Friday Night in the East Village: Loren Kleinman Poetry Reading at KGB Bar

(Video courtesy VitaleBand)

Saturday Afternoon in the East Village: Pride Meets the Street, with New York Neo-Futurists' Twitter Plays, on East 4th Street

From Tompkins Square Park we strolled over to East Fourth Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery for "Pride Meets the Street," a Gay Pride Week event that's part of this summer's weekly Meet the Street programs on this wonderfully block, home to various vibrant cultural venues.

Behind Meet the Street is FAB, Fourth Arts Block, leading the development of the East 4th Street Cultural District and looking to build a permanent home for cultural facilities.

Pride Meets the Street was also an event of Pride Goes East, this week's celebration of Gay Pride on the East Side. The Stonewall rebellion and much gay history, of course, took place in the West Village, but as someone who sometimes hung out on St. Marks Place in the summer of '69 (though we were mostly out West) and after, we know there's a lot of gay history here, too.

Coming to the traffic-free block, we heard "Beat It" coming loudly from the speakers when we approached the block. Next they played "Billie Jean," then a lot more Michael Jackson songs we all love now whether or not we hated them in the 70s or 80s.

In addition to no thru traffic, there was no free parking with pride.

This banner was on the Bowery side. There was a table of Cooper Square neighbors nearby.

Like every Saturday weekend in June, it was B.Y.O.L.C. (Bring Your Own Lawn Chair). But we had too much pride to schlep ours around.

Who would pay to get an ice cream cone from the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck when a free one was available in the gutter, chalked by one of the big kids using the free chalk for all?


This family was figuring out how to play bocce. We'd never before seen it done in this kind of enclosed square.

There was also a volleyball net, but bocce was drawing more players.

This nice woman with the bullhorn was going up and down the block saying that the New York Neo-Futurists' Twitter plays would begin soon. She also said other stuff, like when two cute teenage boys holding hand walked by, she said, "They are gay. See how they walk with pride." They ignored her.

We didn't, though, and sat like all of the other lawn-chair-less audience, in the gutter (we're from Brooklyn, that's what we call it), in front of KGB, our old friend Denis Woychuk's cultural empire.

The Twitter plays all contained 140 characters. If you ask us, that is too many characters for a play. We couldn't keep them straight. Luckily the plays mostly had gay pride as a theme. Here two gay men, helpfully name-tagged "Papa" and "Daddy" adopt a child. Child hugs them. Short but tweet.

In 140 characters, what happens in this Twitter Twister play? "Right foot on yellow." Then one of the actors runs into the audience and kicks in the chest a young man fortuitously wearing a yellow T-shirt. He was surprised but unhurt.

There seems to a be fake itty-bitty bird (prop) in the little birdcage (another prop) the actor here is holding in her hand. Play: "If it's this size, get the hell out." There's still room for more characters, we guess, so maybe the climax should have been delayed.

When the audience came out of a real play (uh, we mean a non-Twitter production) in the Kraine Theatre inside, they got to be part of the show. Various innocent people were referred to as animals such as a snow leopard (man with white hair), a jackrabbit (man with ears), a field mouse (a middle-aged brownhaired lady), a swordfish (no, actually that was a swordfish coming out of the theater).

OK, we don't quite remember which Twitter play this was. We liked the one that was this exchange between two girls:
"Did you hear about that kid that got beat up for being different?"
"No."
"Neither did I."
The dénouement is a passionate kiss.

"I'm Henry the Eighth I am."
"No, you're jut a silly man who needs a shave and a new coat."
(Our only comment: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown have a lovely daughter.)

We think this was the play - there were about two dozen of them, so we got our no-money's worth - where all antigay bigots have to come to the public square to be chastised or something.

The final play featured Marissa coming out and telling the audience she was giving out "poison cupcakes." We tasted ours and it was good and we didn't die. So we had a much better theater experience with the Twitter plays than Abe Lincoln did at "Our American Cousin."

New York Neo-Futurists rule. Here is a video about their benefit performances of "30 Gay Plays in 60 Gay Minutes" for a great group, Marriage Equality New York. You can still catch the last show if you hurry!

As we left, we saw more people coming to Meet the Street. By now some of them are old friends.

Pride Meets the Street was a fab event. Did we tell you we love East 4th Street? If you haven't met it yet, we hope this serves as an introduction.

Thursday Night at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble: Nathaniel Rich

This post is from Richard Grayson's MySpace blog for Thursday, April 24, 2008:

Thursday Night at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble: Nathaniel Rich


Ordinarily on Thursday evening I would not be at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble that opened fairly recently but around the corner at Borough of Manhattan Community College, teaching English 201. But we're on spring break this week and the weather is almost summerlike, so I was able to get out and see Nathaniel Rich, whose new novel The Mayor's Tongue is pretty much the talk of the town. I've admired Nathaniel's essays and criticism and was looking forward to reading his novel even before tonight.

(I'm sure by now everyone knows that his father is the New York Times's best columnist, Frank Rich. His younger brother Simon, author of the very funny book Ant Farm -- my octogenarian father recommends it highly -- was also there last night; I recognized Simon from when he came up to me at KGB last May at a reading I did along with Tao Lin and others and not only said nice things about my writing but actually bought one of my books.)

After being introduced by the Barnes & Noble coordinator as an editor of the Paris Review and contributor to the New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, etc. as well as the recipient of killer blurbs from Stephen King and Gary Shteyngart for his novel, Nathaniel came out to a crowd of close to a hundred shortly after 7 p.m. (I got one of the last of the B&N folding chairs in the back row before it became standing room only.)

Slightly diffident, endearingly nerdy (dressed, I'm pretty sure, in the goofy red shirt in the Polaroid above) but extremely poised, Nathaniel began by saying that his novel was not autobiographical but that a couple of things in it were inspired by events in his life.

One of those was a summer he spent in Milan working for a publishing company and living with an editor there (sleeping in a fold-out chair in the guy's kitchen) who wanted Nathaniel around to practice his English. As a result, Nathaniel said, his passable Italian never became excellent and his own English deteriorated after weeks of talking a simplified pidgin.

He then read from the prologue of the novel, told in the third person, about Eugene Brentani, working as a mover at Aaronson & Sons in Manhattan, who moves in with a Dominican fellow mover, Alvaro, in an Inwood apartment he keeps apart from his wife and family in order to have a place to have sex with various girlfriends and prostitutes.

Alvaro speaks a little-known dialect called Cibaeño that even other Dominicans can't really understand. When he and Eugene -- who seems to be hiding out from what I assume is a more privileged family -- begin hanging out in a secret room at the local public library, Alvaro writes in a scribbled longhand a novel that he finally asks Eugene to translate. Eugene can barely understand Alvaro's speech, and that only because of Alvaro's expressive gestures, so how he can he translate a novel in an almost illegible scrawl in a dialect he barely can comprehend? But somehow he does it.

I'm not quite doing justice to the complexity and elegance of Nathaniel Rich's prose here. The language is precise and measured, the metaphors fresh, and it's not the show-offy prose you might expect from someone the press has sometimes categorized as a hot young literary wunderkind. It doesn't really sound like a first novel at all, it has so much authority. Just as Eugene suspects that Alvaro is a beautiful writer without really understanding everything he is putting down on paper, it seems like Rich is writing a novel about the possibilities of fiction and the struggle to articulate a vision using the very fragile medium of words.

There weren't very many questions after Nathaniel finished reading -- he offered to ask himself questions and answer them -- but a man who's reading the novel asked him if the storyline involving Eugene ever converges with the other major storyline involving an elderly man named Mr. Schmitz. Nathaniel said he wasn't giving away anything to say no, that putting the two strands of the narrative together in an artificial way at the end would have been artificial.

Another questioner asked if Nathaniel was influenced by his work on his book San Francisco Noir. The author said perhaps a bit, since he was watching two noir films a day during part of the time he was working on The Mayor's Tongue.

In response to another question, Nathaniel said he mostly "sneaked in" moments of free time to write the novel, taking five years and working on it only in a sustained, all-encompassing way for six months. He felt the time it took gave him the ability to make sure at the end that it was a consistent narrative.

After the last question, the B&N coordinator gave us the usual bookstore chain fire-drill rules for getting copies autographed -- it's always one row at a time. I've ordered the book elsewhere so I slipped out, very much impressed with this writer's thoughtfulness about the nature of fiction. I'm looking forward to reading The Mayor's Tongue.

Sunday Night at KGB: Nina Siegal & Warren Adler

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Monday, March 17, 2008:

Sunday Night at KGB: Nina Siegal & Warren Adler


Teaching everything from business writing to creative writing five evenings a week at four campuses – The School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute of Technology, Borough of Manhattan Community College and Brooklyn College – I don’t get to go much to readings this semester. But last evening I went to a terrific one at KGB with classy debut novelist Nina Siegal and the legendary Warren Adler, screenwriter and author of dozens of novels and story collections, including the justly-celebrated best-seller The War of the Roses.

Siegal, an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, worked as a top New York journalist for a number of years and she’s put her newspaper experience to good use in what sounds like a delightful romp of a murder mystery, A Little Trouble with the Facts, published two weeks ago by HarperCollins.

It’s a very New York novel, and from the first chapter and other excerpts that Siegal read fluidly last night, it’s a breezy and very funny noir-ish take on the upper reaches of the Manhattan media and art worlds. Valerie Vane (all the names sound as if they belong to characters in 1930s films featuring fast-talking swells and gum-snapping dames) is a reporter who covered the glamorous and famous for a Times-like "newspaper of record," now demoted to the obituary desk.

When a mysterious caller, "Cabeza," feeds her information that the supposed suicide of a once-famous graffiti artist wasn’t really a suicide, Valerie turns gumshoe (after listening to Siegal’s snappy prose, I find it hard to avoid writing words like "gumshoe") to investigate. The novel seems as if it’s full of social satire from someone who knows the scenes she’s covering like she knows the back of her hand.

After a short intermission following Siegal’s reading, Warren Adler came up to read a story from his new collection, New York Echoes. Although he lived elsewhere for forty years, the Brooklyn native recently returned to the city (I know the feeling) and if the piece last night is any indication, his eye for details and Manhattan milieus is as sharp as ever).

"The Mean Mrs. Dickstein," which Adler said he was not going to read half as well as Cynthia Nixon did for Audible.com (you can listen here) is an old-fashioned story about a 75-year-old lifelong New Yorker, a genuinely sweet old widow who’s nevertheless no fool. Like many older Manhattan residents, she’s a prisoner of her routine, and when she sets out to re-read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black on "her" bench at Central Park on a spring weekday, the confrontation-averse Mrs. Dickstein is faced with a nightmare: a stylish, vulgar yuppie woman who will not stop yakking loudly and pretentiously on her cell phone. I could see the ending coming a mile away, but that didn’t make the resolution of the story any less perfect or less satisfying.

I’ve long admired Adler’s fiction, particularly his stories. Living in a condo at Sunrise Golf Village in 1982, when I was decades younger than any of my neighbors, I stumbled upon Adler’s story collection The Sunset Gang, set in a South Florida condo similar to the milieu I found myself in. I was entranced. Just two years ago, I taught his story "Yiddish" to students at a Jewish community high school in English and the teenagers in my class loved the story of forbidden love among people their grandparents’ ago.

Last night Adler also mentioned his just-published novel, Funny Boys, about young comedians in Catskills resort hotels in the 1930s, is "historical fiction" and he wondered if people today even knew what the Borscht Belt was. (Being of a certain age, with parents who owned the DeVille Country Club in South Fallsburg – "where the elite meet," the slogan went – I certainly did.) It looks like a charming book too.

Warren Adler is really an amazing journeyman writer who deserves more recognition. I’ve enjoyed his books and his email newsletters. Adler has more advanced ideas about the publishing industry and using online technology than writers and editors one-third his age. His avatar lectures on Second Life and he runs web-based short story contests. Check him out.

As it did with Siegal, the KGB audience gave Adler a lot of applause when he finished his stint at the podium. Although the old pro Adler admitted that he didn’t go to many readings because he found them boring, this night at KGB was anything but boring. I enjoyed both authors a lot and look forward to reading more of their work.

--- Nina Siegal will be giving her final New York reading this Wednesday at Three of Cups in the East Village.

Also at KGB, in the Kraine Theatre, you’ll find currently running the new rock musical based on the gripping memoir, Attorney for the Damned, by Denis Woychuk, my friend for 34 years from the Brooklyn College MFA program, who adapted his book for the stage.

It’s got a limited run, so catch the show while you can. (Denis is also the owner of KGB!)