Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
ROB REGER, JESSICA GRUNER AND BUZZ PARKER
Slideshow, reading, and book signing for Emily the Strange: The Lost Days
Thursday, June 4 at 7:30 p.m.Emily the Strange: 13 years old. Able to leap tall buildings, probably, if she felt like it. More likely to be napping with her four black cats; or cobbling together a particle accelerator out of lint, lentils, and safety pins; or rocking out on drums/ guitar/saxophone/zither; or painting a swirling feral sewer mural; or forcing someone to say "swirling feral sewer mural" 13 times fast . . . and pointing and laughing. The Lost Days is her first novel.
Rob Reger has grown Emily the Strange from an image on a few skateboards and T-shirts to an international fashion brand and publishing phenomenon. He lives in the Bay Area. A former high school English teacher, Jessica Gruner owns a clothing boutique in San Francisco. She lives in the Bay Area.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
with Eric Zassenhaus and Gravity Goldberg of Instant City, and other guests
Panel on community and peep culture for The Peep Diaries
Monday, June 8 at 7:30 p.m.Join award winning cultural observer Hal Niedzviecki as he takes you on a multimedia tour of our new world: Peepville. In Peepville, Hal will show you such notable features as streets lined with surveillance cameras, daycares equipped with webcams, and citizens eagerly tracking themselves and each other via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and shared GPS.
Behind all those cameras, cell phones and profiles are real people. It’s time to meet your neighbors, the peeps of Peepville! Some of them are inexplicably revealing the intimate details of their (sex) lives online. Others have become the new enforcers of (digital) morality – digicam vigilantes who stalk everyone from bad drivers to prostitutes. Some of us just want to sit back and relax and watch other people go about their lives dying, disliking their jobs, and trying out for reality tv. Part travelogue, part diary, part meditation and social history, The Peep Diaries explores the way Peep Culture is replacing pop culture, radically changing not just the entertainment landscape, but also the firmaments of our culture and society.
Hal Niedzviecki is the founder of Broken Pencil magazine and the author of Hello I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity and We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture. Called the "guru of independent/alternative creative action" by The Toronto Star, Niedzviecki and has published numerous works of social commentary and fiction. His writing has appeared in periodicals and newspapers across North America including The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, The Walrus, Adbusters, the Utne Reader and more. Hal is the subject of an upcoming documentary, "The Peep Diaries."
VIVIENNE SOSNOWSKI
Reading and book signing at Cask 17 Third Street, SF, CA Tuesday, June 9Today, millions of people around the world enjoy California's legendary wines, unaware that 90 years ago the families who made these wines – and in many cases still do – turned to struggle and subterfuge to save the industry we now cherish. When Prohibition took effect in 1919, violence and chaos descended on Northern California. Federal agents spilled thousands of gallons of wine in the rivers and creeks, gun battles erupted on dark country roads, and local law enforcement officers, sympathetic to their winemaking neighbors, found ways to run circles around the intruding authorities. In When the Rivers Ran Red, Vivienne Sosnowski tells the inspiring storyof how ordinary people fought to protect to a beautiful and timeless culture in the lovely hills and valleys of now-celebrated wine country.
Vivienne Sosnowski has been an editorial director of newspapers, including the Washington, D.C., Examiner and the San Francisco Examiner. A gifted photographer whose portraits of wine country pioneers were the genesis of this book, she divides her time between a home in the vineyard county of Sonoma and another in Vancouver, Canada.
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Reading and book signing for LIFE INC.
Tuesday, June 9 at 7:30 p.m.According to social theorist, author, and filmmaker Douglas Rushkoff, the current financial crisis started 450 years ago. In LIFE INC: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back, Rushkoff traces the history of how we came to where we are today, a society where “community” and personal connectedness have broken down, where most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it, where we have replaced our personal decisions with market-tested solutions (for everything from weight loss, to conception, to finding a date), and, now that we are fed up with corporate spending, where to go from here. Provocative and controversial, Rushkoff argues that America's economic implosion is an opportunity for us to become reconnected to our towns, to our values, and to each other.
Douglas Rushkoff is a widely known media critic and documentarian. He has written ten books, and his documentaries include Frontline’s award-winning “The Merchants of Cool” and “The Persuaders.” He teaches media studies at the New School, hosts “The Media Squat” on radio station WFMU, and serves on the board of directors of the Media Ecology Association, the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and the National Association for Media Literacy Education. He has won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology and was the first winner of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. He lives just outside of New York City.
Eduardo Galeano on Mirrors
Friday, June 12 7:30
at Berkeley Arts & Letters @ FCCB, Berkeley, CACharacteristic of Galeano, Mirrors looks at the world and its histories “upside down” -- “against horror, against defeat, against oblivion” as one critic put it -- recounting, in his inimitably impish and mystical way, the songs and stories of humanity that have been forgotten or condemned to posterity. This author recently made headlines when Hugo Chavez gifted his book "Open Veins" to President Obama. Tickets for this event are available for sale at The Booksmith or online at: Brown Paper Tickets.
NOVELLA CARPENTER
Launch party, reading, and book signing for Farm City
Monday, June 15 at 7:30 p.m.Farm City is an unforgettably charming memoir about the battle between urban life and the natural world as well as a beautiful meditation on what we have given up to live the way we do. Novella Carpenter loves cities—the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can’t shake the fact that she’s the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents’ disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard self-sufficiency, Novella decides that it might be possible to have it both ways: a homegrown vegetable plot as well as museums, bars, concerts, and a twenty-four-hour convenience mart mere minutes away. If you’ve ever considered leaving it all behind to become a farmer outside the city limits or looked at the abandoned lot next door with a gleam in your eye, consider this both a cautionary tale and a full-throated call to action.
Novella Carpenter grew up in rural Idaho and Washington State. She studied biology and English at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she had many odd jobs, including assassin bug handler and 16-millimeter projectionist. After moving to California, she attended UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her writing has appeared in salon.com, saveur.com, sfgate.com (the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site), and Mother Jones. Her adventures in urban agriculture began with honeybees and a few chickens, then some turkeys, until she created an urban homestead called GhostTown Farm near downtown Oakland, where she and her boyfriend, Bill, live today.
IN CONVERSATION: ADRIAN TOMINE AND SETH
A Special Off-Site Event
at the Park Branch of the SFPL
1833 Page Street
Thursday, June 18 at 7:30 p.m.The two New Yorker illustrators Adrian Tomine and Seth will be celebrating their own new releases--Tomine's new editions of Shortcomings and 32 Stories and Seth's new graphic novel George Sprott 1894-1975--as well as the releases of the books they have each edited and designed--Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life (Adrian Tomine) and The Collected Doug: Canada's Master Cartoonist (Seth). The two authors will present slide shows, chat with each other, take questions from the audience and sign books.
At 16, Adrian Tomine started writing and drawing a combination of fictional and autobiographical stories, self-publishing them in his mini-comic Optic Nerve, which he sold through local stores and mail order. Thanks to his cool, clean, and very distinctive style, Tomine quickly found himself in high demand and his work has graced numerous CD and album covers as well as magazines like The New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Time. From 2004 to 2007, Tomine completed his most lengthy story arc thus far, Shortcomings, originally serialized in Optic Nerve issues #9-11, excerpted in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13, and published as a graphic novel in Fall 2007. The racially-charged, volatile dialogues delineated in Shortcomings are unlike anything in Tomine's previous work or, for that matter, comics in general.
As a book designer, Seth has worked on a variety of projects including the recent Penguin Classics reedition of The Portable Dorothy Parker. He is the designer of the 25 volume series The Complete Peanuts and the upcoming two volume series on Canadian master cartoonist Doug Wright. His novels, which have been translated into 8 languages, include It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken, Wimbledon Green, and the illustrated memoir of his father, Bannock, Beans and Black Tea. Currently, he is serializing the story Clyde Fans. In 2007, Seth serialized the story George Sprott (1894-1975) in the New York Times Magazine in 25 installments, and has expanded the story to appear as a standalone book. As an illustrator, Seth has produced commercial works for virtually all of the major Canadian and American magazines. His work frequently appears inside and on the cover of the New Yorker. He is the subject of an upcoming National Film Board documentary, lives in Guelph, Ontario with his wife and two cats, and rarely leaves his basement.
EAT, DRINK, TALK AND SWAP BOOKS
An Evening at The Booksmith
Friday, June 19 at 7:00 p.m.
Price: $25For anyone who is tired of meeting people at bars, new to the city, or simply looking to meet the other smart, creative, lit-minded souls of San Francisco, the Booksmith has put together an event for you: a book swap. If not just tempted by the good company and swell atmosphere, be tempted by delicious Bi-Rite food and free-flowing wine. Bring a book -- one you loved but can part with, and well cook up some good smart fun.
Attendees will receive a 20% discount on all purchases for the evening. There are also rumors of surprise giveaways.
CHRISTIE HERRING
Panel discussion and preview screening of THE CAMPAIGN
A documentary-in-progress about the fights against Prop 8
Monday, June 22 at 7:30 p.m.Award-winning director and cinematographer Christie Herring presents a sneak preview of her documentary-in-progress, THE CAMPAIGN, and activists from “No on 8” and beyond discuss the state of the movement for marriage equality today. With exclusive access to the headquarters in San Francisco, this film chronicles the daily trials and travails of the people behind the “No on 8” campaign – the largest political campaign for LGBT rights in American history.
In Conversation: ANDREW SEAN GREER
Author of The Story of a Marriage
Wednesday, June 24 at 7:30 p.m.Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune while garnering many other coast-to-coast honors.
His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, and his story collection, How It Was for Me, were also published to wide acclaim. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and other national publications, and have been anthologized most recently in The Book of Other People and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is the recipient of the PEN/O’Henry Prize for Short Fiction, the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer currently lives in San Francisco and New York, at work on his next novel.