. I consulted my Mom--a woman who, it should be noted, had recently backed my lobe with a wine cork, piercing it with a boiled sewing needle (to a rumpus of Academy demerits and suspension, natch). "Take the F," she said, "Once you read it, you'll understand." I did. And did.

Between 1985 and 1988, Mike Edison wrote 28 pornographic novels, reported on German whorehouses and Spanish coke dealers for Hustler, and published a series of erotic “confessions” for the legendary Penthouse Letters. In 1998 Edison became publisher/editor of marijuana counterculture magazine High Times. Following HT, he was named the editorial director for Jewish culture magazine HEEB, for whom he went undercover and exposed Jews for Jesus as a Baptist organization. He is the long-time drummer for New York cult-garage band the Raunch Hands, as well as being a collaborator of infamous punk rocker GG Allin with whom he wrote a number of songs and recorded two albums. FREE! Refreshments served.

8 PM, Sat. Oct 10
LIKE TRAINS & TAXIS
Live Music
One part pop, one part soul, one part jazz, Like Trains and Taxis is one of the most appealing bands I've seen in a long time. As many of you know, I once tended bar and booked music at a sweaty little jughouse in NB. Every Weds through Sat. we slid over the slate pool table to make room for bands like 3 Piece & Biscuit, a lusty quartet that played some of the best original soul I'd ever heard. Until now. Upon the recommendation of Raconteur volunteer Mallory (you know her, she's the one with the Gilda Gray haircut and the tattoo owl that looks like a pineapple), I went to see LT&T play a gig at George Street Playhouse early last month (Mal was playing accordion in a different band on the same bill). Backed by bassist Owen Susmen and drummer Mike Del Priore, Chris Harris (who styles himself as a modern-day urban love prophet in the tradition of Marvin Gaye) sat at his keys, porkpie askance, dancing in his seat like Little Stevie and crooning jazz pop grooves reminiscent of Maze's brightest days. Good stuff. Don't miss it. FREE!

8 PM, Sun. Oct 11
THE ROADSIDE GRAVES
Live Music
Their sweet-tempered country-rock is far more slippery than it might first appear and often conjures images of a roadhouse Bad Seeds. “I've drank enough to know that I've drank enough," announces front man Gleason on the world-weary “Live Slow,” the one song that comes closest to encapsulating the enduring spirit of The Graves. Performed with an uncommonly deft touch and subtle grace, their songs concern themselves primarily with the pause for breath that comes after reaching original destinations, and the long, careful glance at the atlas that comes before deciding where to go next.

0ct 15 - 30
Special midnight show on Mischief Night!
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
A Play by Anthony Burgess
Directed by Alex Dawson
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. All tickets ONLY $10! The Studio Theatre @ Middlesex County College. For show times/gen info/photos/advance tickets/etc., click HERE.

SEPT 2009: Transatlantic Web Cam Jam; Clockwork Orange Auditions; Walking w/the Caveman; Night of the Cryptids; Padma Viswanathan

2009-09-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

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).

Everybody's Talkin'; Web Cam Jam; Everything Asian; Back Pockets; Like Trains & Taxis; Exit 10; Live Bassa Nova; Kohler's Cracks

2009-08-03T16:33:00.000-07:00

7 PM, Sat. Aug 1
Barry Monush
Discussing/Signing
EVERYBODY'S TALKIN': The Top Films of 1965 - 1969
Discussion accompanied by corresponding film clips.
From the PG conquests of Michael Caine's Alfie to the first and only X rated film to win an Oscar, Screen World editor Barry Monush discusses why certain films stood out in the latter half of the greatest decade in movie history. The text of Everybody's Talkin' (a reference to Midnight Cowboy's excellent score) is idiosyncratically accompanied by illustrations of movie ads, tie-in book covers, soundtrack albums, sheet music, and other oddities. Monush is also a researcher at the Paley Center for Media in New York City and the author of the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors: From the Silent Era to 1965. FREE! Refreshments Served. Books on sale at event.

11 AM, Sun. Aug 2
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. Aug 7
Sung Woo
Reading/Signing
EVERYTHING ASIAN
You're twelve years old. You can't speak English. Your fifteen-year-old sister is miserable and your mother isn't exactly happy, either. You're seeing your father for the first time in five years. He owns a gift shop in a strip mall called Peddlers Town. He's nice enough, but he might just be, well--how can you put this delicately?--a loser. Welcome to the wonderful world of David Kim. After flying in from Seoul, Dae Joon (“David” in America) and his older sister do their best to adapt to the strange new world of Oakbridge, New Jersey. They work after school in their Dad's store, East Meets West, and attend ESL classes at night. Along the way they meet a motley crew of Peddlers Town shop owners, including Mr. Hong, the only other Korean, who owns In the Bag, a luggage outlet, and Dmitri, who sells second-hand stereos at HiFi FoFum. Alternating between humor and melancholy, Woo eschews immigrant clichés to focus on complicated familial relationships and a rogues gallery of surprising and sympathetic characters. SUNG J. WOO's short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His short film, Fork and a Chopstick, was an audience choice screening at the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival 2008. Everything American is his first novel. Visit his Web site at www.sungjwoo.com. FREE! Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Thurs. Aug 13
THE BACK POCKETS
Live Music
The Back Pockets is three girls, two boys, and one old geezer who looks like a cross between Dusty Hill and the guy with ripped flannel elbows drinking brekkie shots of Ten High who just stole your smokes. They play banjos and bongos, fiddles and flutes. Sometimes they lay electric guitars across their laps and saw on them with a violin bows. The girls dress like flappers, acrobats, or, on occasion, the Daryl Hannah android from Bladerunner. The boys wear Mexican wrestling masks and fencing helmets. They like sidewalks at night, homemade things, and carnies. They frequently rig and engage tightropes and trapezes during their shows, and have played whole songs hanging from their knees. The sound is folk, but the experience is Stomp. They're painters as well as musicians. They hail from Atlanta, GA. They sometimes describe themselves as Jefferson Airplane meets Blue Man Group. FREE!

8 PM, Fri. Aug 14
LIKE TRAINS & TAXIS
Live Music
One part pop, one part soul, one part jazz, Like Trains and Taxis is one of the most appealing bands I've seen in a long time. As many of you know, I once tended bar and booked music at a sweaty little jughouse in NB. Every Weds through Sat. we slid over the slate pool table to make room for bands like 3 Piece & Biscuit, a lusty quartet that played some of the best original soul I'd ever heard. Until now. Upon the recommendation of Raconteur volunteer Mallory (you know her, she's the one with the Gilda Gray haircut and the tattoo owl that looks like a pineapple), I went to see LT&T play a gig at George Street Playhouse early last month (Mal was playing accordion in a different band on the same bill). Backed by bassist Owen Susmen and drummer Mike Del Priore, Chris Harris (who styles himself as a modern-day urban love prophet in the tradition of Marvin Gaye) sat at his keys, porkpie askance, dancing in his seat like Little Stevie and crooning jazz pop grooves reminiscent of Maze's brightest days. Good stuff. Don't miss it. FREE!

8 PM, Sat. Aug 15
Tom Cheche
Reading/Signing
EXIT 10
Tom Cheche's broadcasting and newspaper career took him from the locker rooms of the NBA Champion New York Knicks and the NHL New York Rangers to pit roads at Daytona and Indianapolis, from the broadcast booth to the team bus. This is what came first. "Exit 10" is the story of a lousy athlete who knew he'd never get off the bench. Instead, he became the next best thing: a sports reporter who spent three decades interviewing his heroes.

8 PM, Fri. Aug 21
DANIEL EGGERS & CO. play a final show at The Rac before returning to South America
Traditional Brazilian Music
Daniel Eggers is a young man from Peru. I met him two years ago. He'd heard I did events and had popped by the shop to perform an audition of sorts. After retrieving a battered rosewood from the cluttered bed of a dusty El Camino he proceeded to play ten minutes of what is likely the most beautiful guitar music I've ever heard. Naturally, I booked him immediately, and, accompanied by his friend Pocho on the djembe, he captivated one of the biggest crowds (Lennon-ex May Pang aside) we've ever had at an in-store event. We've had him back several times since and each time he's played a different instrument from a different region in a different style: the quenna, the charango, the tarka, etc. This time, the last time as I understand it, he's playing bossa nova. Bossa nova is performed on classical guitar and is played with the fingers rather than with a pick. It emerged primarily from the upscale beachside neighborhoods of Rio De Janeiro and was made popular by the release of the1959 film Black Orpheus. It spread to North America via visiting American jazz musicians and the resulting recordings by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz cemented its popularity, ultimately leading to a worldwide boom with the Getz/Gilberto "The Girl From Ipanema." FREE! Complimentary wine.

8 PM, Thurs. Aug 27
Sheila Kohler
Reading/Signing
CRACKS
As many of may know, I'm getting my MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Bennington College. Ms. Kohler is one of my professors and I had the pleasure of hearing her read at my most recent residency this past June. Being South African, she pronounces her English phonemes with a strong Dutch inflection, which makes her an absolutely exquisite reader. It's been said that actor Christopher Plummer could captivate an audience by reading the phone book and, indeed, so could Sheila. But instead she'll be reading from her brilliant novel Cracks, a feverish mash up of Lord of the Flies and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie set at a South African boarding school for girls. The film version of Cracks, due out later this year, stars Eva Green (Casino Royale) as the provocative and charismatic Miss G, a teacher who encourages a sapphic “crack” (or crush) held by one of her pupils. Hormones rage when a beautiful and mysterious new student arrives, inspiring jealousy and umbrage, which lead—perhaps—to her inexplicable disappearance. Sheila Kohler is also the author of six other novels: Crossways, The Perfect Place, Children of Pithiviers, Bluebird: The Invention of Happiness, and Becoming Jane Eyre (due of this Dec). FREE! Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event.Eva Green as Ms. G in Cracks

JULY 2009: Summer Party; Andalusians/Risk Relay; The Seems

2009-07-09T08:31:00.001-07:00

8 PM, Fri. July 10
SUMMER'S HERE.
TIME TO SHOW OFF YOUR RAC!
Bring one friend who's never been to the coolest bookstore in the country. Internationally acclaimed scribble scratcher DJ Disko Troop (Neil Mohammed)spins everything from Soixante Neuf to Little Red Corvette. Free food. Free drink. Ice cold AC. Plus pig-faced bascinets, werewolf masks, pith helmets, and moose horns.

8 PM, Fri. July 17
ANDALUSIANS & RISK RELAY
Live Music
The vehicle for songwriter Basla Andolsun (Beauty Pill, Del Cielo, and, currently, Edie Sedgwick), The Andalusians' debut, a 7 inch called "Do the Work," is out this month on Ian MacKaye's Dischord Records. With influences as far ranging as Fela Kuti and Black Flag, the band is more akin to the Pixies, Throwing Muses, and the freewheeling alternative rock of late night MTV circa 1989 than any of their harder Dischord peers. The Andalusians wield a sense of chemistry that's casual, and vocalist/guitarist Andolsun, supported by an all star cast of DC luminaries from bands like Hoover and Faraquet, pushes the art of pop song writing to a place that is distinctively her own.

Though guilty of the occasional atonal freak out, Risk Relay care as much about the quasi-symphonic art-guitar music of composers like Rhys Chatham as they do about the punk pop form. Their songs hover gorgeously for extended lengths, letting guitarists Ed and Mark intertwine spindly tonalities as carefully as it's possible to do at wall-shaking volume, while Ed's untutored voice seditiously intones words that flirt with pop stupidity, high-art eloquence, and urban cool. When they bear down and rock, they do it with a blurry intensity that finds gorgeousness at the heart of discord. Tonight is a must-go for any post punk Garden Stater with a "Washing Machine" T-shirt, who considers themselves the least bit cool. FREE! CDs on sale at the event.

8 PM, Thurs. July 23
Rene & Raul Villereal
HEMINGWAY'S CUBAN SON
Reading/Signing/Slide Show
Celebrate Hemingway's 110th b-day w/his Cuban son!
Together with his own son Raul, Rene Villereal tells the account of how he came to be Ernest Hemingway's majordomo, confidant, and friend - his Cuban son. Hemingway, called El Americano by the Cubans, moved into the Finca Vigia, an estate outside of Havana, in 1939. He allowed the village children to play on his property, and they soon became fixtures, caring for his pets, performing odd jobs, and running errands. Hemingway recognized Rene as especially responsible and attentive and made him household manager, or majordomo, in 1946 when Rene was only seventeen. For the next fifteen years, Rene ran the Finca, tending to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, and their visiting family and distinguished guests. Villarreal's clear recollections offer up humorous stories of escapades and adventures with Hemingway as well as insightful comments on the writer's work habits, moods, passions, and friendships. He also writes of Cuba before and after the revolution, beautifully capturing place and time. Plus a slide show of candid, largely unseen photos of Hemingway in Cuba! FREE! Complimentary wine and rum. Books on sale at the event.

7 PM, Fri. July 24
THE SEEMS (Ages 9 & up)
Michael Wexler & John Hulme
Reading/Q&A/Signing
Written by childhood friends, John Hulme and Michael Wexler (from Highland Park, NJ, The Seems is the Matrix by way of Willy Wonka for middle school boys and girls. The World that you live in is not, in fact, the world that you think it is. Weather, Time, Sleep, and even the Color of autumn leaves are controlled by those in the Know, who regulate The World from The Seems. The sunset is painted daily, rain is regulated by a water tank, and a Good Night's Sleep is packaged, processed, and distributed nightly, with a special dream, included like a Crackerjack prize, just for you.It is into this new place, The Seems, that Becker Drane, a seventh grader from HIGHLAND PARK, NJ, arrives after applying for The Best Job in the World and becoming the youngest Fixer ever. Fixers are, just that, Fixers. They step in and take on the dangerous task of Fixing things when they go wrong and Becker's first job is to Fix a Glitch in Sleep. Putatively a sci-fi series for kids, The Seems also speaks to greater philosophical issues: concrete existence, angst, freedom, facticity, existence preceding essence, the other, the look, and the absurd. A film version of The Seems, directed by Night at the Museum's Shawn Levy is due out sometime next year. FREE! Book 1 & 2 on sale at event.

Barry Monush (Everybody's Talkin') Sat. Aug 1; Sung Woo (Everything Asian) Fri. Aug. 7; Like Trains & Taxis Fri. Aug 15; Exit 10 Sat. Aug. 16; Sheila Kohler (Cracks; Bluebird of Happiness)Thurs Aug 27; Night of the Cryptids: Faces in the Rocks doc & The Beast of Bourbon Flip Fri. Aug 28; Michael Agovino (The Bookmaker)Sat. Sept 12; Padma Viswanathan (The Toss of a Lemon) Sat. Sept 26; A Clockwork Orange: A Staged Adaptation, Oct. TBA

JUNE 2009: Treasure Hunt, Web Cam Jam, Hobo Art/Railyard Poetry, Postively Main Street w/The Cucumbers

2009-05-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

9:30 AM, Sat. June 6
1st ANNUAL METUCHEN TREASURE HUNT (FULLY BOOKED, SORRY!)
The Raconteur, in conjunction with the Metuchen Masonic Lodge, is sponsoring a Metuchen based treasure hunt! In keeping with the rollicking spirit of The Man who Would be King, Freemason Rudyard Kipling's fantastic tale of two masonic scoundrels who set off from 19th century British India in search of gold and adventure and end up as kings of Kafiristan, and The National Treasure, in which hoard hunter Benjamin Gates follows a series of cryptic clues to find an ancient cache intertwined with the arcane history of Freemasonry, young adventurers (boys and girls 1st through 5th grade) work in teams, following clues and unraveling a variety of knotty riddles as they move from one mysterious location to another within the town limits of Metuchen proper. Each cracked conundrum will lead players ever closer to the final treasure! Expect anagrams, number puzzles, and a brass plated, cylindrical device known as a Cryptex. FREE! Raconteur gift certificates awarded to all participants. Again, this weekend's hunt is, unfortunately, FULLY BOOKED (40 Kids!). But due to the overwhelming response, we will be organizing a second one late this summer. Watch the sea and skies for an upcoming announcement!

11 AM, Sun. June 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, Friday June 19
OFF THE RAILS: Hoboetry and Gallery Night
Six NJ Poets (Joe Weil, Deborah LaVeglia, Sarah Maloney, Tony Gruenewald, Rebecca Nison, Andrew Erkkila) and seven NJ artists (Seth Goodwin, Daniel Brophy, Diana Marsh, Robert Rubin, Bryant Jefopoulos, Jessica Kizmann, Charles Laskowski) present railroad infused readings, paintings, photographs, screen printings, drawings and sculpture. Followed by an open mic. Complimentary wine, cheese, and desserts. Free!

8 PM, Sat. June 27
POSITIVELY MAIN STREET
Featuring John Raido & The Cucumbers
Live Music
Musicians from all over New Jersey jam locally. Hosted by celebrated music zinester/Jersey Beat editor Jim Testa. Testa published the first issue of his zine Jersey Beat in 1982. It covers the music scene in New Jersey and beyond. Jersey Beat covers a wide cross section of music but most particularly Punk and its many off-shoots, including Hardcore, Old-Skool, Pop Punk, Synth Punk, Anti-Folk, etc. Several well-known zine writers have contributed to Jersey Beat over the years, including Donny The Punk, Jim DeRogatis, Ben Weasel, and Tris McCall.

The Cucumbers' very first song, “My Boyfriend” became a hit on the college radio charts, leading to national tours, a couple of videos on MTV, reviews in Rolling Stone, People Magazine, The New York Times, etc. Their 6th album, All Things to You, was mixed by producer/engineer Roger Moutenot (Sleater-Kinney, Yo La Tengo, Lou Reed)."What makes the band major (besides Deena Shoshkes’ incredible voice) is the songwriting” The Village Voice. “Cool as you-know-what; sexy and bittersweet” People Magazine. “…budding with talent” Rolling Stone.

FREE! CDs on sale at event. Complimentary wine.

Morris Men 3:30 PM, Mon. July 6; Summer Bash (it's summer! show off your rac!) Fri. July 10; Risk Relay & Co. Fri. July 17; Michael Wexler & John Hulme (The Seems)Fri. July 24; Barry Monush (Everybody's Talkin') Sat. Aug 1; Sung Woo (Everything Asian) Fri. Aug. 7; Faces in the Rocks doc & The Beast of Bourbon Flip Fri. Aug 28; Michael Agovino (The Bookmaker)Sat. Sept 12; Padma Viswanathan (The Toss of a Lemon) Sat. Sept 26; A Clockwork Orange: A Staged Adaptation, Oct. TBA

MAY 2009: Web Cam Jam; Joe Romeo; Arthur Phillips; Mary Ann McGuigan; Kurt Wenzel; Daniel Eggers; Jake Cherry; Armsport; Mark Doty; Mike Edison

2009-04-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

11 AM, Sun. May 3
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.” MUSICIANS WANTED! FREE! Comp cornbread (fresh from the oven)!

8 PM, Thurs. May 7
JOE ROMEO & THE ORANGE COUNTY VOLUNTEERS
Live Music
Influenced in equal parts by Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, Robinson Crusoe, and Dalton, Patrick Swayze’s dive bar doorman in the 1989 film Roadhouse, low fi, quasi-country, folk singer Joe Romeo fills his album with a rustic eclectism that’s funnier than he is generally given credit for. But his lyrical preoccupations remain tragic--God, loss of love, drinking, death. After the whacked out preacherman blues stomp of track one, the album slides into a series of sprawling ballads that highlight Romeo’s baritone croon. Romeo is not merely in a different league from most of his peers; he's scarcely even playing the same game. FREE! CDs on sale at event.

8 PM, Fri. May 8
ARTHUR PHILLIPS
Reading/Signing
THE SONG IS YOU
Arthur Phillips’ first novel, Prague, followed a group of young expats living in Budapest and yearning for the more glamorous city of the title. His second, The Egyptologist, set mostly in Egypt in the 1920s, had two unreliable narrators and was plotted with one devilishly clever reversal and switchback after another. Angelica, his third, began as a Victorian ghost story and gradually darkened into a complex psychological tale. Now comes The Song is You another radical departure in a career of radical departures. A middle aged man, a troubled relationship, an IPOD. At first glance The Song is You sounds like pure Nick Hornby territory, but it turns out to be a lot closer to the grim fable of The Red Shoes, a story in which characters are tragically torn between the twin forces of love and art. Julian Donahue is a skilled director of commercials who has come to know his limits. Cait O'Dwyer is a singer, and a bit of a comet that Julian somehow catches the tail of. Their courtship--as Julian evades a marriage split by an unbearable loss and Cait shoots single-mindedly toward stardom--is an intricately constructed pas de deux that is both surprising and convincing. Recently praised on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, The Song Is You takes on loneliness, alienation, middle age, and what it means to be saddled by your past. Yet despite these sober concerns, Phillips' sparkling prose makes for a seriously fun read. Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think, and for those of us who try to think and feel, The Song Is You captures the flip sides pretty much perfectly. Labeled “one of the best writers in America” by The Washington Post, Arthur Phillips is that rare thing among authors, a wisenheimer who's also wise. FREE! Books on sale at event.

3 PM, Sat. May 9
National Book Award Winner
YA author MARY ANN MCGUIGAN
Reading/Signing
MORNING IN A DIFFERENT PLACE
An act of teenage rebellion in November 1963 sets off a chain of events that irrevocably changes 14-year-old Fiona O'Doherty's life and the world she inhabits. National Book Award winner Mary Ann McGuigan is as adept at evoking the class consciousness and racial politics of '60s New York as she is the timeless horrors of adolescence and with the twin evils of domestic violence and President Kennedy's assassination looming in the background, the author's portrait of the chameleonic nature of teenage girls builds aggressively to a powerful finale. FREE! Books on sale at event. Ages 12 & up.

8 PM, Thurs. May 14
KURT WENZEL
Reading/Signing
LIT LIFE & EXPOSURE
I was a theater district bartender/East Village playwright when Wenzel’s debut novel Lit Life came out in 2001. A boozy, sardonic take on artistic self-absorption and the grind and glamour of literary life, it quickly became one of my favorite books of that year. ‘Nuff said. He’ll be here Thursday with his latest novel, Exposure, a blistering mash up of Phillip K. Dick, Nathaniel West, and Chuck Palahniuk. FREE! Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Sat. May 16
DANIEL EGGERS & CO.
Live Traditional Peruvian Music
Daniel Eggers is a young man from Peru. Last spring I met him for the first time. He'd heard I did events and had popped by the shop to perform an audition of sorts. After retrieving his guitar from his car he proceeded to play ten minutes of what is likely the most beautiful music I've ever heard. Naturally, I booked him immediately, and, accompanied by his friend Pocho on the djembe, he captivated one of the biggest crowds (May Pang aside) we've ever had at an in-store event. Well, he's back. This time on the quena. The quena is a traditional bamboo flute from the Andes once banned by the Spanish government. They said it inspired indecent emotions among the natives. There is a legend of an Incan princess named Ollantay. She fell in love with a commoner and, forbidden to marry him, she died of unhappiness. Her lover, visiting her grave, hears a haunting whistling sound coming from the wind. This gives him the idea of creating the quena, whose sound will remind him of his lost love. Now, you can hear it too! FOR FREE! As you sip complimentary red wine from the province of Ica (despite its hot and dry climate, Ica is actually a perfect place to grow wine grapes as the fields are thoroughly irrigated with water from the Andes). Songs will be accompanied by classic Spanish guitar.

7 PM, Thurs. May 21
NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM
w/special guest child star JAKE CHERRY
Film Screening
Jake Cherry, the young star of N@M and N@M2: Battle of the Smithsonian (which opens the following day), introduces the film, delivering a fascinating show-and-tell of production stills, movie props, and shooting scripts, while sharing his experiences working with Ben Stiller, who plays his divorced dad, and the various rampaging fossils that populate both movies. Inspired by a 1993 children's book by Milan Trenc, the film stars Stiller as a well-meaning ne'er-do-well father who takes a steady job as night watchman at New York City's Museum of Natural History to give his son (Jake Cherry) some much needed stability. He soon discovers that the exhibits (Roman centurions, Attila the Hun, T. Rex, etc.), animated by a magical Egyptian artifact, come to riotous life at night. But with the help of President Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Larry may just figure out a way to control the chaos and become a hero in his son's eyes. Wildly imaginative effects, costumes and makeup, help make the film appeal to the 8-year-old in everyone. With Owen Wilson, Ricky Gervais, Carla Gugino, Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, Bill Cobbs and Steve Coogan. FREE! With comp popcorn.

8 PM, Sat. May 23
SANTIAGO ARMSPORT TOURNEY
Inspired by the 24 hour arm wrestling competition between the dogged Santiago, the titular character in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and “the great Negro from Ceinfuegos,” The Santiago Armsport Tourney is sponsored by The Raconteur and occurs in the rear of the shop on a regulation table. Shop proprietor Alex Dawson takes on all comers. Victors (should they emerge) win $25 gift certificates and get their names engraved onto a trophy which remains in the shop. To reserve your slot, contact raconteurbooks@gmail.com. The tournament will be preceded by a short theatrical reading from the Pulitzer Prize winning OMS and followed by a free screening of the Spencer Tracy movie. $5 to enter contest; FREE to watch!

8 PM, Weds. May 27
2008 National Book Award Winner
Poet MARK DOTY Reading/Signing FIRE to FIRE
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008 and features a hefty selection from his seven collections, plus a generous sheaf of new poems, should solidify Doty's position as a star of contemporary American poetry, a career which took off in 1993 with My Alexandria, his third book, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Fire to Fire contains only two poems from his first two books—“Adonis Theatre,” about an old movie palace turned gay porno theater, and “The Death of Antinous,” about the Roman emperor Hadrian's lover's afterlife in statuary, both of which are meditations on representation, absence and desire. Readers are guided through a world of female impersonators, street musicians and homeless poets. There is an all-pervasive sense of doom in some of the poems, from the dying man who gives away all his animals to the dog shot in the head that refuses to take its final breath. But Doty's death-haunted poems from earlier books give way here to recent poems about a more hopeful life with new friends, new vistas, new narratives, all rendered in a way that feels at once confessional and universal. Not that death’s irrelevant—ghosts and apparitions, such as spotting John Berryman having lunch in a diner in Chelsea, still make regular appearances—but the poet has made his peace with it. FREE. Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Sat. May 30
MIKE EDISON Reading/Signing I HAVE FUN EVERYWHERE IT GO
Plus Live Music by THE EDISON ROCKET TRAIN
Edison’s memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World recounts twenty years of druggy adventurism and his parallel careers as a magazine editor, writer, and musician. Between 1985 and 1988 he was the author of 28 pornographic novels, wrote about German whorehouses and Spanish coke dealers for Hustler, and published a series of erotic “confessions” for the legendary Penthouse Letters. In 1998 Edison became publisher/editor of marijuana counterculture magazine High Times. Following HT, he was named the editorial director for Jewish culture magazine HEEB, for whom he went undercover and exposed Jews for Jesus as a Baptist organization. Edison has also recorded a “beatnik bop and punk rock boogaloo, outerspace soundtrack and spoken word” companion CD, collaboration with rock musician and producer Jon Spencer. He is the long-time drummer for New York cult-garage band the Raunch Hands, as well as being a collaborator of infamous punk rocker GG Allin with whom he wrote a number of songs and recorded two albums. He currently leads his own band, the Edison Rocket Train. FREE! Books/CDs on sale at event.

Graffiti Art Show/Transit Poetry 8 PM, Fri. June 19; Sung Woo (Everything Asian) July

APRIL 2009: Jellyfish Artist Bill Ward; Transatlantic Web Cam Jam; John Wray; Postively Main Street; David Gates & John Wesley Harding

2009-03-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Thurs. April 2
LOCAL COLOR w/Bill Ward
Biochemist/jellyfish artist/bamboozled Nobel Prize candidate
How well do you know your neighbor? Why is their basement light on? Why is their chimney belching rags of purple smoke? And why exactly is their dog gnawing on a narwhal tusk? Find out! Local Color is a new Raconteur series exploring the eccentricities of the people that live next door.

I first met Bill Ward when I decided to purchase one of his psychedelic jellyfish prints. A biochemist at Rutgers, he'd found a way, through the use of various dyes, to transpose the image of a bioluminescent jellyfish known as a Sea Walnut to paper. The result was stunning and a perfect gift for my father.

My father, long retired, counts and tracks migrating horseshoe crabs in Cape May. I'd recently joined him for a tally, which involved stalking a desolate piece of shoreline at midnight with cap lights, thongy things that look like miner's helmets made from jockstrap bands. Dad fished out several plastic pipes from the bed of his station wagon, a wood-sided Buick Roadmaster, and we assembled them like tent poles to form a square. Clipboard in hand, we walked a precise number of paces, laid the pipes down, and ticked off how many crabs the square circumscribed. We did this for about a mile, alternating the paces between 5 steps and fifteen. We had trudged this wet spit of sand for about fifteen minutes, when we noticed something that my Dad, who'd done this exact stretch every spring and fall for the last decade, had never before seen. Thousands of green-glowing objects the size of silver dollars and the color of firefly tails floated along the beach, riding in on the lapping water. They looked like fallen stars, like alien eyes, like nuggets of debris from a crashed mother ship. Upon further research, we learned they were Comb Jellies (or Sea Walnuts), and this is what Mr. Ward so beautifully turns into art. But I'll let him tell you about it. As well as how exactly he was cheated out of the 2008 Nobel Prize. Seriously.

Upcoming Local Color events include a man who rafted the Raritan in a pontoon made from plastic storage tubs from Target, and a girl who has found corn flakes shaped like all fifty states. FREE! Comp wine. Art for sale at event.

11 AM, Sun. April 5
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. HOMEMADE CORNBREAD!

If you watched the Oscars last month, 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.

8 PM, Fri. April 17
John Wray
Reading/Signing
LOWBOY
Early one morning in New York City, Will Heller, a sixteen-year old paranoid schizophrenic, gets on an uptown B train alone. Like most people he knows, Will believes the world is being destroyed by climate change; unlike most people, he’s convinced he can do something about it. Unknown to his doctors, unknown to the police—unknown even to Violet Heller, his devoted mother—Will alone holds the key to the planet’s salvation. To cool down the world, he has to cool down his own overheating body: to cool down his body, he has to find one willing girl. And he already has someone in mind.

Lowboy, JOHN WRAY’s third novel, tells the story of Will’s fantastic and terrifying odyssey through the city’s tunnels, back alleys, and streets in search of Emily Wallace, his one great hope. Suspenseful and comic, devastating and hopeful by turns, Lowboy is a fearless exploration of youth, sex, and violence in contemporary America, seen through one boy’s haunting and extraordinary vision. The opening pages recall Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, but the denouement and haunting aftertaste may make the stunned reader whisper “Dostoevsky.” Yes, it really is that good.FREE!Complimentary wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Sat. April 18
POSITIVELY MAIN STREET
Live Music
Musicians from all over New Jersey jam locally. Hosted by celebrated music zinester/Jersey Beat editor Jim Testa. Testa published the first issue of his zine Jersey Beat in 1982. It covers the music scene in New Jersey and beyond. Jersey Beat covers a wide cross section of music but most particularly Punk and its many off-shoots, including Hardcore, Old-Skool, Pop Punk, Synth Punk, Anti-Folk, etc. Several well-known zine writers have contributed to Jersey Beat over the years, including Donny The Punk, Jim DeRogatis, Ben Weasel, and Tris McCall. FREE! Complimentary wine.

RENTAL
8 PM, Thurs. April 23
SUNBURST CARRIER
Live Music
Featuring Lisa Kowalew & Jeff Weiner
A liquified circus, nothing more, nothing less. FREE! Click HERE to sample their music. Please note: we occasionally rent the rear of our shop to budding poets, filmmakers, and musicians; The Raconteur does not screen "tenants" and, accordingly, makes no claims regarding the quality of the entertainment they offer. If you are interested in renting our venue, reply to this e-mail or call Alex at 732-906-0009.

8 PM, Sun. April 26
Pulitzer Prize Finalist David Gates & Folk Noir Gangster John Wesley Harding
Reading/Signing/Live Music
The author of the highly acclaimed novels Jernigan (a Pulitzer Prize Finalist) and Preston Falls (a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist), and a collection of short stories, The Wonders of the Invisible World (also a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist), DAVID GATES was anointed a "true heir to Raymond Carver and John Cheever," by New York Magazine. His work, stylish and ferociously humorous, nimbly explores the dark side of suburban masculinity and has been called "brilliant" by both NPR and the Boston Globe, and "beautiful" by the New York Times.

Chosen by Springsteen as his first opening act in 20 years, rocker/poet/punk/folkie/popster JOHN WESLEY HARDING has been called the British Bob Dylan and is often compared to Elvis Costello (probably fueled, in part, by the fact that two members of his band had been members of The Attractions). Rolling Stone Magazine hailed him as, "a literate and ironic neo-folkie with enough bile to win over a younger, hipper audience not attuned to folk music." His best known work includes "I'm Wrong About Everything", which was featured on the High Fidelity soundtrack and an accoustic cover of the Madonna song, "Like a Prayer." He has been joined onstage by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen (with whom he recorded a duet on his album Awake), Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Peter Buck, Evan Dando, David Baddiel, Rick Moody, Scott MacCaughey and Robyn Hitchcock and has opened for Michelle Shocked, Los Lobos, and The Band.After placing his music career on hold while working as an author (under his real name, Wesley Stace, he wrote the international best seller Misfortune and 2007's By George), JWH released Who was Changed and Who was Dead this March, his first rock album in five years.FREE! Complimentary wine. Book and CDs on sale at event.

MARCH 2009: Web Cam Jam; Rapscallion Book Club; Kyo Morishima/Joan Arbeiter; Dante's Inferno; Glad Hearts; Achy Obejas; Watchmen Radio Play

2009-03-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

11 AM, Sun. March 1
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. MUSICIANS WANTED! FREE!

If you watched the Oscars this past Sun, you heard Best Actress winner Kate Winslet mention this very same pub and the pickling contest her mother recently won there. Indeed, in last month's Raconteur jam session Kate's mom, Sally Winslet (now known as the Queen of Shallots), was in the foreground eating bangers.

4 PM, Sun. March 8
THE RAPSCALLION CLUB
Book Discussion
w/Lit prof Liz Mazzola and author Alex Dawson
Ages 7 - 12
Okay. So now you know what banana dogs, mustache mugs, and french fry contests are. But you still have questions. What, for instance, does poppycock mean? Has Nigel ever shot a gun? Will Uncle Jonathan's third floor Piper Cubs every see the sky? How did Uncle Edmund lose his fingers? How much money can you really make from poop? Find out!PLUS: Hear about Dawson's month long trip to visit his brother (a bonafide adventurer) at The South American Explorer's Club in Peru, and learn top secret tid bits from Book 2 (due out next Christmas)!

The Raconteur Children's Book Club meets once a month and is open to children ages 7 - 12. Children choose books and direct the discussion, although Ms. Mazzola is on hand to keep things running smoothly. Upcoming titles include Gary Paulsen's My Life in Dog Years (April 19) and Lauren Myrade's Eleven (May 31). Contact Liz Mazzola (emazzola@yahoo.com) with any questions. Elizabeth Mazzola lives in Metuchen and is a Professor of English at the City College of New York, where she teaches courses on poetry and Renaissance literature. She shares her love of children's literature with her two daughters.

8 PM, Fri. March 13
Joan Arbeiter & Kyo Morishima
Art Exhibtion
You couldn't find an artist better suited to a Raconteur exhibition than Joan Arbeiter. The life size figures in Arbeiter's colossal pencil portraits of neighborhood locals and NYC street people are surrounded with a sprawl of dense text relating their colorful biographies. At first she recorded their experiences herself, but soon she turned the pencil over to her subjects, asking each one to write their personal narrative directly onto their portrait. Stand back to take in the full image, get close to read the quirky stories. Kyo Morishima is a street photographer with a proclivity for bluesmen, bikers, and subway buskers. But when you look at his wonderfully theatrical photos (like the rank of red umbrellas pressing through a Manhattan blizzard or the glam vampire descending a steep subway escalator) you'll find it hard to believe not one was staged. Kyo's success as a photographer comes from being in the right place at the right moment and, of course, recognizing what that moment is. FREE! Comp wine.
8 PM, Sat. March 14
Jean Hollander
Reading/Signing
THE INFERNO/ORGANS & BLOOD
The epic grandeur of Dante’s masterpiece has inspired readers for 700 years. Indeed, translating the intricate, rhyme-rich tercets of Comedia has been the ambition (and despair) of many a distinguished English language poet, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Metuchen's own John Ciardi. Now comes a new hard-boiled translation that will for many be the definitive edition for the foreseeable future. Robert Hollander, who has taught Dante for nearly four decades at Princeton, supplies the scholarly sinew, while his wife, acclaimed poet Jean Hollander (Organs & Blood), attends to the verbal music. The result is a terse, lean Dante with its own kind of beauty. Hear Ms. Hollander read about a three faced Satan waist deep in ice, weeping from six eyes, and find out exactly what she thinks of the upcoming video game from Electronic Arts, in which the poet-philosopher is transformed into a hulking veteran of the Crusades battling monsters designed by Hellboy's Wayne Barlowe. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.
7:30 PM, Thurs. March 19
Robert Kaplow
Discusses/Signs
ME AND ORSON WELLES
Book Club
NPR alum Robert Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles, a beautifully rendered and hilarious valentine to the burly thespian, was recently turned into a movie by indie filmmaker Richard Linklater (Dazed & Confused). Set in 1937 New York, Kaplow's novel tells of a teenager hired to star in Welles' production of Julius Caesar. In theaters this fall, the film stars America's sweetheart Troy Bolton (I mean, Zac Efron!), Claire Danes, and Christian Mackay as Welles. Critic Roger Ebert called it, "one of the best movies about theater I've ever seen." Meet Kaplow and find out how a cantankerous bouncer at a local New Brunswick bar cast the man playing Welles.
8 PM, Weds. March 25
Ryan Bing & Glad Hearts
Live Music
Promises are made, bottles are drained, fists are raised, seasons change and a pair of would-be revolutionaries bike across town. Theatrical, folk-influenced chamber pop that slots in somewhere between Belle and Sebastian's delicacy and the robust classicism of the Chills, the Glad Hearts debut album, The Oak and the Acorn, drips with enough romanticism to rival Jeff Buckley's Grace. Bing’s kitchen sink arrangements include the use of guitar, accordion, banjo, crumbling paper, a glass jar full of coins, a jingle bell wreath, a slide and e-bow, saw, drums, falling snow, tape loops, bass, lap steel, and keys (black, white, and car). Come for the singing and shouting, stay for the all abouting. FREE!

8 PM, Thurs. March 26
Achy Obejas & Robert Arellano
Reading/Signing
The Ruins & Havana Lunar
Junot Diaz said of Cuban writer Achy Obejas, who recently translated Diaz's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, into Spanish, “Obejas writes like an angel: flush with power, vision and hope ... one of the Cuba's most important writers." In addition to Havana Lunar, Cuban-American Robert Arellano is the author of Fast Eddie, King of Bees, and the graphic novel Dead in Desemboque, a collaboration with three comic-book artists that was inspired by the illustrated pulp fiction of Mexico. When he's not writing or teaching fiction workshops at Brown University, he plays guitar for Nick Cave, The Palace Brothers, and low-fi, quasi-country legend Will Oldham (aka Bonnie Prince Bill), who said of Arellano's provacative fiction, "I hope he's not killed for writing this book." FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

POSTPONED!!!!!!!!
THE WATCHMEN
Staged Radio Play
Live Sound Effects!
W/Jeff Maschi, Larry Mintz, Laurence Paone, David Liss, Carlyle Owen, and Kristy Lauricella.
A graphic novel, a movie, and now a radio play! Both comic scribe Alan Moore and Terry Gilliam the original director assigned to the movie deemed it unfilmable, but nobody ever said you couldn't stage it. Six actors play everything from Mr. Rorschach to The Comedian. Featuring live foley effects and panels from the strip projected onto a screen behind the performers. With The Watchmen Moore reflected contemporary anxieties and deconstructed the superhero concept. It is regarded as the seminal text of the comic book medium and is one of Time Magazines Top 100 Novels. FREE!

Bill Ward, a biochemistry professor/jellyfish artist cheated out of the Nobel Prize, Thurs. April 2; Transatlantic Web Cam Jam Session Sun. April 5; John Wray (Lowboy), Fri. April 17; Positively Main Street, musicians from all over NJ jam locally, Sat. April 18; Charles Bock (Beautiful Children),Thurs. April 23 tentative; Pulitzer Prize finalist David Gates (Preston Falls) w/ Wesley Stace (By George), the given name of musician John Wesley Harding, Sun. April 26; Arthur Phillips (The Song is You) Fri. May 8; Mike Edison (I Have Fun Everywhere I Go) Sat. May 30

FEB 2009: Transatlantic Web Cam Jam; Idiots' Fest; Rumble Fish; Risk Relay; Mommy's Having a Watermelon; Rac-On-Tour; Alethea Black

2009-02-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

Noon, Sun. Feb 1
Transatlantic Web Cam Jam Session
Live Music
The first Sun of each month The Raconteur will host a transatlantic jam session. The shop's session will be concurrent with a very similar session occurring in Reading, England at a pub called The Retreat. The performers will build on/riff off one another via a Google web cam. TWCJS is more about the performers than the performance, but that doesn't you can't come in watch. Raconteur musicians will play in the rear of the shop. Retreat musicians will be projected on a 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.

8 PM, Sat. Feb 7
IDIOTS' FEST
Reading/Art Exhibition/Live Music
http://www.idiotsbooks.com/ http://www.bfslattery.com/fiction.html MATTHEW SWANSON, born at the foot of a volcano, will read from his work against a backdrop of ROBBI BEHR's projected illustrations (think Ralph Steadman) while musicians contribute tones, both dulcet and jarring.

Compared to Phillip K. Dick and Jonathan Lethem by The Village Voice, BRIAN SLATTERY, author of Spaceman Blues, a loving tweak of vintage pulp, will read his book while musicians attempt to distract him with guitars. Offensive to the eye and ear.

DR. BRIAN A. WECHT, B.A., PhD., member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, will deliver a stirring lecture titled "String Theory for Idiots" which may involve musicians. FREE! Refreshments served. Books on sale at the event.

8 PM, Thurs. Feb 12
RUMBLE FISH
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola & starring Mickey Rourke, Matt Dillion, Diane Lane & Dennis Hopper
Film Screening
If Raiders the Lost Ark was the film that defined my childhood, then Rumble Fish is the movie that characterized by teens. My mom took me to see it when it first came out. I was thirteen and couldn’t understand her breathless reaction to Mickey Rourke’s Motorcycle Boy. At fifteen, I bought my first bike, a used Nighthawk with a tiny teardrop tank, smoked my first filter-less cigarette, and saw the movie again. This time I got it, and for a month, I’m embarrassed to admit, I would respond only if my parents, teachers, and friends called me Motorcycle Boy.Filmed almost entirely in black and white with allusions to French New Wave and German Expressionism, this tale of alienated youth centers on the relationship between the Motorcycle Boy, a revered former gang leader/existential Fonzie, and his younger brother, Rusty James (Matt Dillon), who struggles to live up to his brother's legendary reputation. In addition to Diane Lane and Dennis Hopper, the cast includes a host of fresh faces who went on to thriving careers, including Nicolas Cage, Christopher Penn, Laurence Fishburne, and musician Tom Waits. All the performances are excellent, but it’s Micky Rourkes' finest hour as the evocative biker. “That's a deep motherf**ker, man," says the old black guy in the pool hall "He's like ... royalty in exile." Granted, Pope & Barfly are great movies, but Rumble Fish is, I think, the best example of Mickey Rourke’s damaged charm: empathetic and sorrowful, with a junkie's whisper-soft voice during even the worst emotional violence. FREE! Refreshments served.

8 PM, Fri. Feb 13
RISK RELAY
w/Jonathan Badger & Borne
Live Music
Though guilty of the occasional atonal freak out, Risk Relay care as much about the quasi-symphonic art-guitar music of composers like Rhys Chatham as they do about the punk pop form. Their songs hover gorgeously for extended lengths, letting guitarists Ed and Mark intertwine spindly tonalities as carefully as it's possible to do at wall-shaking volume, while Ed's untutored voice seditiously intones words that flirt with pop stupidity, high-art eloquence, and urban cool. When they bear down and rock, they do it with a blurry intensity that finds gorgeousness at the heart of discord. Tonight is a must-go for any post punk Garden Stater with a "Washing Machine" T-shirt, who considers themselves the least bit cool. FREE! CDs on sale at the event.

2 PM, Sat. Feb 14
MOMMY'S HAVING A WATERMELON
Reading/Signing/Sing-a-long with Danny & Kim Adlerman
Mommy's Having A Watermelon, co-written by Danny and Kim Adlerman, with mixed-media illustrations by Megan Halsey, is a lovingly humorous tale about a girl who discovers that her mother is not having a watermelon like she thought (on account of a seed she may have swallowed when the girl accidentally spit it into her mom's water glass.) The story is told in 6 very short chapters and the simple dialogue makes it an easy reader for children ages 7-10. There are bonus watermelon recipes at the back including, Watermelon in a Blanket. This is the tenth book by Danny and Kim who also produce music for little and big people. FREE! Books/CDs on sale.

7:30 PM, Weds. Feb. 18
THE RAC-ON-TOUR
Reading/Live Music
The Zimmerli Musuem, Voorhees Campus, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
THE ZIMMERLI MUSEUM, the third largest university gallery in the country, is hosting The Rac-On-Tour, a literary road show that attempts to bottle The Raconteur "experience" and uncork it at other locales. The event will include readings by Robert Kaplow, Clay McLeod Chapman, the enigmaticJack A. Napes (in latex werewolf mask--natch), and Alex Dawson. With live music by Arlan Feiles. All are contributors to The Raconteur Reader, an annual compendium of short prose and song lyrics published by Raconteur Books. FREE! Refreshments served.

While the Zimmerli usually charges $3 to view their collection, the night of the event it will all be free. So get there early, roam the labyrinthine galleries, enjoy the Daumier, their impressive accumulation of Soviet art (the biggest outside of Moscow), and a particular fine exhibition called "Inspired by Literature," which includes Sean Scully's stunning color intaglios for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

THE PERFORMERS:
Described as a "tattletale psychiatrist turned rodeo clown" by acclaimed author Tom Robbins, CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN has spent the past decade in New York theaters reinventing the art of the campfire tale with his critically acclaimed Pumpkin Pie Show, a rigorous session of theatrical tale telling. He's been called "hauntingly poetic" by Time Out New York and compared to William Faulkner by The Village Voice. The Scotsman, Scotland's leading newspaper, called him "Stephen King transformed into a punk, preacher poet." His most recent project, Hostage Song, an Off Broadway rock musical about terrorism, was praised by The New Yorker and The New York Times.

NPR alum ROBERT KAPLOW's last book, Me and Orson Welles, was recently turned into a movie by indie filmmaker Richard Linklater. Set in 1937 New York, Kaplow's novel tells of a teenager hired to star in Welles' production of Julius Caesar. In theaters this spring, the film stars Zac Efron, Claire Danes, and Christian Mackay as Welles. Critic Roger Ebert called it, "one of the best movies about theater I've ever seen."

JACK A. NAPES works as a hammerman (pounding tent pegs) for a small traveling circus. His short story, "Dogman," is tattooed in full on the broad back of his burly friend and circus colleague, Big Ink. When not on the road, he lives in New Jersey.

Dubbed an "Angry Young Man," by The Village Voice, Rutgers graduate ALEX DAWSON has written 15 plays for the New York stage. His work has been called "intense" and "original" by Esquire, "Profane, funny, compelling, and tragic" by The Star Ledger, "gritty and lyrical" by Show Business Weekly, and "disturbing, hysterical genius" by author Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight). Booker Prize finalist Paul Watkins (The Ice Soldier)—labeled the "British Hemingway" by Entertainment Weekly—recently called Dawson's work "Extraordinary." A former bouncer and bartender, Dawson is a licensed Central Park carriage driver and the owner of The Raconteur.

ARLAN FEILES: Arlan sings about the street and the barking of distant dogs. He writes about greasy brother crows wheeling, beak to heel, in a troubled sky. He moans about how he's sick of love and of himself. He's been compared to a young Bob Dylan and a class five hurricane ("if songwriters were bad weather..." you get the idea). He plays a mean little harmonica and a damn sweet guitar.

Books/CDs on sale at the event.

8 PM, Sat.. Feb 28
PARTIAL NUDITY
PARTIAL SOBRIETY
PARTIAL SANITY
Readings
Alethea Black, Rebecca Donner, and Jennie Kaufman will be reading three short stories that explore the hidden meaning behind such phrases as “Reality: A nice place to visit, but...,” “It isn’t fun until someone takes their skirt off,” and “Whoever gets there first, start drinking!” They’re not sure who is which or which is what, but they’re certain you’ll be entertained. And if you enjoy the complimentary wine so much you find yourself slipping your shoes off as you listen, who are they to judge?

ALETHEA BLACK recently completed a short story collection entitled Wise As Serpents, Harmless As Doves. She is currently working on a novel whose subject she still believes is top secret, even though every time she has a third glass of wine, she tells people about it. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines and have won first place in literary competitions judged by Joan Silber and ZZ Packer. This spring, dramatic readings of two of her stories, collectively titled “Marriage and Other Odd Occurrences” and starring Dennis Boutsikaris, will be performed at RiverSpace in Nyack and as part of the Insights & Revelations performance series.

REBECCA DONNER was born in Canada but spent her formative years growing up in Los Angeles, an experience that inspired her critically acclaimed first novel, Sunset Terrace. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, Rebecca worked at the New Yorker, served as the literary director of the renowned KGB Fiction Series, and was editor of the story collection On The Rocks: The KGB Bar Fiction Anthology. Last summer, DC Comics published her graphic novel, Burnout. Rebecca is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and a contributor to Bookforum magazine. She lives in the East Village, and is working on her third novel.

JENNIE KAUFMAN's fiction and essays pop up every few years in literary magazines. She has also written screenplays; her debut, Mustardville, was first runner-up at the New England Screenwriters Conference. Her novel The Ark tells the story of a tortured gay rebel on a tiny island paradise, and her newest novel, Cartoon Gravity, is a comic exploration of failure, forgiveness, and the joy of art. FREE! Comp wine.

Rapscallion Club YA Book Club March 8; Artist Joan Arbeiter & Photographer Kyo Morishima March 13; Poet/Inferno translator Jean Hollander (Organs & Blood) March 14; Musician Ryan Bing/Glad Hearts March 25; Cuban author Achy Obejas (Ruins)March 26

JAN 2009: Idiom; Rapscallion Club; Paul Muldoon; Cool Women;

2009-01-02T12:50:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Thurs. Jan 15
The Idiom Book: Collected Works Release Party
Reading/Live Music
Chris McIntyre, Steve McNamara, Mark Brunetti
Chris McIntyre's writing is bothself-refelective and keenly observant of the world around him. He notices things like park benches going out of style and the anger he feels for Walt Whitman both the man and the bridge. He can ride mechanical bulls for a pretty long time. Steven McNamara is a retired ferris wheel operator. His poetry focuses on the eternal aspects of life derived mainly from his time spent crossing the country, seeing a groundhog predict the weather 10 years in a row, and some time in Peru building houses for people. Mark Brunetti is the publisher of The Idiom Magazine. He won the 2007 Do-It-Yourself Book Competition based out of Los Angeles California for his poetry chapbook, "Airplane Lies and other Poems Without a Home". His lines are simple and concrete, while still attempting to be lyrical and poetic.

The Idiom Magazine is going into its 4th year of publication. It won the London Book Festival: Magazine Category in 2007 and was banned from Rutger's zine festival for obscene material and a 4 1/2 foot paper-mâché volcano which attracted a lot more attention than expected. The Idiom Book is $18 but the Idiom is sympathetic to economical strain.

7:30 PM - 9:30, Sat. Jan. 17
The Rapscallion Club
Alex Dawson
Book Release Party
What do French fry contests, moustache mugs, banana dogs, and the lost art of bumbershooting have in common with ancient magic, pirate ghosts, island treasure, and an underground tunnel to Peru? Find out!

Due to vast fields of compressed pancake ice, Malaysian pirates along the Strait of Malacca, the repeated ramming of a truculent humpback, and the slow recovery of a captain stung by a deadly jellyfish known as the Sea Wasp, the Dutch Fluyt delivering the book, while originally slated to drop anchor five days before Christmas, will not arrive until the morning of the party. Once the Fluyt makes port, a steamer trunk containing the books will be freighted from an unspecified Weehawken dock to downtown Metuchen in the rumble seat of a rented 1925 Kissel Gold Bug Speedster. The trunk will be wound and bound in heavy chains and hung with a big black lock the size of a bear trap. Upon entry to the release party, each guest will receive a skeleton key. Only one key turns the lock. The person with the right key will be awarded his/her very own edition of The Rapscallion Club for FREE!

The event will also feature relevant entertainment and refreshments: a Scottish bagpiper, a fencing maestro in full regalia, a Bartitsu demonstration (an Edwardian martial art otherwise known as self-defense with a walking stick), Peruvian musicians Daniel and Pocho on quenna and djembe, theatrical readings from the novel, and South American snacks such as chichi morada, sweet purple juice made from black corn, and churros, a long fluted donut that gets its name from its shape, which resembles the horns of the Churro sheep. For more info or to pre-order the book, please visit rapscallionclub.blogspot.com/

The Raconteur turns four!
8 PM, Fri. Jan 23
THE RACONTEUR ANNIVERSARY PARTY
w/Pulitzer Prize winning Irish poet PAUL MULDOON
Reading/Signing
Join us in celebrating our fourth anniversary with a magnum of Baron Albert Brut and Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

Carlos Fuentes claims the luck of the English language consists of someone Irish coming along every generation and reinventing it. Muldoon--reared in Northern Ireland, long resident at Princeton, recently professor of poetry at Oxford--is today's reinventor. Many of his poems distinctly take up the poetic tradition yet skew it with half-rhymes and unlikely subjects for classical forms (Ulster gangsters, suburban New Jersey, pub crawls, Warren Zevon), and his voice, with its taste for meaty unpronounceables and querulous urgencies, is like no other in contemporary poetry. With signature wit, Muldoon is preoccupied with the passage of time, the ways things change and stay the same, the distance between one culture and another, and the narrowing gap between high art and popular entertainment.

He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War." Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now a professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Influenced by John Donne and Seamus Heaney as well as rock music and advertising, he has described himself as a "prince of the quotidian". FREE! Comp Brut, wine, and stout so thick it drinks like a meal. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, Fri. Jan 30
Cool Women
Reading/Signing
Audiences have come to expect “hot” poems from the Cool Women. Even the poets themselves don’t know, until their jazz-like ensemble begins a performance, which poems will be shared. They tune like musicians around a theme--first to their audiences, always to each other, making each reading unique. Habitués know to expect the unexpected. Though they perform widely in the NY metro area, Cool Women began as a critique forum; members continue to meet monthly. Members have mentored gifted young women poets at the YWCA of Princeton. Several are Poets in the Schools, under the auspices of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as ‘Dodge Poets’ with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation. All have a broad range of books and publications to their credit—prose as well as poetry. Three Cool Women anthologies, plus a CD, were created by audience demand. A fourth is in the making.

Members include: Eloise Bruce (Lawrenceville); Juditha Dowd (Sergeantsville); Joyce Lott (Rocky Hill); Lois Marie Harrod (Hopewell;) Betty Lies (Montgomery); Judy Michaels (Hillsborough) and Penelope Schott (Portland, Oregon). Maxine Susman (Highland Park) and Gretna Wilkinson (Somerset) have recently joined the group, bringing new energies and perspectives.

DEC/JAN 2008: The Hub Kings; Holiday Party; Roadside Graves

2008-12-03T11:51:00.000-08:00

8 PM, Fri. Dec 5
The Hub Kings
Live Music/CD Release Party
The Hub Kings call their sound Mondo Lounge. It's mondo alright, and it's loungey, but it's also very Memphis soul-y thanks to Hub King Jonathan Tristram's percolating Hammond organ. Throw in some bop jazz and groove happy funk and you're getting close. Huffing behind a bank of old-school keyboards, The Hub Kings plow into their songs with abandon, slapping and whacking their keys with inspired malice. Jimmy Smith, the reigning B3 player of all time, was instrumental in ushering in the soul-jazz genre, and the Kings pay him tribute,replicating what he called "the slow blues stroll" and covering Jimmy greats like "The Sermon" and "Back at the Chicken Shack." In addition to a slew of originals, they'll also cover Robert Walter gems like "Don't Hate, Congratulate," and the hard (sleigh)driving version of "Winter Wonderland" from Robbie's Christmas classic, In a Holiday Groove. FREE! Comp wine.

8 PM, Fri. Dec 19
The Holiday Hootenanny
Steve Kaplan/Guitar & Paul Caluori/Violin
Live Music/Party
400 years of music: from Gustav Holst's "In a Bleak Midwinter" to Coltrane's groovy "Greensleaves" to classic Zep (Led, that is), with detours into Celtic folk and Victorian dance hall. Steve Kaplan and Paul Caluori bring their love of traditional folk, classical music and acoustic jazz into sharp focus by using truly acoustic instruments to perform, exploring sonic possibilities without the "clutter" of other instrumentation. Their approach to the music is deceptively simple: wring out as much emotion as possible without losing the essential structure of the pieces they're playing.
Expect a variety of spiked nogs, puissant punches, and a withering concoction called Yukon Cornelius, along with a range of baked, roasted and boiled dishes (capon anyone?), marinated tench, and an edible lifelike scene sculpted in colored marzipan. Plus Cream Wafers, Date Drops, Honey-Filled Biscuits, Cinnamon Stars, Zucker Hutchen, Fattigmands Bakkels, Drumkake, and Buttery Nut Rounds. FREE!

8 PM, Tues. Dec 23
The Roadside Graves
Live Music
Their sweet-tempered country-rock is far more slippery than it might first appear and often conjures images of a roadhouse Bad Seeds. “I've drank enough to know that I've drank enough," announces front man Gleason on the world-weary “Live Slow,” the one song that comes closest to encapsulating the enduring spirit of The Graves. Performed with an uncommonly deft touch and subtle grace, their songs concern themselves primarily with the pause for breath that comes after reaching original destinations, and the long, careful glance at the atlas that comes before deciding where to go next. Joining Gleason & gang is Austin singer/songwriter Jonathan Terrill, who shared a Graves bill on their last tour and is up from Texas selling Frasier Firs on the streets of Brooklyn. Expect some rowdy Christmas covers, including "Fairytale of New York" (otherwise known as "Christmas Eve in the Drunk Tank") by the Pogues. FREE!

NOV 2008: Ian MacKaye; Kal Wagenheim & Bob Friedman; Pilar Timpane; Benjamin Parzybok; Mutts' Patrick McDonnell; Maltese Falcon Radio Play

2008-10-24T12:25:00.001-07:00

6:30 PM, Sat. Nov 8
IAN MACKAYE
Autobiographical Storytelling/Q&A
A key figure in the development of hardcore punk and a staunch promoter of an independent-minded, do-it-yourself ethic, MacKaye is best known for being the frontman of the influential punk and alternative rock bands Minor Threat, Embrace, Fugazi, and The Evens. Along with his seminal band Minor Threat, he is credited with coining the term Straight Edge, though he did not intend it to become a movement. He is a founder and owner of Dischord Records, an independent record label based in Washington D.C. Venue: THE REFECTORY, 270 Woodbridge Ave (adjacent to the church boneyard), Metuchen, NJ. Doors open @ 6 PM. Admission: ONLY $5. Advance tickets now on sale at The Raconteur!

8 PM, Fri. Nov 14
CUENTOS: STORIES FROM PUERTO RICO
Edited by Kal Wagenheim
SHADOW OF THE FATHERS
by Robert Friedman
Reading/Signing
CUENTOS is a bilingual anthology of twelve short stories, many of which appeared in the 1960s in the English-language magazine The San Juan Review, co-founded by Kal Wagenheim and Augusto Font. Written by six of Puerto Rico’s leading writers, the themes vary in time from the 16th-century Spanish conquest to the migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States. Each story is published in both English and the original Spanish. Sometimes sad and sometimes hilariously comic, these stories represent in many respects an authentic voice of the Puerto Rican people. Editor Kal Wagenhiem was a former correspondent of the New York Times in Puerto Rico and is the author of several books and plays.

In SHADOW OF THE FATHERS, Friedman turns a disturbing event in Puerto Rican history into a captivating work of fiction. American doctor "Dusty" Rhoades cruelly confides in a secret letter to have killed several of his Puerto Rican patients. When exposed, he claims it was all a joke, and quietly leaves the island. Four decades later, Dusty's son Pablo, a highly regarded Puerto Rican artist, is still haunted by the past and vows to finally discover the truth about the father he never knew. A rich, suspenseful tale, the novel moves from the colorful life of San Juan to the snow-covered streets of New York, from the pastel heat of Miami to the fog-shrouded canals of Amsterdam. Books on sale at event. FREE! Comp wine.

8 PM, Thurs. Nov 20
VEO A VICENTE(I see Vicente)
Spanish with English Subtitles
Directed and photographed by Pilar Timpane
Film Screening
Veo a Vicente is a short documentary about Vicente, a Mexican man living in New Brunswick. The film documents his alcoholic abuse in Mexico, what happened as he crossed the border, and his recovery in the states. Pilar is a senior at Rutgers University. This is her first film. The screening is part of The Raconteur's newly minted Emerging Artist Series, which offers a venue and promotion to burgeoning artists with something to say. FREE! Comp wine.

8 PM, Fri. Nov 21
BENJAMIN PARZYBOK
Reading/Signing
COUCH
A lot of people are looking for magic in the world today, but only Benjamin Parzybok thought to check the sofa, which is, I think, the place it’s most likely to be found. Couch is a slacker epic: a gentle, funny book that ambles merrily from Coupland to Tolkien, and gives couch-surfing (among other things) a whole new meaning. An apartment flood destroys almost everything owned by roommates Thom, Tree and Erik, leaving only a colossal orange couch, which the landlord demands they remove. Broke, jobless, and now homeless, the roommates begin carrying their couch through the streets of Portland, and quickly discover two things: it might be magical, and Goodwill won't take it. They reluctantly embark on a hapless quest to take the couch exactly where it wants to go. Occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, Parzybok's quirky humor recalls early Douglas Adams and his high-minded themes recall Life of Pi. Parzybok is the creator of Gumball Poetry, a journal published through gumball machines, and the Black Magic Insurance Agency, a city-wide mystery/treasure hunt. He has worked as a congressional page, a ghostwriter for the governor of Washington, a Taiwanese factory technical writer, an asbestos removal janitor, and a potato sorter. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with the writer Laura Moulton and their son. Books on sale at event. FREE! Comp wine.

3 PM, Sat. Nov 22
PATRICK MCDONNELL
Reading/Signing/Chalk Talk
In 1994, McDonnell created the award-winning comic strip Mutts, which now appears in more than 700 newspapers in 20 countries and has been anthologized in books all over the world. It was described by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz as "one of the best comic strips of all time." A coffee table book of his life and work, Mutts: The Comic Art of Patrick McDonnell, was published in 2003. In 2005, McDonnell wrote his first children's book, The Gift of Nothing, which was a New York Times best seller. The Best of Mutts, a ten year celebration of the strip introduced by acclaimed novelist Alice Sebold. In 2007. McDonnell again returned to the New York Times bestseller list with Hug Time, featuring a kitten named Jules who goes around the world hugging endangered species. His fifth children’s book, South, about the unlikely friendship between a cat and bird, was just released this fall. All of his books are printed on recycled paper. He is involved with many animal and environmental charities, and is a member of the Board of Directors for both The Humane Society of the United States and the Fund for Animals. Books on sale at the event. Books on sale at event. FREE!

8 PM, Sat. Nov. 29
THE MALTESE FALCON
A Staged Presentation of the Radio Play
Featuring Laurence Mintz, Jeff Maschi, Kristy Lauricella, and Lawrence Paone
Celebrate a decidedly different sort of bird two days after Thanksgiving. Spade and Archer is the name of a San Francisco detective agency. The two men are partners, but Spade doesn't like Archer much. Just one hour after a knockout named Miss Wanderly wanders into their office everything has changed. Archer is dead. And so is a man named Floyd Thursby. It seems Miss Wanderly is surrounded by dangerous men. There's Joel Cairo, who uses gardenia-scented calling cards. There's Kasper Gutman, with his enormous girth and feigned civility. Her only hope of protection comes from Spade, who is suspected by the police of murder. More murders are yet to come, and it will all be because of these dangerous men...and their lust for a bird statuette known as the Maltese Falcon. FREE! Comp wine.

OCT/NOV 2008: Porachista Khakpour; Dark Views; Ringwood Manor; The Haunting; Shirley Jackson; The Thing; Haunted Bookshop

2008-09-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Fri. Oct 10
POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR
Reading/Signing
SONS & OTHER FLAMMABLE OBJECTS
Khakpour builds her luminously intelligent debut around the travails of an Iranian-American family caught in the feverish and paranoid currents immediately after 9/11. Darius Adam and his wife, Laleh (who, much to Darius's disgust, Americanizes her name to Lala), flee revolutionary Iran for the alien territory of Southern California, settling in an apartment complex with the allegorically enticing name of Eden Gardens. Khakpour's first novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects was published in September 2007 to great critical acclaim. It was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was included on the Chicago Tribune's 2007 Fall's Best list. It won the 77th annual California Book Award prize in First Fiction. She has been longlisted for the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards for young writers. Her writing has been compared to that of Zadie Smith (by NPR) and Phillip Roth (by Paper Magazine).

"The characters burst from the page in fiery exchanges, while their chaotic inner lives are conveyed with witty precision." The New Yorker. FREE! With complimentary wine.
8 PM, Fri. Oct 17
DARK VIEWS
Photography Exhibition
I met this gentleman in the shop this past July. He's a burly guy with a pony tail, a goatee, and a sleeve of ink that runs down his left arm. From what I can gather, he breaks into abandoned, frequently forbidden places -- asylums, orphanages, jails, castles -- and photographs what he finds. His trespassing takes him all over the world and often involves hiking through nettles, scaling walls crenelated with broken glass, and paddling up to the water-facing and, hence, unguarded sides of various properties in a long blood-red kayak, the bow of which is emblazoned with a stenciled skull. Fifty of his photos will be on display, along with various fearsome things filched from the locations: straitjackets, winding sheets, wheelchairs, morgue trays, shock treatment tables.
10 AM, Sun. Oct 18
THE RACONTEUR MOTORCYCLE CLUB
RINGWOOD MANOR
Field Trip
Seated in northern New Jersey is a beautiful, rolling estate known as Ringwood Manor. Its reputation as a "haunted house" is well earned. Hans Holzer, the "grandfather of ghost hunting", visited the Manor years back with a psychic medium in tow, ultimately declaring it the most frightening place in NJ. Edward Cayce, one of America's most famous male psychics, fondly nicknamed “the sleeping prophet” because of his renowned trance readings, held seances there.

Behind the Manor pond is the grave where the original owner General Erskine, a Geographer and Surveyor-General for General George Washington during the Revolutionary War, is buried. At dusk General Erskine can apparently be seen sitting on his headstone gazing across the pond. The ghost of a housemaid is believed to haunt the small third floor bedroom in which she was beaten to death. It is also said there is an unmarked grave filled with the remains of French soldiers who fought with Rochambeau during the Revolutionary War. After dark, the dead come to the Manor lake to walk along the shore. Sometimes, you can hear soft, sad voices speaking in French.

The Raconteur Motorcycle Club meets at the shop and proceeds en masse to a destination of literary or cinematic significance. The Club was profiled in The New York Times and recently featured in a travel book, Novel Destinations: Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West, published by National Geographic. An article on the Club, written by acclaimed author Robert Kaplow (Me & Orson Welles), will be included in the October edition of New Jersey Monthly. FREE!

8 PM, Thurs. Oct 23
THE HAUNTING
Directed by Robert Wise from a story by Shirley Jackson
Film Screening
Certain to remain one of the greatest haunted-house movies ever made, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is antithetical to all the gory horror films of subsequent decades, because its considerable frights remain implicitly rooted in the viewer's sensitivity to abject fear. A classic spook-fest based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House , the film begins with a prologue that concisely establishes the dark history of Hill House, a massive New England mansion that will play host to four daring guests determined to investigate--and hopefully debunk--the legacy of death and ghostly possession that has given the mansion its terrifying reputation. Like Jack Clayton's 1961 chiller, The Innocents, The Haunting knows the value of planting the seeds of terror in the mind, as opposed to letting them blossom graphically on the screen. What you don't see is infinitely more frightening than what you do, and with nary a severed head or bloody corpse in sight, The Haunting is guaranteed to chill you to the bone.

8 PM, Fri. Oct 24
A DEMON IN HER EYE
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF SHIRLEY JACKSON
World Premiere!
Written by Maire Martello
A Staged Reading Featuring Jane Hardy
Shirley Jackson, an American author, has powerfully influenced such notable horror and fantasy writers as Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. Her novel The Haunting of Hill House, which many writers, including King, believe to be the best horror novel of the twentieth century, is a contemporary updating of the classic ghost story. Jackson, who dedicated herself to rejecting her mother's sense of propriety, drank, smoked and fed to excess. She also dabbled in magic and voodoo, and was often described as a New England witch. She kept eleven black cats and believed she had caused the accident of an enemy by making a wax image of him with a broken leg. By the end, a tangle of physical and mental ailments made her feel unable to venture out into her own town of Bennington, Vermont. One hot August night in 1965, a 48 year old Jackson, frozen with paranoia, went to sleep. She never awoke. This play explores her destructive and mysterious life.

8 PM, Thurs. Oct 30
THE THING
Directed by John Carpenter
Man is the Warmest Place to Hide!
Film Screening
In sharp contrast to the The Haunting’s conceit of unseen horror, The Thing is a grotesque exercise (thanks to FX whiz Rob Bottin, fresh off The Howling) in how to terrify even the most jaded viewer. A loose remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi Cold War allegory, Carpenter's Thing isn't concerned with messages; it's just a terrifying meditation on paranoia and subzero dread as a group of scientists at a South Pole outpost (led by Kurt Russell) is infiltrated by an alien that assumes the bodies of its victims in very messy ways. Which member of the crew is the alien? The crew doesn’t know, and neither does the audience until the creature begins one of its stomach churning transformations. In the aforementioned Robert Wise classic we have creaking doors, cranky caretakers, and a house that was “born bad,” in The Thing we have a head dipped in spare-rib sauce skittering about on spider legs. But despite its many gross-outs, no moment in the movie is more unsettling than watching cuddly Quaker Oatmeal pitchman Wilford Brimley go insane. Though ebulliently resurrected as a cult favorite, The Thing failed at the box office during its initial run. Many factors have been attributed to the poor opening, including the concurrent release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a slightly more optimistic view of alien visitation. Carpenter is frankly surprised by the film's latter-day esteem. “When The Thing was released,” he says, “it was one of the most hated movies of all time.” Time to set the record straight. FREE! w/complimentary wine.

7 - 11 PM, WEDS. OCT 31
THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP
W/B-Horror Star Marvin Schwartz
Guaranteed to scare you Lit-less!
What goes on after a bookstore closes for the night? Come witness the death of Halpin Frayser from Ambrose Bierce's horror story of the same name; see Kafka's Gregor Samsa turn into a clacking black bug as Dr. Moreau’s hybrid manimals scrabble and yowl; observe Lovecraft's ghouls eat parts of their own body as the tragic Prince of Denmark addresses the exhumed skull of his dead court jester and Victor Hugo’s hideous Gwynplaine grins grotesquely; participate in the chilling Swiss Alps séance from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain as a very dead Poe recites The Raven and Mary Shelley's monster is jolted into consciousness. Your guide for the night is B-horror star Marvin Schwartz, last seen as the king of the undead in Midnight Mass, scripted by famed vampire scribe F. Paul Wilson. Gallery of Horrors! Cabinet of Curiosities! Chilling Live Music by the Phantom Pianist. Admission: $5 @ the door.

SEPT 2008: Youth Open Mic; Delhi Rickshaw Doc; Traditional Peruvian Music; Poets Rachel Hadas & Diane Lockward; Author Joshua Henkin

2008-09-02T09:08:00.000-07:00

7 - 9 PM, Thurs. Sept 4
YOUTH OPEN MIC
Hosted by Rachelle Adlerman
Music, poetry & short prose. Parties interested in participating should arrive no later than 6:45 and sign in with Rachelle.

8 PM, Fri. Sept 5
MEN OF BURDEN: PEDALING TOWARDS A HORIZON
With Special Guest Director Raghu Jeganathan
Film Screening/Q&A
The High Court recently tried to outlaw cycle rickshaws in the capital of Delhi after policy makers claimed they were violating traffic rules. If cycle rickshaws are banned, nearly two million pullers, most of whom are landless farmers, uneducated and unskilled, coming to the cities to ride rickshaws and earn enough to sustain their families, will be out of jobs, and the oldest, cheapest, most environmentally sound mode of transportation will disappear from Indian streets. An estimated 500,000 human-powered cycle rickshaws criss-cross narrow lanes in Old Delhi alone, ferrying passengers and goods for measly sums. This documentary explores some of the ethical dimensions of man pulling man in the thickening brume of pollution and against the increasingly menacing current of motorized traffic for less than a dollar a day. FREE! With complimentary wine.
8 PM, Fri. Sept 12
DANIEL EGGERS & CO.
Live Traditional Peruvian Music
Daniel Eggers is a young man from Peru. Last Feb I met him for the first time. He'd heard I did events and had popped by the shop to perform an audition of sorts. After retrieving his guitar from his car he proceeded to play ten minutes of what is likely the most beautiful music I've ever heard. Naturally, I booked him immediately, and, accompanied by his friend Pocho on the djembe, he captivated one of the biggest crowds (May Pang aside) we've ever had at an in-store event. Well, he's back. This time on the quena. The quena is a traditional bamboo flute from the Andes once banned by the Spanish government. They said it inspired indecent emotions among the natives. There is a legend of an Incan princess named Ollantay. She fell in love with a commoner and, forbidden to marry him, she died of unhappiness. Her lover, visiting her grave, hears a haunting whistling sound coming from the wind. This gives him the idea of creating the quena, whose sound will remind him of his lost love. Now, you can hear it too! FOR FREE! As you sip complimentary red wine from the province of Ica (despite its hot and dry climate, Ica is actually a perfect place to grow wine grapes as the fields are thoroughly irrigated with water from the Andes). Songs will be accompanied by classic Spanish guitar.

8 PM, Fri. Sept 19
RACHEL HADAS & DIANE LOCKWARD
Reading/Signing
RACHEL HADAS: is the author of more than a dozen books of poems, essays, and translations. About Hadas's work, the poet Grace Schulman has written, "The poems are urgent, contemplative, and finely wrought. In them, antiquity illuminates the present as Rachel Hadas finds in ordinary human acts what never was and what is eternal" Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is often associated with the New Formalism school of poetry, and her work was included in landmark collections of New Formalism including Rebel Angels and A Formal Feeling Comes. The daughter of noted Columbia University classicist Moses Hadas, she received her baccalaureate at Harvard Univerity in classics, her Master of Arts at Johns Hopkins University in poetry, and her doctorate at Princeton University in comparative literature. Living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poets James Merrill and Alan Ansen. They strongly influenced her early work, as did Cavafy, whose work she translated, and Seferis. She writes regularly for The New Yorker and lives in Manhattan.

DIANE LOCKWARD is the author of What Feeds Us, which received the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times, and have appeared in such journals as The Beloit Poetry Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. Lockward is the recipient of a 2003 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and has received awards from North American Review, Louisiana Literature, the Newburyport Art Association, and the St. Louis Poetry Center. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. She was a featured poet at the Warren County Poetry Festival, the Inkberry Festival, the Long Branch Poetry Festival, the Walt Whitman Poetry Festival, the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and the 2007 Burlington Book Festival. FREE! With complimentary wine.

THE RACONTEUR MOTORCYCLE CLUB
The Back-to-School/F. Scott Fitzgerald Ride
10 AM, Sun. Sept 21
Cagers Welcome!
"Princeton is in the flat midlands of New Jersey, rising, a green Phoenix, out of the ugliest country in the world. Sordid Trenton sweats and festers a few miles south. Northward are the suburban slums of New York. But around Princeton, shielding her, is a ring of silence: milk dairies, great estates with peacocks & deer parks, pleasant farms & woodlands..."-

Taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, is largely set in Princeton and examines the post-war moral let-down of a fast living generation know as "the flaming youth." We'll visit Fitzgerald's eating club, Cottage, his residence, Little Hall, and many of the locations mentioned in the book, including Holder Tower and Cleveland Tower, two spires that capture the imagination of the novel's protagonist, a precocious egoist named Armory Blaine. The Club will eat lunch at The Yankee Doodle Tap Room, part of The Nassau Inn, mentioned in this following excerpt from Paradise.

"The orgy of sociability culminated in a giant party at The Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from immense bowls, and the whole down-stairs became a delirious, circulating, shouting pattern of faces and voices."

The Raconteur Motorcycle Club, which now allows "cagers" (people in cars) to tag along with supplies, meets at the shop and proceeds en masse to a destination of literary or cinematic significance. The Club was profiled in The New York Times and recently featured in a travel book, Novel Destinations: Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West, published by National Geographic. An article on the Club, written by acclaimed author Robert Kaplow (Me & Orson Welles), will be included in the October edition of New Jersey Monthly. FREE!

7 – 9:30 PM, Weds., Sept 24 – Oct 15
THE RACONTEUR WRITING WORKSHOP: SHORT FICTION
Register Now! Sessions fill quickly.
In The Spooky Art, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Norman Mailer talked about crisp words "clamping down…sticking." In an interview shortly before his death, Noir author Raymond Chandler spoke of perfectly pitched sentences "walking off the page." Despite using opposing metaphors, they are obviously describing the same thing. Good writing. A key focus of the class is this acoustical quality. The profound difference between how a sentence sounds and its mute presence on the page. Accordingly, a significant amount of time is dedicated to declaiming work. Students are not, however, permitted to read their own work, rather their work is "vocally published" by the instructor. The writer then becomes a critical part of the evaluating audience for his own piece, often noticing the same literary stumbles (and moments of grace) as his peers. Students should come prepared to revise/resolve a prior project or to draft a pre-existing idea. The workshop does not, for the most part, assign exercises, but rather use the students' own projects to instruct. The cost of the workshop is $100.00 payable at the beginning of the first class. For further information or to register, e-mail The Raconteur at raconteurbooks@aol.com.

8 PM, Thurs. Sept 25
JOSHUA HENKIN
Reading/Signing
MATRIMONY
It is 1987, and Julian Wainwright, aspiring writer and Waspy son of New York City old money, meets beautiful, Jewish Mia Mendelsohn in the laundry room at Graymont College. So begins a love affair that, spurred on by family tragedy, will take Julian and Mia across the country and back, through several college towns, spanning twenty years.

"In the tradition of John Cheever and Richard Yates ... a novel about love, hope, delusion, and the intricate ways in which time's passage raises us up even as it grinds us down. It's a beautiful book. Here's to its brilliant future." Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Hours.

"Beguiling ... [Henkin writes] effortless scenes that float between past and present.... [He creates] an almost personal nostalgia for these characters."--Jennifer Egan, New York Times Book Review

MATRIMONY was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Book Sense Highlight Pick of the Year, and a Borders Original Voices Selection. Joshua Henkin is also the author of the novel SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON, which was named a Los Angeles Times notable book. His short stories have been published in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Triquarterly, DoubleTake, The North American Review, The New England Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. FREE! With complimentary wine.

3 PM, Sun. Sept 28
C. P. KLAPPER
Reading/Signing
Please note: this is a rental, and, accordingly, The Raconteur makes no claims regarding its quality..
C. P. Klapper is the author of "The Washington Poems" and "Sonnets for the Spanish." Born into a family with decidedly mixed backgrounds and professions, his musical and academic talents were early recognized, as were his hyperactivity and strange mannerisms. After finishing an occasionally accelerated primary and secondary education, he attended Grinnell College, where he received his BA in Mathematics. After his graduation, Mr. Klapper was an industry economist for the federal government and, in his spare time, wrote poetry and letters, some of which were published in The Washington Post, and performed with various musical groups, including a choral performance in New York's Carnegie Hall. Mr. Klapper then returned to graduate school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he received his MS in Mathematics.

RAIDERS: THE ADAPTATION w/special guests ERIC ZALA & CHRIS STROMPOLOS

2008-08-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

2 PM, Sun. Aug 17
RAIDERS: THE ADAPTATION
Eric Zala & Chris Strompolos
Film Screening/Q&A
After seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, three 12 year old friends, Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb, began filming their own shot-by-shot adaptation in the backyards of their Mississippi homes. Vigilant, resourceful, and a little bit insane, these Mississippi tweens gained access to sacks of gunpowder, gallons of gasoline, a retired WWII battleship and a functioning Navy submarine. They They broke bones, got grounded, burned down a garage, and got grounded again. Eric had to be hospitalized twice, once for having his hair set aflame, and once because shards of plaster from an exploding head "effect" had to be surgically removed from his scalp. Seven years later their film was in the can. In 2003 (22 years from the project's inception), Steven Spielberg and George Lucas watched the tribute and gave it their stamp of approval, calling it "hugely imaginative," "impressive," and "lovingly detailed." In 2004, Vanity Fair did an expansive 10,000 word feature on the boys' experiences making the movie, Quentin Tarantino became a fan, Wes Craven called the film "phenomenal," and Paramount producer Scott Rudin purchased the life rights to their story. Oscar nominated author/cartoonist Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) is currently working on a screenplay about them. This Sunday, Eric and Chris are flying into Metuchen to screen and discuss their now legendary cult sensation, Raiders: The Adaptation. THE REFECTORY THEATER, 270 Woodbridge Avenue (adjacent to the graveyard), Metuchen, NJ. Parking in rear. All tickets: $15. For advance tickets call 732-906-0009 or visit The Raconteur at 431 Main Street in Metuchen.

JULY 2008: Mountains of the Moon; Inner Paths; Photo Exhibition; Princeton Writers

2008-07-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Thurs. July 10
MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON
Film Screening
In the 1850's two British officers Capt. Richard Burton and Lt. John Speke set out on a spectacular adventure to discover the source of the Nile. They are warned that great dangers await them, but, against all odds, they push on deeper and deeper into the magnificent untamed African wilderness, where no western man had ever gone. As the difficult journey takes its toll Burton and Speke forge a strong bond. A bond that one will eventually betray.How did Bob Rafelson, the director of small-scale American studies such as Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, find himself helming an old-fashioned adventure story such as Mountains of the Moon? Whatever the reasons, Rafelson invested this 1990 epic with passion and professionalism. The hero is one of the greatest British explorers of the 19th century, Sir Richard Burton (played by Patrick Bergin), a fascinating figure and a man out of time: a modern in the Victorian era. Mountains of the Moon is primarily concerned with Burton's trek into East Africa to discover the source of the Nile, accompanied by fellow adventurer John Hanning Speke (Iain Glen). Rafelson is at least as interested in the tricky psychological jockeying between the two men, as he is in the grueling conventions of the adventure movie, but he delivers well on both counts. The brawny Bergin is sensational in a role that should have made him a star, but didn't; the film disappeared quickly. Perhaps audiences were put off by the lack of marquee names and confused by the title, which refers to a piece of African landscape. Providing solid support are Fiona Shaw (another should-have-been star), Richard E. Grant, and Delroy Lindo, as an African warrior. A very satisfying excursion into the National Geographic pith-helmet genre. FREE! Comp Wine.

8 PM, Sat. July 12
SLAWEK WOJTOWICZ & EDE FRECSKA
Reading/Signing/Q&A
INNER PATHS TO OUTER SPACE
For thousands of years, voyagers of inner space--spiritual seekers, shamans, and psychoactive drug users--have returned from their inner imaginal travels reporting encounters with alien intelligences. Inner Paths to Outer Space presents an innovative examination of how we can reach these other dimensions of existence and contact otherworldly beings. Based on their more than 60 combined years of research into the function of the brain, the authors reveal how psychoactive substances such as DMT allow the brain to bypass our five basic senses to unlock a multidimensional realm of existence where otherworldly communication occurs. They contend that our centuries-old search for alien life-forms has been misdirected and that the alien worlds reflected in visionary science fiction actually mirror the inner space world of our minds. The authors show that these “alien” worlds encountered through altered states of human awareness, either through the use of psychedelics or other methods, possess a sense of reality as great as, or greater than, those of the ordinary awareness perceived by our five senses. FREE! Comp Wine.

8 PM, Fri. July 18
MARVIN W. SCHWARTZ & HELEN STUMMER
Photography Exhibition: Joint Show
Marvin Schwartz: I’ve known Marvin for about ten years. As an actor. Before opening a bookshop, I ran a theater company in Manhattan, of which Marvin was a regular part. He’s seventy-eight. He lives in a rent controlled apartment in the West Village. He’s held its lease, even while living for long stretches in Puerto Rico, France, Spain, and Germany, for the better part of forty years. Marvin doesn’t make much money as an actor. He’s appeared in a handful of independent horror films and a few Off Broadway plays. He played the king of the undead in a movie written by famous vampire scribe F. Paul Wilson. Sometimes Marvin gets enough equity work to support his health insurance through the union. Sometimes not. In the first half of Marvin’s life he was a professional photographer. He doesn’t speak of it. Despite our decade of friendship, I’ve seen just one of his photos: an elephant being unloaded from a ship. But when he needs money, for rent, food, medicine, he sells one. Marvin, as it turns out, had done alright snapping his little pictures. He worked for Life Magazine, shooting such subjects as Norman Mailer and Muhammad Ali. He was friends with Paddy Chayevsky. His work is part of the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum, and one of his pictures sold earlier this month for 22,000 USD at an auction in Germany (although he’d sold it to them for five thousand years ago). Come meet Marvin and see thirty of his rarely seen black-and-white photographs. FREE! Comp Wine.Helen Stummer: In the tradition of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange—who dynamically and passionately photographed impoverished immigrants, child labor and migrant workers from the 1800’s through the 1950’s, Stummer has been photographing the struggle and dignity of people in Newark, New Jersey, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, rural Maine, and Comalapa, Guatemala, for over twenty-five years. Although geographically diverse, they speak the same language. It is the language of the streets, the subsistence farms, the aldeas. It is the mother tongue of oppressed people everywhere: Poverty. Because of her decades being involved with urban families, Stummer is unique among American photographers. Her commitment has allowed her to depict children growing up. From babies to young adults, she captures their spirit, their hopes, as well as their disappointments and tragedies. FREE! Comp Wine.

8 PM, Fri. July 25
LOIS MARIE HARROD, JUDITHA DOWD & EDWARD CARCHIA
Reading/Signing
Local resident Edward Carchia is a four-time nominee for the prestigious Pushcart Prize and his short fiction has been published countless times in a variety of literary anthologies.Juditha Dowd's poetry has appeared in numerous journals. She has performed throughout the metropolitan area and as far afield as Portland Oregon. Her work recently received honorable mentions in two esteemed poetry contests--the Allen Ginsberg Award (Paterson Review) and Passager.Lois Marie Harrod has had over 300 poems published in journals and has nine collections in print. She is a professor at The College of New Jersey. FREE! Comp Wine

JUNE 2008: Workshop; Man Who Would Be King; Outsider Art Exhibition; Raiders; Austen Afternoon; Jim/Karen Shepard; Pulp Art Doc Screening; PAPA

2008-05-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

Click to enlarge. All events start at 8 PM unless otherwise noted. For more info, scroll down.

7:00 - 9:30 PM, Mon. & Weds., June 2 - 11
THE RACONTEUR WRITING WORKSHOP
SHORT FICTION
Register Now! Sessions fill quickly.
In The Spooky Art, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Norman Mailer talked about crisp words "clamping down…sticking." In an interview shortly before his death, Noir author Raymond Chandler spoke of perfectly pitched sentences "walking off the page." Despite using opposing metaphors, they are obviously describing the same thing. Good writing. A key focus of the class is this acoustical quality. The profound difference between how a sentence sounds and its mute presence on the page. Accordingly, a significant amount of time is dedicated to declaiming work. Students are not, however, permitted to read their own work, rather their work is "vocally published" by the instructor. The writer then becomes a critical part of the evaluating audience for his own piece, often noticing the same literary stumbles (and moments of grace) as his peers. Students should come prepared to revise/resolve a prior project or to draft a pre-existing idea. The workshop does not, for the most part, assign exercises, but rather use the students' own projects to instruct.

The cost of the workshop is $100.00 payable at the beginning of the first class. Complimentary wine is served. For further information or to register, e-mail The Raconteur at raconteurbooks@aol.com.

8 PM, Thurs. June 5
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
Film Screening
Before Raiders of the Lost Ark, there was The Man Who Would Be King. Adapted from the Rudyard Kipling story of the same title, King was directed by John Huston (The Maltese Falcon) and starred Sean Connery, Michael Caine (who maintained that if any film of his is remembered after his death, it would this one) and Christopher Plummer as Kipling. It tells the tale of two rogue British soldiers/freemasons who set off from 19th century British India in search of adventure, and end up as kings of Kafiristan. Shot on location in Morocco, Huston had planned to make the film since the 1950's: originally with Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable, then Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and then Robert Redford and Paul Newman — Newman suggested Connery and Caine. It's a rollicking tale, an epic satire of imperialism, and the good-natured repartee shared by Caine and Connery is pure gold. FREE! Comp Wine.
8 PM, Fri. June 6
OUTSIDER ART
Group Exhibition
Fifty plus pieces by tattooists, street photogs, and graffiti artists -- all members of the maverick cultural organization: Robots Will Kill. FREE! Comp wine. Art on sale at event.
2 PM - 5:30 PM, Sun. June 8
AN AFTERNOON WITH JANE AUSTEN
Special Event
Beginning at 2 PM, The Brass Lantern (327 Main Street) will display modern and collectible works of needlepoint while a food historian/tea specialist speaks about edibles and drinkables during Austen's era. The Raconteur's Jane Hardy and Laurence Mintz will present a theatrical reading from Austen's Pride and Prejudice at 3:30 PM in the Westerhoff School's new theater (5 Calvin Place). The event will conclude at the School with tea and a classical concert at 4 PM.

Jane Hardy is a former Off Broadway actress. Raconteur patrons my remember her from her riveting performance as a panicky invalid in the staged radio play Sorry Wrong Number, her stunning portrayal of the dynamic titular character in Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, or, most recently, her poignant reading of the epistolary romance, 84 Charing Cross Road (with Laurence Mintz). In July (date TBA) she'll perform Joan Didion's one woman show The Year of Magical Thinking at The Raconteur.

Laurence Mintz is a painter, actor and scholar. Raconteur performances include the Russian Colonel Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game and Briton bookseller Frank Doel (to Jane Hardy's Helene Danff) in 84 Charing Cross Road. He also played multiple characters (Major Calloway, Baron Kurtz, Dr. Winkel) with a range of accents in The Raconteur's recent production of Graham Greene's The Third Man.

8 PM, Thurs. June 12
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
Film Screening
Released exactly 27 years ago today, on June 12, 1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark is the first film I can remember seeing more than once. I was eleven and lived on a horse ranch in southeastern Alabama. The Peachtree movie theater was almost an hour away in Columbus, Georgia. To see a movie multiple times meant multiple two hour round-trips across the state border. Not an easy thing to accomplish when you're in seventh grade. Fortunately, my family loved the film as much as I did, all of us watching wide-eyed and thunderstruck as the Ark heaved its sinister contents into the furious Cairo sky, again and again. An homage to the glory days of Saturday matinee adventure serials and back-lot B-movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the most unabashedly enjoyable cinematic events of the 1980s. Packed with breakneck action and a cheerfully absurd plot, Raiders celebrated old-school adventure, making it palatable to an increasingly jaded contemporary audience and turning otherwise stodgy film critics into gleeful children. FREE! Comp Wine!
8 PM, Fri. June 13
JIM & KAREN SHEPARD (w/special guest Clay Mcleod Chapman)
Reading/Signing
LIKE YOU'D UNDERSTAND ANYWAY:STORIES
DON'T I KNOW YOU? A NOVEL
Stories about dissolving marriages are fine, but how about two gay engineers on the Hindenberg? Or a 19th century man searching for a giant half-shark/half-whale? A recent finalist for the National Book Award, Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval; a maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer; the first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission; and the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear. Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. “These are uniformly bold and exhilarating stories. Let's hope Shepard becomes as influential as he should be. He's the best we've got." —Dave Eggers. "With a near spooky sense of empathy and a wit that finds its mark like lightning, Shepard’s stories transport readers light-years beyond what they think they know of the world." —Vanity Fair

PLUS Karen Shepard's masterful third book, Don't I Know You?, opens in 1976 on Manhattan's Upper West Side as 12-year-old Steven Engel comes home to find his mom, Gina, stabbed to death. Karen Shepard is the author of the novels An Empire of Women and The Bad Boy's Wife. Her work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Bomb, and other publications.

With special guest: acclaimed performer/author Clay McLeod Chapman. Chapman has been called “hauntingly poetic” by Time Out New York and compared to William Faulkner by The Village Voice. The Scotsman, Scotland’s leading newspaper, called him “Stephen King transformed into a punk, preacher poet.”

FREE! Comp Wine. Books on sale at event.

8 PM, FRI. JUNE 20
PULP FICTION ART: CHEAP THRILLS & PAINTED NIGHTMARES
Film Screening/Discussion
Hosted by NYC documentarian JAMIE MACDONALD
With Special Guest: Pulp Art Historian ROBERT LESSER
Hard-boiled dicks, lantern jawed thugs, dames in distress, jungle warlords, and evil oriental masterminds. Pulp magazines, frequently sadistic, occasionally rascist, and always misogynistic, reigned for about a quarter of a century as the most popular entertainment medium in America. They were cheaply produced and cheap to buy, generally a dime. And they were plentiful. After a low-key beginning, the format took off and the initially tame art became more garish, promising endless excitement and ever greater thrills. Western covers went from an illustration of a serene Indian gently paddling his canoe to ferocious savages tomahawking a defenseless frontier family. Mystery covers went from cops on the beat to hoodlums ripping blouses off buxom young blondes.

Pulp writers knew how to write compelling stories and, indeed, many of the best went on to extremely successful and more respectable careers (Dashell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Isaac Asimov, and Tennessee Williams). But with the exception of N. C. Wyeth, the pulp painters (J. Allen St. John, Margaret Brundage, Rafael de Soto) rarely left their lurid beginnings.

This documentary takes a look at the macabre magazine covers that even the artists who painted them sadly seemed to disown. Winner of the 2006 Best Documentary award at both the Dragon*Con Film Festival and The International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival, documentary filmmaker Jamie McDonald gained exclusive access to the world s largest pulp art collection - owned by pulp art historian Robert Lesser. Whether you are a true fan of the form or a curious newcomer, Cheap Thrills & Painted Nightmares will leave you thinking differently about what constitutes true art. Filmmaker MacDonald and historian Lesser will introduce the film and answer questions following the screening. FREE!

7 - 9 PM, Thurs. June 26
YOUTH OPEN MIC
Hosted by Rachelle Adlerman
Music, poetry & short prose. Parties interested in participating should arrive no later than 6:45 and sign in with Rachelle.

8 PM, Fri. & Sat. June 27 & 28
Two Nights!!
PAPA
Staged Reading
Featuring Jeff Maschi
If Papa, John deGroot's unsparing dramatic portrait of Ernest Hemingway in his later years, has any degree of accuracy, the macho titan of 20th-century American fiction was one mean drunk. He was also a bully, a misogynist and a liar, obsessed with manliness and devoured by envy. Halfway into Papa, the character works himself into a competitive frenzy, grabs one of several hunting guns from the wall, and shoots, imagining William Faulkner as a game bird.Set in Hemingway's trophy-decorated home outside Havana in 1959, five years after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and two years before his suicide by shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho, Papa coheres as the story of a man in pain. Without going into medical details, the play conveys the debilitating physical toll of all those macho exploits: the war wounds, plane crashes and car wrecks that facilitated his dependence on alcohol, his favorite general anesthetic. As the author desperately shadowboxes with literary ghosts and fires his gun (figuratively and literally) into the air, you feel the agony of a man whose body and soul are irreparably racked. (blurb excerpted from Stephen Holden's New York Times review of the 1996 Broadway production). FREE! Comp Wine.

ON DECK FOR JULY: Ray Tintori/Death of a Tinman (Film Screening); April Smith & The Great American Show (Live Music); The League of Gentleman (Radio Play); Marvin Schwartz & Helen Stummer (Photography Exhibition); Reign of Fire (Film Screening)

MAY 2008: Rac Fest; Michael Hastings

2008-05-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

2 PM, Sat. May 10
THE RACONTEUR FESTIVAL
Acclaimed Authors/Live Music/Sideshow Performers
What do a sword swallower, a young female folk singer from Seville, Spain, and an author whose latest novel, Skin, is slowly being written on the bodies of ten thousand volunteers (each who've agreed to have a single word tattooed on their body), all have in common? RAC FEST!

The Raconteur Festival is a semiannual hootenanny/cultural clambake featuring acclaimed authors, live music, sideshow performers and an independent press book expo. Performers include Charles Bock, John Crowley, Gabriel Brownstein, Shelley Jackson, The Dan Whitley Band, The Roadside Graves, Samantha Hunt, Clay McLeod Chapman, Alex Dawson, Sandra Rubio, Arlan Feiles, James Braly, Jeremy Benson, and The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. 2 pm, Sat. May 10 (Doors open at 1:30 pm). The Refectory, 270 Woodbridge Avenue (one block from the train station, adjacent to the First Presbyterian Church), Metuchen, NJ. Fest Tickets: $15. Book Expo Free! to public. For advance tickets call 732-906-0009 or visit The Raconteur at 431 Main Street. Tickets available at The Refectory day of event ONLY. While clams covered in seaweed and steamed on hot rocks is typical of clambakes, The Raconteur is anything but typical i.e. no clams. For more info/participant bios visit www.raconteurbooks.com and click on "Rac Fest."

8 PM, Weds. May 14
MICHAEL HASTINGS
Reading/Signing
I LOST MY LOVE IN BAGHDAD
At age twenty-five, Michael Hastings arrived in Baghdad to cover the war in Iraq for Newsweek. He had at his disposal a little Hemingway romanticism and all the apparatus of a twenty-first-century reporter -- cell phones, high-speed Internet access, digital video cameras, fixers, drivers, guards, translators. Back in New York, Hastings had fallen in love with Andi Parhamovich, a young idealist who worked for Air America. A year into their courtship, Andi followed Michael to Iraq, taking a job with the National Democratic Institute. In many ways their romance is typical: they call each other pet names, they exchange frequent IMs and text messages, they make plans for the future. But in many ways it is not: they frequently fight about the risks each of them must separately take, all the while trying to figure out how to physically connect, when each visit puts bodyguards and drivers in jeopardy.

Then Andi goes on a dangerous mission for her new employer: a meeting at the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters that ends in catastrophe.

Searing, unflinching, and revelatory, I Lost My Love in Baghdad is both a raw, brave, brilliantly observed account of the war and a heartbreaking story of one life lost to it. FREE! Comp wine. Books on sale at event.

APRIL 2008: Art Exhibition

2008-04-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

8 PM, Sat. April 12
Pietro Barbera
ART EXHIBITION
I've been trying to get this artist to do a show at the The Raconteur for three years. Now almost eighty, he rarely exhibits or makes public appearances. But I was determined. I renewed my efforts this past winter and months of vigilant coaxing has managed to do the trick. Some of you may have noticed his work in our shop. Indeed, his five foot Indian which stands at the entrance to the store has provoked many comments, unsettled many children (who must be carried past it, eyes closed, head buried in the chest of a parent), and has been highlighted in almost every article on The Raconteur. His rawboned prizefighter, reminiscent of Giacometti's blade thin sculptures and gaunt post war figures, stands on a stack of leather-bound Thackeray in our front window. His crayon/beaver board depictions of schemers and guttersnipes (my personal favorites), which hang to the left of the cashier counter, were done decades ago, when Pietro himself was homeless. Binding the boards with a frayed electrical cord, he'd carry them under his arm wherever he went. When he wanted to make a change, he'd melt the crayon wax with a cigarette lighter and move it about the board with his finger.

Pietro will be here this Saturday with OVER FIFTY ADDITIONAL WORKS OF ART.

As always, Raconteur events are FREE! and include complimentary wine and amuse-bouche (I make no promises, but I hear tell of bacon-wrapped quail and prunes soaked in cognac).

FEB/MARCH 2008: Art Exhibition; Arlan Feiles; Oscar; Rac-On-Tour; 3rd Man Radio Play; Starfish Headquarters; Hard Eight; 3rd Time Around; May Pang

2008-02-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

8 PM, SAT. FEB 16
ART EXHIBITION
Featuring Lawrence Mintz, Steve Epstein, Rita Herzfeld, and Bob Shore
With Live Music by Steve Kaplan and Paul Caluori
View over sixty paintings/drawings by four of New Jersey's best artists while sipping comp Cab and listening to an eclectic mix of acoustic jazz and 18th/19th century Celtic folk played live by Steve Kaplan on guitar and Paul Caluori on violin. Lawrence Mintz paints pre-modern portraiture and urban scenes in the atmospheric shadows of Hopper. Expect lots of nudes, belching factory-scapes, and moody rail yards. Steve Epstein vivisects the social anxieties of the preconscious, recomposing them into unique works of magical, often horrific, expressionism that recall Francis Bacon and H. P. Lovecraft. Rita Herzfeld's bold brush strokes -- some celebratory, some painful -- are more important than the subject matter she depicts. Indeed Ms. Herzfeld's huge, vivid impasto paintings are often abstract, resembling craggy, colorful sections of a blistering foundry wall somewhere south of Key West (I mean that in the best possible way). Plus pencil drawings, intaglio prints and photogravure by Bob Shore! FREE! (the exhibition, not the art...the art you have to pay for you lousy pinch-fisted skinflints).

8 PM, FRI. FEB 22
ARLAN FEILES
CD Release Party
Live Music
Arlan is one of the first musicians I scouted (most of the bands that play here I've known for years, either personally, or from my days of bartending and booking music in NB). I saw him at The Saint (in Asbury Park) and sent my girlfriend Kristy up to the stage with a business card. Arlan sings about the street and the barking of distant dogs. He sings about greasy brother crows wheeling, beak to heel, in a troubled sky. He moans about how he's sick of love and of himself. He's been compared to a young Bob Dylan and a class five hurricane ("if songwriters were bad weather..." you get the idea). He plays a mean little harmonica and a damn sweet guitar. In any case, whether you like Dylan, rough winds, brother crows, or just fine music, Arlan Feiles is not to be missed. CDs on sale at the event. FREE!

8 PM, SAT. FEB 23
OSCAR @ THE RAC
Featuring Theatrical Readings from:
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, ATONEMENT, DIVING BELL & BUTTERFLY, and OIL
With Jeff Maschi, Jane Hardy, Lawrence Mintz, & Morrowbie Jukes.
Looking forward to the Academy Awards? Get geared up with Oscar @ The Rac (ever notice how the last three letters of Oscar, once reversed, spell out "rac"?) with theatrical readings from four novels whose cinematic counterparts have been nominated for awards. FREE!

7 PM, FRI. FEB 29
THE RACONTEUR READER @ PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Readings/Live Music
FRIST 302 (Frist Campus Center)
The Nassau Literary Review, the literary magazine of Princeton University (and the second oldest undergraduate literary magazine in the country -- it once published F. Scott Fitzgerald and Woodrow Wilson) is hosting an on-campus Raconteur Reader event. The event will include readings by Robert Kaplow, Clay McLeod Chapman, and myself (Alex Dawson). With live music by Jeremy Benson. This event is part of The Rac-On-Tour (get it?), a literary road show that attempts to bottle The Raconteur "experience" and uncork it at other locales. For directions and parking suggestions, visit http://www.princeton.edu/frist/. FREE! With Comp Pizza.

The inaugural book of Raconteur Publications, The Raconteur Reader is a compendium of short prose edited by Alex Dawson and featuring work by Oscar nominated screenwriter Robert Festinger (In the Bedroom); O. Henry Prize winner Douglas Light (East Fifth Bliss); Werner Herzog film editor Joe Bini (Rescue Dawn); Nebula Award Winner Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners), whose stories have been called "cross-genre gems," by Time Out New York, "amazing" by New York Magazine and "intoxicating," by Alice Sebold; Whiting Writers' Award and Pushcart Prize winner Jess Row (The Train to Lo Wu), recently selected as one of Granta's 2007 Best Young American Novelists (alongside Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer); novelist/NPR regular Robert Kaplow, whose latest book Me and Orson Welles is in production with filmmaker Richard Linklater and stars Claire Danes; memoirist Jeremy Mercer, whose recent reminiscence Time Was Soft There was touted by famed Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and won raves from The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal; author/essayist Lynn Lauber (White Girls), whose fiction has been praised by Entertainment Weekly and Newsday and whose essays have appeared in The New York Times; novelist Rich Perez (The Loser's Club) whose clear-eyed chronicle of the East Village has been cheered by Tama Janowitz, Barry Gifford, Mary Gaitskill, and Poppy Z. Brite; storyteller Clay Mcleod Chapman (The Pumpkin Pie Show), who's been called "hauntingly poetic" by Time Out New York, compared to Faulkner by The Village Voice and described as a "demon angel on a skateboard" by acclaimed author Tom Robbins; and more!

The Raconteur Reader, which comes with a free music CD and lists at 16.95, will be on sale at the event.

8 PM, SAT. MARCH 1
THE THIRD MAN LIVE!
A Staged Radio Play
Sound Effects!
Featuring Robert Kaplow, Lawrence Mintz, Jeff Maschi, Jane Hardy, and Kristy Lauricella
The atmospheric rubble and melancholy damp of war-smashed Vienna is powerfully evoked in this thrilling radio play, based on Sir Carol Reed's 1949 film starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. Holly Martins is a "scribbler" of hack Westerns who arrives in postwar Vienna to land a job and join his old pal Harry Lime. Instead he finds himself drawn into a murder mystery and a network of deadly black-market racketeers. The story blurs the lines between what's comic and what's corrupt and cankerous, melding melodrama and smirking frivolity with razor-blade noir tones and grave ruminations on the seductive nature of money and evil. FREE!

8 PM, FRI. MARCH 7
STARFISH HEADQUARTERS + SPECIAL GUEST
Live Music
Alt Rock with heavy jazz influences. Further description coming soon. FREE!

8 PM, SAT. MARCH 8
HARD EIGHT
Film Screening
There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar-nominated epic American nightmare, arrived in theaters early this year, belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. But before that. Before even Boogie Nights, his kaleidoscopic saga of seventies porn, Anderson impressed critics with this deftly conceived, low-budget film noir chamber piece. With its minimalist plot, deliberate pacing, and brief, but shocking bursts of violence, Hard Eight won't please everyone, but Anderson and his first-rate cast were clearly working on the same authentic wavelength. It's a mystery at first why a solemn professional gambler (Philip Baker Hall in a captivating performance) cares for a down-and-out loser (John C. Reilly) and a dimwit Reno cocktail waitress (Gwyneth Paltrow). But his motivations soon become clear when he faces blackmail by a small-time crook (Samuel L. Jackson). In tandem with Boogie Nights, this largely forgotten 1996 film marked the arrival of a new filmmaker whose talent is easily as impressive as that of another nineties hotshot, Quentin Tarantino. FREE!

8 PM, FRI. MARCH 14
THIRD TIME AROUND
Live Music
I saw this band's front man, Bryan Hansen, sing when he was still a senior at Edison High. He was in their production of Cabaret. He played the emcee opposite my girlfriend's cousin (the reason we were there) who played Sally Bowles. Having been the artistic director for a Manhattan theater company prior to opening the Raconteur, I've seen a lot of plays (both in Manhattan and out) and am typically unforgiving when it comes to community theater, let alone high school theater. But this production of Caberet, specifically this kid's idiosyncratic performance as the emcee, absolutely blew me away. Anyway. Fast forward one year and I run into him at one of those strip mall Halloween superstores where I'm getting some last minute cobweb fluff for The Raconteur's haunted bookshop. I find out he has a band. I book that band. They play tonight. FREE!

8 PM, FRI. MARCH 28
MAY PANG
INSTAMATIC KARMA
Reading/Q&A/Signing
John Lennon is the most famously photographed Beatle, but you've never seen pics like these taken by May Pang, Lennon's girlfriend from 1973 to 1975. Collected for the first time in Pang's new book, Instamatic Karma, these photos are that rare thing: intimate images of an icon. They show Lennon in a variety of settings: at work, at play, at home, and away. They portray a lighthearted Lennon, blithe, flirtatious, casual and unguarded; they're the kind of photos one lover takes of another. Accumulated during a time when, according to legend, Lennon was unhappy and unproductive, estranged from his family and bandmates, Pang's photos and rich accompanying captions clearly tell another story. They show Lennon clowning around, working on his hit album "Walls and Bridges", embracing old friends and family, hanging out in their apartment on Manhattan's East 52nd Street, relaxing in the country in upstate New York or spending peaceful days swimming in the waters of Long Island.

In 1973, Lennon and Ono separated and Lennon and Pang began a relationship, which Lennon later referred to as his "Lost Weekend," that lasted over 18 months. Tired of being "airbrushed out of the Lennon history", Pang published her memoir, Loving John, in 1983. It was later updated and re-named, John Lennon: The Lost Weekend. Pang claims that she and Lennon remained lovers until 1977, and stayed in contact until his death. Instamatic Karma will be on sale at the event.

Plus that same night following Ms. Pang:

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
Film Screening
Nobody expected A Hard Day's Night to be much more than a quick exploitation of a passing musical fad, but when the film opened it immediately seduced the world--even the stuffiest critics fell over themselves in praise. Wisely, screenwriter Alun Owen based his script on the Beatles' actual celebrity at the time, catching The Fab Four in the delirious early rush of Beatlemania: dodging rampant fans, killing time on trains and in hotels, appearing on a TV broadcast. American director Richard Lester, influenced by the freestyle French New Wave and British Goon Show humor, whips up a delightfully upbeat circus of perpetual motion. From the opening scene of the mop tops rushing through a station mobbed by groupies, the movie rarely stops for air. Some of the songs are straightforwardly presented, but others ("Can't Buy Me Love," set to the foursome gamboling around an empty field) soar with ingenuity. Above all, the Beatles express their irresistible personalities: droll, deadpan, infectiously cheeky. Better examples of pure cinematic joy are few and far between. FREE!

As always, all Raconteur in store events are FREE! and include complimentary wine/amuse bouche.