Archive
Friends,
below are some great events coming up at the Book Smith at 1644 Haight St. between Clayton & Cole (863-8688)
FIRST FRIDAYS: SPECIAL EVENT
Friday, October 2
TAO LIN
Shoplifting from American Apparel
7:30 PM“A revolutionary.” – The Stranger ~ “Hard to believe he’s only 24…We’ll be hearing a lot from him in the years to come.” – USA Today ~ “Helluvanovella.” – Daniel Handler
“Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass – from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious.” – Miranda July
Set mostly in Manhattan -- although also featuring Atlantic City, Brooklyn, GMail Chat, and Gainesville, Florida -- this autobiographical novella, spanning two years in the life of a young writer with a cultish following, has been described by the author as “A shoplifting book about vague relationships,” “2 parts shoplifting arrest, 5 parts vague relationship issues,” and “An ultimately life-affirming book about how the unidirectional nature of time renders everything beautiful and sad.”
From VIP rooms in “hip” New York City clubs to central booking in Chinatown, from New York University’s Bobst Library to a bus in someone’s backyard in a college-town in Florida, from Bret Easton Ellis to Lorrie Moore, and from Moby to Ghost Mice, it explores class, culture, and the arts in all their American forms through the funny, journalistic, and existentially-minded narrative of someone trying to both “not be a bad person” and “find some kind of happiness or something,” while he is driven by his failures and successes at managing his art, morals, finances, relationships, loneliness, confusion, boredom, future, and depression.
Tao Lin was born in 1983, and raised in Orlando, Florida. His first two works of fiction, the short story collection Bed, and the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, were published simultaneously. Lin quickly became an underground sensation with a huge cult following. In 2008, Lin published his poetry collection, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. It has been assigned as a text book in several college level psychology courses.
Monday, October 5
ORAN CANFIELD
Long Past Stopping
7:30 PMHippies, circus clowns, drugs, radical thinkers, a broken family, madcap teachers, experimental music, rehab… Welcome to the life of Oran Canfield, the son of a freethinking psychologist and khaki-wearing motivational speaker Jack Canfield (yes, THAT Jack Canfield -- creator of the bestselling self-help series Chicken Soup for the Soul). A life full of adventure and mayhem, pain and reconciliation. Oran puts pen to paper to deliver a wry, edgy, and often hilarious account about his struggle to overcome a childhood dismantled by hypocrisy and an adulthood plagued by heroin addiction.
In the tradition of Augusten Burroughs, Oran Canfield grapples with the vagaries of addiction in a world as dizzling sober as it is stoned in Long Past Stopping. While Oran’s needling mother will go to any length to keep her sons from the scourges of television and traditional culture, she leaves them in the care of an anarchic school, where going to class is optional and throwing rocks at passing cars is a popular pastime. Unmoored but fiercely intelligent, Oran learns to hold his own, delivering newspapers on a unicycle, juggling for a professional circus, and somehow surviving every bewildering adult he encounters.
As an adult, he floats from menial job to menial job and plays drums in a number of fringe California bands, encountering a host of weird characters along the way: Grux, a singer and longtime devotee of obscure noise music, a deranged and paranoid roommate who wakes Oran up at knife point, and a Stanford philosophy professor who supplies him with his first hit of heroin. Even Wavy Gravy and Jerry Garcia make cameos, as Oran struggles with a crippling heroin addiction -- eventually selling off every possession and burning every bridge along the way, all to feed a drug dependency that confounds him. From Steps 1 through 12 and back again, apartment to apartment, failed safety net to safety net, Oran must boldly confront the paradoxical and confounding truths and people of his life, and find his own way through the cliché that self-help can be.
Oran Canfield, 34, was raised by his hippie psychologist mother in Central America and the San Francisco Bay area. In his early twenties, while attending the San Francisco Art Institute, he began his career as a drummer and became heavily involved in San Francisco’s flourishing underground music and art communities. Along with his involvement as a drummer for a countless number of bands in the nineties, he also owned and operated a recording studio and co-operated a music venue featuring experimental and creative jazz music. He has held jobs as a bike messenger, piano restorer, housecleaner, and limo driver. Early in 2000, after seven separate stints in rehab, he got clean after attending an experimental treatment center in the Virgin Islands. He currently lives in Brooklyn and works as a freelance art handler and audio installer for art galleries and designer Donna Karan.
Tuesday, October 6
SUMBUL ALI-KARAMALI
The Muslim Next Door: the Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing
7:30 PMYou're not alone if you've ever wondered what Muslims really believe and practice. In her new book, The Muslim Next Door, Sumbul Ali-Karamali, a Stanford-educated mom and corporate lawyer with degrees in Islamic law and English, invites you inside for a candid, witty, and surprisingly down-to-earth conversation about Muslim life in America.
Warm, funny, and yet scholarly, The Muslim Next Door reliably answers questions about Islam from an American Muslim woman's point of view, discussing subjects from the basic (is Allah different from God?) to the complex (does jihad not mean holy war?) to the borderline ridiculous ("what do you mean you can't go to the prom because of your religion?!").
Sumbul Ali-Karamali grew up in Southern California in an ethnically South Asian family. She earned her undergraduate degree in English, with Distinction, from Stanford University. After working as an editor in a publishing company, she attended law school and graduated with her J.D. from the University of California at Davis. She practiced corporate law in San Francisco for several years.
Although always a practicing Muslim, Sumbul began the formal study of Islam when she attended the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She graduated from SOAS with her L.L.M. in Islamic Law, with Distinction. She has taught Islamic law as a teaching assistant at the University of London, worked as a research associate at the Centre of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law in London, and lectured on Islam and Islamic law. She has had many articles published, both in mainstream news publications and legal journals.
Wednesday, October 7
BEN FONG-TORRES
The Grateful Dead Scrapbook: The Long, Strange Trip in Stories, Photos, and Memorabilia
7:30 PMGrateful Dead fans are legendary for their Dead-ication to the band and its enduring legacy of freewheeling musical exploration. The Grateful Dead Scrapbook collects rare removable memorabilia and evocative images culled from the Grateful Dead Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz, including never-before-published photos, flyers, fan letters, and other ephemera. To accompany the eye-popping visuals, renowned journalist Ben Fong-Torres draws on his personal knowledge of the San Francisco music scene in a rich text that conveys the Grateful Dead's story in a fresh way, centering each chapter on a pivotal song that encapsulates a certain era of the group's songwriting, performance, and community. An attractive slipcase and an audio CD round out the book's beautiful design, delivering a richly illustrated volume as colorful as the band itself.
Ben Fong-Torres is the author of Becoming Almost Famous: My Back Pages in Music, Writing, and Life, The Doors, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to Twenty Years of Rock and Roll, and Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Graham Parsons, among other books. He began writing for Rolling Stone with its 8th issue in 1968, and his writing has been published in numerous other magazines. He contributed the main biography of Jerry Garcia for People Magazine's tribute issue on the occasion of the singer's death in 1995. Ben lives in San Francisco.
Thursday, October 8
NICK BELARDES
Random Obsessions: Trivia You Can’t Live Without
7:30 PMBefore buying that plane ticket, don’t you need to know which exotic islands still have cannibals? Wonder what it’s like to live in Hell Town at the End of the World? Are you worried about coming down with “Alien Hand Syndrome”? In Random Obsessions, historian Nick Belardes has dug into the raw source material found in historical archives, scientific studies, and libraries the world over, to give us the arcane, the bizarre, and the inexplicable – all of which is true.
Belardes’ passion and wit shine through these accounts of the surprising reality that lurks behind the things we take for granted. And who doesn’t want to read first-person interviews with people who can explain the unexplained, from the permanently puzzling Mothman conspiracy to secret Star Wars Jedi religious cults, and the charmingly eccentric reason why British aerospace engineers sent teddy bears floating out into space?
Nick Belardes is a historian turned into a TV/online journalist overnight after blogging his way to success. His articles and essays have since appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites across the country. He is the author of the first Twitter novel, Small Spaces, and you can follow his daily rants: twitter.com/nlbelardes. He lives in Bakersfield.
Friday, October 9
Eat, Drink, Talk (and Swap) Books: An Evening at the Booksmith
Note early time: 6:30 PM
Tickets $25 at Brown Paper Tickets and in the storeWe’ll bring the food and wine, you bring the book—a book that intrigued or excited you, something you couldn’t put down or that you savored over months—a book you want to talk about. The evening’s activities will be full of smart fun and good cheer, culminating in a swap.
At the Booksmith, we believe that bookstores are more than a place to buy books. They are a meeting place for people who love books—all kinds—a place to bring people of like interests together. This event was created for book-lovers by book-lovers. Wine and appetizers are included in the ticket price.
October's book swap theme is Literary Fiction. We’re delighted that Michelle Richmond (No One You Know, The Year of Fog) will be our special guest this evening!
AMOEBA RECORDS & THE BOOKSMITH SPECIAL EVENT!
Saturday, October 10
STEWART COPELAND
Strange Things Happen: A Life with the Police, Polo, and Pygmies
Note time and location: 2:00 PM at Amoeba (1855 Haight Street, San Francisco)When Stewart Copeland gets dressed, he has an identity crisis. Should he put on "leather pants, hostile shirts, and pointy shoes"? Or wear something more appropriate to the "tax-paying, property-owning, investment-holding lotus eater" his success has allowed him to become? This dilemma is at the heart of Copeland's vastly entertaining memoir-in-stories, Strange Things Happen. The world knows Copeland as the drummer for The Police, one of the most successful bands in rock history. But they may not know as much about his childhood in the Middle East as the son of a CIA agent. Or be aware of his film-making adventures with the Pygmies in the deepest reaches of the Congo, and his passion for polo ("Brideshead Revisited" on horses). In Strange Things Happen we move from Copeland's remarkable childhood to the formation of The Police, their rise to stardom, and the settled-down life that followed. It ends with a behind-the-scenes view of The Police's extraordinarily successful reunion tour. It's a book of amazing anecdotes, all completely true, which take us backstage in a life that is fully lived.
Reunited after twenty-three years with his bandmates in The Police when they opened the Grammy Awards on February 11, 2007, Stewart Copeland counts himself fortunate to have been a founder of the most played and successful trio of the 1980s. The Police's reunion tour, which began in Vancouver in May 2007 and ended in New York's Madison Square Garden in August 2008, went on to be the third biggest tour of all time -- grossing some 387 million dollars. Recipient of the Hollywood Film Festival's first Outstanding Music in Film Visionary Award and a 2003 inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Copeland has been responsible for some of the film world's most innovative and groundbreaking scores. His career includes the sale of more than sixty million records, which have won him five Grammys and numerous other awards. His ongoing travels in search of exotic rhythms and musical celebrations have taken him all the way around the world -- from the polo fields of Cirencester to the dives of Havana, from the steaming Congo to the remotest regions of the Hollywood jungles. Copeland is the father of seven children. He lives with his wife and three daughters.