Tuesday Night in Tempe: Michael Montlack and "My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them" at Changing Hands Bookstore

We went back to the fabulous Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe for the second evening event in a row, and we're glad we did.

Michael Montlack, whose poetry we've admired for years, gave a wonderful reading from and talk about the well-received anthology he conceived and edited, My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them.

Like last night's event, it drew a smallish (about twenty) but enthusiastic crowd, including Big Bird sitting in the back row. We all pretty much adored Michael's talk about how he came to create My Diva and his readings, assisted by a friend, of not just his own essay but those of several wonderful writers who are among his 65 contributors.

The book has received wonderful notices, such as this rave in Publishers Weekly:

In very short, very tender essays, a variety of gay male writers, from poets to playwrights to a standup comic, pay homage to an even wider variety of women who have inspired them. Peter Dubé writes how the photography of Claude Cahun suggested "a delirious world of possibilities"; Jeff Oaks recalls a childhood of wearing wristbands fashioned from paper cups to emulate his "model of power," Wonder Woman; Christopher Lee Nutter looks back on his closeted teenage years and how Sade taught him "that there was a world somewhere that suited them better than the world they'd been born into"...such standout pieces as Mark Doty on Grace Paley are elegant and affectionate tributes to how these muses have been "fairy godmothers" and "older sisters," as Montlack's introduction explains, and illustrate how complex, sustaining and lifelong are the bonds between gay men and their divas.

And Library Journal:

The essays, mostly three to five pages, are touching and thoughtful as well as funny, as they lovingly detail what each author's personal diva has meant to him. Show business and popular culture icons abound, with most of the usual suspects present (Liza, Marlene, Cher, both Bettes, and Joan), as well as choices from history and politics (Elizabeth I, Eva Perón), the culinary arts (Julia Child, Jennifer Patterson), and even fictitious figures (Auntie Mame, Princess Leia, Endora)...This is one of those delightful books you can open at random and be amused, enlightened, or moved by.

Michael, who divides his time between New York City, where he'a an English professor at Berkeley College, and San Francisco, discussed how he came up with the idea of the book, a departure from his work in poetry (his chapbooks include Girls, Girls, Girls, The Slip and Cover Charge).

He found that nearly all the gay male writers he solicited as contributors were immediately excited about the idea of writing about their personal divas; their only concern was that someone else might reserve her first. It turned out there were few overlapping requests. There's a diva for everyone, it seems.

After discussing how the book was put together, Michael read his own essay on his diva, Stevie Nicks, whom he's loved since viewing her on MTV in the early 1980s during his Long Island childhood.

The essays Michael read are fairly brief but interestingly varied. Surprisingly, the most stereotypical divas -- the trinity of Judy, Barbra and Madonna -- were not among them, but there were some fascinating choices. (Michael said he got a little grief early on for having such a "non-traditional" diva as Stevie Nicks.) For example, "Heart of a King" by Patrick Letellier is an appreciation of what the author admits is a "nerd's diva," Queen Elizabeth I.

RJ Gibson's penetrating look at Annie Lennox takes off from her legendary appearance with the Eurythmics at the 1984 Grammy Awards ("Mom, is that a guy?") and evolves into a meditation on androgyny.

We especially liked the unconventional selection of the brilliant and underrated comedian Margaret Dumont in Christopher Murray's "The Duchess of Dignity," which has brilliant insights about the Marx Brothers' straight woman as a role model for how a ridiculed outcast can maintain her power and grace.

And delicious is the first word we can think of for one of the essays on a fictional diva (others in the book include Princess Leia and Auntie Mame), "Afternoons with Endora" by the always-worth-reading Richard Blanco, who chronicles how the witch created by Agnes Moorehead on TV's Bewitched served to empower a sensitive Miami kid constantly ridiculed and demeaned by his homophobic abuela. Like the other divas, Endora helped a young man survive and thrive.

We look forward to reading the contributors' other essays in My Diva. Thanks to Changing Hands (don't forget their annual New Year's Day sale) and to Michael Montlack for tonight's event, and if he ever decides to do a sequel, we know at least one diva who merits inclusion.

Monday Night in Tempe: Mary Z. Maher and "Actors Talk About Shakespeare" at Changing Hands Bookstore

On a cool, pleasant evening, we drove over from Apache Junction to our favorite bookstore of all time, Changing Hands in Tempe, for a fascinating talk by Mary Z. Maher on her new book, Actors Talk About Shakespeare.

The book features interviews with Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Zoe Caldwell, Derek Jacobi, Stacy Keach, Nicholas Pennell, Geoff Hutchings and other American, Canadian and British actors talking about acting Shakespearean roles. Maher, who taught acting and Shakespeare at the University of Arizona, worked on BBC's The Shakespeare Plays series and has published over 50 articles and book chapters in her field, and her earlier book Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies is a classic in performance studies.

Maher now lives in Ashland, Oregon, home of the famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she lectures on the art of performing Shakespeare. We felt lucky to hear her talk over a wide range of issues related to the subject tonight.

She began by decrying the lack of documentation of acting performances and stage productions in the United States, saying that "when the curtain is struck, not a rack is left behind." Actors' unions make difficult the videotaping of theatrical performances, which with today's technology, wouldn't be that expensive. As a scholar, this lack has made her work difficult and frustrating; there really is no way we can compare Shakespearean acting styles of, say, the 1920s, 1950s and today.

There are some wonderful video resources, Maher said, at a few places, like the Billy Rose Performing Arts Library (near the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University, where we teach), but it's limited to one-time screenings by scholars, and Maher complained that there were no decent video performances of, say, the Lears of Stacy Keach or Kevin Kline.

So Maher began interviewing actors for her Hamlet soliloquies book and this one as a way of providing a record of some sort of these ephemeral but often historic performances. She began shyly, but actors, Maher said, taught her how to do interviews, and she told a charming story about Ben Kingsley, who'd suggested they do a Saturday morning interview at the Lyric Hammersmith Theater, unaware that a hundred noisy kids would be there for a drama group. The old pro Kingsley showed her how to muffle the sound so her tape recorder would work and proved generous with his time and insights.

Clearly, Maher is smitten with her subjects, some of whom are happy to go over the limited time periods they originally scheduled (Kenneth Branagh offered her only an hour but then said he'd come back for a much longer session once he'd "had a pee") and some of whom, like Kevin Kline, seem to have become her friends.

Aided by photos of some of the actors in their classic Shakespeare roles, Maher told some wonderful stories (and withheld others, like the theatrical gossip about co-stars and directors told to her by the legendary Zoe Caldwell). It's easy to get swept up in Maher's enthusiasm for her subject, and she tells nice stories on herself too, like the time Tom Stoppard startled her at Waterstone's in Stratford-Upon-Avon by coming behind her and putting his hand on her shoulder and praising her theater scholarship.

She called Kenneth Branagh "the king of networking" and described him going into "his little professor persona" as he talked about his work with such precision. Zoe Caldwell explained in painstaking deal how she prepares for a role like Cleopatra. And Derek Jacobi (who we saw in the wonderful Royal Shakespeare production of Much Ado a quarter-century ago) was frank about the shortcomings of some of his directors.

Kevin Kline seems to be Maher's favorite, inviting her to rehearsals of both theatrical productions and his work as a director for TV's PBS version of Hamlet. But it's obvious that Maher loves all the actors who's given her interviews, and she's got a treasure trove of stories about them; during the enlightening Q&A period, Maher proved just as interesting in her opinions of various Shakespeare productions.

Her favorite play? A Midsummer Night's Dream, which "unfolds like magic." She's naturally a partisan of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but she seems open to all kinds of productions of the Bard's plays, including Henry VIII and perhaps even Two Noble Kinsmen. Her books sound fascinating and we look forward to reading them.

Thursday Evening in Tempe: Tisa Wenger & "We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religion" at Changing Hands

General Motors may be on the brink of bankruptcy, but our 2000 Chevy Cavalier, which we bought six years ago at the CarMax on State Road 84 near our home in Davie, Florida, got us from Apache Junction to Tempe for the second night in a row for another terrific event at the best indie bookstore in the U.S., Changing Hands.

Tonight we were there to see Tisa Wenger, a religious studies professor at Arizona State University (we recently discovered that our old faculty/grad student photo ID still works!), there to read from and discuss her new book from the University of North Carolina Press, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom.

We could tell from her talk that Tisa must be an excellent professor; she's leaving ASU for a position at Yale Divinity School in the fall. There was an attentive crowd of about 40 (like last night, women outnumbered men by at least 4:1) - though the professor's little son Dylan was squealing a bit and her 9yo son Jordan was reading Harry Potter; her daughter Sophie, husband Rod and parents were also in attendance, and she talked for a bit about being a missionary kid in Africa.

Her parents were very sensitive to the legacies of racism and colonialism in Africa in which Western religion was often entangled. That background, Tisa said, and her academic interest in the distinctions between religions and non-religions, "good" and "bad" religions, "true" and "false" religions - and her concerns with these different conceptions of religion - led her to investigate the 1920s New Mexico Pueblo dance controversy for her dissertation nine years ago.

Her research was historical, not ethnographic, as she's not a Native American scholar primarily, but her work in this area probably sheds a great deal of light on the difficulties of Native Americans to achieve religious freedom and the limitations of the First Amendment ideal captured in the free exercise clause.

She read from the beginning of her book first, and we were impressed with her clean style. Living our life on the fringes of academia in the humanities and law, we've been exposed to all-but-unreadable jargon-filled, seemingly deliberately impenetrable articles piled with as many abstract words as we've stuffed this sentence with. But Tisa's prose was clear and precise. You can get a feeling for what she's doing in this excerpt from an interview:

Rather than asking this question [about the developing conceptions of what is a "religion" in the context of race and colonialism] in general I wanted to ground it in a very specific historical case, and was looking at the American southwest as a region mostly neglected in U.S. religious history. I finally decided to focus on the Pueblo Indians because the amount of attention they had received over the years from both anthropologists and missionaries created a very interesting story and meant there was a rich set of sources.

Early in my research I ran across the Pueblo dance controversy of the 1920s and determined that this little-known yet historically important dispute would allow me to address all my theoretical concerns in a focused and compelling way. As I worked on the topic I became more and more interested in the perspectives of the Pueblo Indians themselves in these events, and was able to find Pueblo voices from that time in the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, the New Mexico state archives, various reform agencies, and the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Project (completed in the 1970s). The Pueblos' resourcefulness in a very tough situation deserves recognition, and the implications of their appeal for religious freedom became one of the most interesting aspects of the story. More and more the book became about the difficulties for Native Americans of gaining religious freedom, and about the cultural bias of the religious freedom ideal. Religious freedom is based on conceptions of religion-- as a matter of individual conscience, and as something separable from other spheres of life-- that really do not make sense for Native American traditions. WE HAVE A RELIGION shows the impact of these notions of religion on the Pueblo Indians at a time when, in order to protect their ceremonial traditions from government suppression by appealing to religious freedom guarantees, they increasingly spoke of these traditions as a religion (for various reasons they had not done so previously, as my first chapter explains).

Secularism and secularization are themes that emerged rather unexpectedly in my writing. The anthropologists and artists who romanticized Pueblo religion and fought for Indian religious freedom in the 1920s were also fighting against a virtual Protestant establishment that had long dominated Indian affairs, and they sought to replace Christianity with secular/scientific sources of authority. They were eventually successful in that effort, though it was a very gradual process, and an important step was their valorization of Indian traditions as religions just as legitimate as Christianity. But I also came to see that the new more "secular" regime maintained many of the same cultural biases regarding religion as an individual and non-political sphere of life. By the 1930s the government formally recognized Indian ceremonies as religion with the right to constitutional protection, but in many ways this recognition only strengthened the pressures to "modernize" other aspects of Indian life by clearly separating this newly identified religion (now the designated repository of tradition) from tribal governance and other aspects of tribal life.

After reading from the beginning of the book, Tisa then delved into excerpts from the fifth chapter, dealing with a controversy at Taos Pueblo that began in May 1924, when the governor asked the BIA commissioner to release a number of boys ages 7 to 10 from the government-mandated compulsory schooling for extended periods ranging from six to eighteen months so that these boys, selected by the tribe, would spend the time learning traditional Pueblo culture (religion?) so that they could serve as the depository of Pueblo knowledge.

This was a long-standing practice, and at first BIA officials thought they could get the Pueblo leaders to agree to a compromise of two weeks off from school, filling in the remainder of the time after school and in the summer. When this was refused as unworkable, the BIA commissioner visited Taos to discover that the boys were indeed taken out of school, a challenge to his authority and colonial control that he found intolerable. He would not, he said, "submit to pagan demands."

Now the Pueblos had accepted Christianity long before then and didn't call their traditional cultural beliefs and rituals a "religion" in either Spanish or English, but in this case, as in the larger dance controversy, they began to assert their rights to free exercise of religion under the Constitution. Citing religious persecution, the tribal council called on other Native American tribes and supportive whites to back them up. Taos, of course, had a large community of artists, including such influential people as Mabel Dodge Luhan, who took the Indians' side, viewing it as part of an indigenous people's struggle to be recognized as fully human.

In her reading, Tisa also highlighted the split between the self-styled "progressive" Pueblos who were largely assimilationist reformers and the
traditionalists who had made the conflict over the boys' forced attendance at school a cause celebre. By August 1924, the BIA agreed that two boys could stay out of school for a year, provided that they made this time up by coming back for an extra year at the end of the mandatory period of education.

In relating this, we're missing much of the nuance of Tisa's narrative and analysis, but clearly, the outcome proved complex. By allowing at least some boys to opt out of compulsory schooling, the U.S. government gave credence to honoring individual conscience and implicitly furthered the necessity to recognize the "progressive" Pueblos' individual right not to participate in otherwise mandatory tribal rituals.

This controversy made us remember Yoder v. Wisconsin, the 1972 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that Amish children could not be placed under compulsory education past 8th grade, as it violated their parents' fundamental right to freedom of religion. So we started off the Q&A period by asking if any litigation was filed in this or the larger Pueblo dance controversy.

Tish said no, that eventually the government backed down in the face of negative publicity over its efforts to trump up Pueblo rituals like the various dances as sexually immoral and "deviant"; the Pueblos had influential support from not only the arts community but of the anthropologists who had studied the tribe's culture and others. Neither side wanted these cases to go to court because, in some respect, they were afraid they would lose and set a damaging precedent.

The other questions were much more interesting and covered both Tisa's own intellectual and academic experiences and putting the subject of her book in larger contexts: the struggle for land rights, the more supportive BIA administration after 1933 (the new commissioner, John Collier, on the side of the Pueblos, rescinded the by-then-notorious "dance circular" propagated by the Bureau in the '20s), and
the changing concept of religious liberty at different points in American history.

Many members of the audience were far more knowledgeable than us, and some of the Native Americans related family experiences that put a human face on the subject of Tisa's scholarly work.

We're again grateful to Changing Hands Bookstore for being such a great community resource and to Tisa Wenger for sharing her knowledge, expertise and insights in We Have a Religion. Hold on to what is good, even if it's a handful of books.

Wednesday Evening in Tempe: Luis Alberto Urrea & "Into the Beautiful North" at Changing Hands Bookstore

After a week of below-normal temps in the Phoenix area, today it hit 100 degrees - not yet really too hot for us - and as it began to cool off, we drove from our home in Apache Junction to our favorite indie bookstore, Changing Hands, to see the prolific and versatile Luis Alfredo Urrea, on tour for his just-published novel, To the Beautiful North.

Although this was listed as a ticketed event, with those who bought the book eligible for seating starting at 6 p.m., there were still enough seats available when we got to Changing Hands at 6:45 p.m. to score one of the comfy padded chairs (rather than a folding chair) in the back row. The author, dressed casually in a short sleeved shirt over a black T-shirt, khakis and New Balance walking shoes, soon arrived with his wife and they greeted and chatted with another couple sitting to our left.

Yesterday Luis was at Denver's wonderful Tattered Cover and after tonight, he was headed for D.C.'s Politics and Prose, then Powell's in Portland and more indie bookstores, but Luis seemed to gather energy as the evening went on. He's a good reader and a great raconteur.

Luis, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother, he's published 11 books in multiple genres.

The Devil's Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the 2004 Lannan Literary Award and was a national best-seller as well as being named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald and the Chicago Tribune.

Luis's first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. Luis also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life and in 2000, he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos.

His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by ForeWord, and he's also won a Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being. His The Hummingbird's Daughter, is a historical novel tells the story of Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as The Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc.

Women outnumbered men 4:1 in the crowd, and it seemed as if many had attended previous appearance by Luis at Changing Hands and most had read more than one of his books. It was an audience largely made up of Urrea fans, and he kindly provided a fan to the first person to ask a question. It was from the taco shop and internet cafe of the real-life model for one of his characters in Into the Beautiful North, and he took it out of a shopping bag from the Kanakee, IL, public library, where a week ago even the town's mayor got her copy of the book autographed.

No wonder, from the excerpt he read from an early chapter. Consider this, from the Dallas Morning News review by Roberto Ontiveros:

In a Mexican village called Tres Camarones, the men have gone missing. Over generations, fathers and sons went off to find work or new lives, and now the women left behind have realized they are alone.

These women work hard and still have time to dream of marrying Johnny Depp or getting friendlier with the cute missionary boy. They have a new mayor, and there is even some work at an Internet cafe. But a smooth drug dealer who calls himself Scarface has come into town and sized up the situation. He and his thugs plan to make the town their own.

They accost Nayeli, a dark 19-year-old beauty who works at the Fallen Hand Café. She handles herself, but later, during a viewing of The Magnificent Seven at the perpetual Steve McQueen film festival, she realizes what she needs to do: go into the United States, find seven Mexican men and persuade them to come back to Tres Camarones. So she grabs her pals Yolo and Vampi, and her flamboyantly gay employer, Tacho, and off they go.

In sweet youthful naiveté, Nayeli announces the simplicity of the plan: "We will only be there for as long as it takes to get the men to come." She continues: "The Americanos will be happy we're there! Even if we're caught!"

Now comes an entertaining slew of horrific street hustlers, terrifying Mexican officials, bumbling jump-the-gun boarder patrols, and a staff-wielding trash dweller who comes straight out of Kurosawa.

Luis Alberto Urrea's Into the Beautiful North is awash in a subtle kind of satire. Our travelers get sick from having to eat American fast food, and they get thrown out of a Mexican restaurant by a fellow Mexican who realizes they're illegal.

Here is a funny and poignant impossible journey in which the characters come to earn pride for a homeland they have gone on a comedic pilgrimage to defend. Into the Beautiful North is a refreshing antidote to all the negativity currently surrounding Mexico, with its drug cartels, police-abandoned cities and killer flu.

Luis began by telling some great stories about his experiences with the Border Patrol when he was researching The Devil's Highway, which Little, Brown asked him to write when he was finishing up two decades of research on The Hummingbird's Daughter, ten years of which was spent among the medicine people and curanderos of Arizona's Yaqui people.

"If you're a writer, you know that writers' careers are like a Six Flags roller coaster ride," Luis said. "You can be up one day and way down the next." He said when Little, Brown called he was publishing his books "out of a guy's garage in El Paso, Chicano style." (We've all been there.)

After relating some of the scarier initial experiences with Marine-gruff Border Patrol agents when he was doing research on the tragic case of the Yuma 14, Luis talked about Kenny Smith, the veteran agent who said to him early on, "You think I'm a jackbooted thug. . . Well, I am your jackbooted thug in shining armor." And Luis said The Devil's Highway couldn't have been written without Kenny, whom he introduced as the man sitting to our left. He got a big hand from the crowd, and clearly the two men are close friends.

The excerpt he read from Into the Beautiful North was funny and precise, setting the plot in motion as Nayeli and her friends realize why there haven't been any pregnant women in their town for quite a while: all the men have left for work north of the border. It was teaser enough for us that we are anxious to read the novel.

After we applauded his lively and funny reading, Luis said he wanted to "chat" and said, "Hit me," and that's when he awarded the fan to the fan who aked the first quetion. The Q&A session was one of the liveliest we've heard.

Someone asked about the mixture of Spanish and English in his dialogue, and Luis said he listens to the voices in his head and sometimes he hears them in Spanish and other times in English. Sometimes he's accused of having too much Spanish, as when a reader sent him a letter: "What do you expect of your readers?"

Luis rightly said that reading is not necessarily a passive activity but - as most of us who are even slightly familiar with his work will attest - he tries extremely hard to make it fairly clear what's said in Spanish.

He made some interesting comments about the Spanish translations of his books - Luis writes poetry in Spanish sometimes - and said his cousin Enrique Hubbard Urrea has translated some of his novels. The Hummingbird's Daughter became La Hija de la Chuparrosa, deliberately using the Mexican 'chuparrosa' rather than 'colibrí."

He was asked about his upbringing and that led to a fascinating reminiscence about growing up dirt-poor and ill with TB in Tijuana, his American mom going to the U.S. to work every day, a trip to visit relatives in Sinaloa via a 12-hour bus ride (on a bus with a stewardess), during which someone finally realized that the 12yo boy badly needed glasses. We're drastically compressing and probably distorting some of these colorful recollections - but it gave us a good picture of how Luis Alberto Urrea became the writer he is today: clearly a man upon whom no experience is wasted.

Asked about his staff of researchers, Luis pointed to his wife and praised her for her invaluable help. He told about his mother's traumatic experience in a bombing as a World War II WAC servicemember behind enemy lines in Germany. An audience member asked how he felt being compared to Cormac McCarthy. "I'll take it!" Luis exclaimed.

There was a lot more. Luis said he may appear at an event like this to be "Mr. Professional Writer," but at heart, he's a fan who's been kept alive by the authors whose books he's read since childhood. He discussed the writing process and his shrewd editor's effective work in shaping his books.

We had a wonderful evening, thanks to Luis Alberto Urrea and Changing Hands Bookstore, and we're looking forward to reading Into the Beautiful North.

Friday Night in Tempe: Changing Hands Bookstore presents "Paperback Dreams" Film & Discussion on Future of Indie Bookstores

For the second Friday evening in a row, we headed for everybody's favorite Arizona bookstore, Changing Hands, to see a fascinating film, Paperback Dreams, and a discussion afterwards on the future of indie bookstores and Changing Hands' important role in the culture of metro Phoenix. It was another of the many wonderful events at this Tempe mainstay. (And given the subject of the one-hour documentary, the struggles of two venerable Bay Area bookstores, we stress the "stay" in "mainstay.")

We hurried over as best we could from Apache Junction after dinner, but getting to Tempe's McClintock Drive store just five minutes before the 6 p.m. starting time for the film, we saw that the room was full. But then we were told they'd be moving the screening out on the bookstore floor because of the huge crowd, which to us looked like about a hundred people.

The screen was brought out and lots of chairs set up. We sat in the back row but had a great view of the film and the discussion afterwards with bookstores owners Bob Sommer and Gayle Shanks and marketing director Cindy Dach, as well as the cool poster from Indie Bound on the back wall.

Rachel came up after everyone was seated, welcoming us to the "oldest and largest independent bookstore" in our community. All of us got hands stamped, good for discounts at various local stores and bars that night. Rachel suggested that a good book to go with the movie was Larry McMurtry's Books, an account of the adventures in bookselling by the Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning writer. After a little trouble, Paperback Dreams began, and for a quick hour we got the story of two years in the life (and death) of two great indie bookstores, Cody's and Kepler's.

We loved both stores when we were living in Silicon Valley for several months during the winter and spring of 1998 although we went to Kepler's on Camino Real just a few times and Cody's on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley just once (a trip we remember well because our rear-view mirror fell off midway there and had to be fixed in Oakland).

You can find great stuff on the film's website on both Cody's and Kepler's. As Bob Sommer said before the screening, Cody's on Telegraph Avenue played an important role in the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 1960s (Mario Savio even worked there for a while!) and served, as the film showed, as not just a meeting place but an emergency first aid station during the beatings of students by police.

Both stores were focal points in the changing of a culture. Paperback books, really really cheap, played an important part in the counterculture, not just for literature but for ideas. As college students, we carried around worn copies of books by Marx, Engels, Marcuse, Fanon, Mao, Du Bois, Mailer, Baldwin, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, etc. as well as our Pynchon, Plath, D.H. Lawrence, Vonnegut, Hesse, Albee, Pinter, Salinger, Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Tom Wolfe et al. literary books and teachers assigned us Future Shock, The Greening of America, The Population Bomb, The Story of O and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. We talked in an interview with The Written Nerd about the indie bookstores in Brooklyn and Manhattan where we spent many spellbound hours in our teens and twenties.

But it's not 1969 or even 1975 anymore. Reading habits have changed, the Internet is omnipresent, and chains (what Gayle called "the B stores") and big-box stores (Wal-Mart, Costco, etc.) that use ultra-cheap books as loss leaders have made the indie bookstore an endangered species. Paperback Dreams shows Andy Ross of Cody's and Clark Kepler facing dwindling crowds and sales, financial woes, and a culture in which their once-loyal customers have cheated on them with Amazon.com and other online retailers.

We're betting Fred and Pat Cody and Roy Kepler would not be starting their legendary bookstores today but doing something else to benefit society. As Paperback Dreams shows, they were valiant idealists who struggled against bigotry and ignorance (Kepler's was bombed by neo-Nazis who thought the store was un-American) but managed to thrive by being part of a vibrant group of people in the Bay Area who wanted to change the world one book at a time.

The equally idealistic Andy Ross's opening of a megastore branch on San Francisco's Stockton Street in 2005 seems, in retrospect, like a very noble fool's errand. We remember during the community campaign to resuscitate Kepler's, there were those who were skeptical (though they're not shown in the film).

Anyway, the film has some amazing clips of historical events, readings with famous writers, and talks with ordinary book-lovers whose lives were changed by their hours in Kepler's and Cody's, and it ends on an uncertain but hopeful note. Paperback Dreams is definitely worth seeing.

The long discussion following the film was fascinating. Gayle and Bob said that while others viewed the film You've Got Mail as a romantic comedy, to them it was kind of a tragedy when Meg Ryan's indie bookstore is imperiled by Tom Hanks' family's chain. However, even the chains are suffering, and Borders may be close to bankruptcy; they couldn't succeed on Mill Avenue in a space that Changing Hands had looked at when they left the street, and one suspects CH might have thrived there, since they are an important part of the community.

That was evident in the comments of many in the audience, some of whom were taken to the store as little kids and "grew up" there and who are now loyal customers.

It's understandable that people might be price-sensitive. Cindy related that when they had their Harry Potter celebration, they ran out of books and went over to Costco to get some more. Costco, which receives a price break on books which they use as loss-leaders to bring people into their stores, charged them retail what they (as retailers) had to pay Scholastic for the books. So the competition between indie bookstores and big-box stores isn't exactly fair.

There was much talk about "buying locally." That said, Bob agreed that it might be understandable that someone in east Mesa (or, like us, out in Apache Junction) might not want to spend the gas money and enlarge our carbon footprint by driving 15 miles to Changing Hands when they could get a book on Amazon. Of course, you can't browse the shelves on Amazon, meet friends there, or get out of the house...

The discussion included lots of interesting history about Changing Hands, why they left Mill Avenue after the 1980s heyday (too many football games on weekends that scared off customers, terrible parking). One person in the crowd summed up most people's feeling about Changing Hands when she called it "a gathering place" that is important in a metro area like Phoenix (which Cindy said was "an awful place" in terms of culture when she arrived 22 years ago).

It seemed funny when Gayle said she didn't know how many people would show up for the screening of Paperback Dreams. She thought it might be as few as half a dozen and she could take them all out for a drink next door afterward. Needless to say, with about a hundred in the crowd, we were on our own when the discussion ended - though thanks to our hand stamps, we could get discounts ourselves!

Thanks to everyone at Changing Hands for a great evening. And Bay Area indie bookstores are indeed surviving, as this story in the San Francisco Chronicle attests:

Defying conventional wisdom, and despite what you hear every time a landmark bookstore closes - Stacey's on Market Street is the latest example - independent bookstores are thriving in San Francisco.

And, thank our lucky stars, at least one independent bookstore is thriving in Tempe.