Posts From Author: Month: January 2014

Tuesday, January 28, 2014, WSJ Speakeasy

Uma Thurman, Susan Orlean Host A Night for the Literary Elite
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Why We Fight: Body Counts, Surviving the Plague, and the Angels in America

There’s a poster currently on display in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building advertising a “MASSIVE PROTEST” to “STOP THE CHURCH” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It’s almost twenty-five years old but quite as shocking as it was in 1989. In fact, pretty much all the material in the New York Public Library‘s moving exhibition “Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism” has retained its direct, visceral power. The famous “Silence = Death” posters, which reappropriate the pink triangles used by the Nazis to brand gay men, are still highly provocative. So too are the numerous works on display by artists’ collective Gran Fury, including the “New York Crimes” front pages that sought to readdress a perceived imbalance in news coverage of the AIDS crisis, and the memorable pin badges that read “Men: Use Condoms or Beat It”. NYPL, which preserves the archives of a range of activist organisations and key individuals, has done a magnificent job in presenting the early grassroots response to the epidemic. The exhibition is also a timely reminder that AIDS is an ongoing crisis. The horror I felt reading on one poster “One AIDS death every thirty minutes!” was magnified by an editorial caption bringing this stat up to date: […]
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Tuesday, January 28, 2014, Daily Mail Online UK

Uma Thurman Takes to the stage in New York for A Seriously Entertaining evening.
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Plays with Matches: A Brief Meditation on Fire & Literature

This coming Monday, the House of SpeakEasy’s inaugural special guests — Andy Borowitz, Uma Thurman, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Simon Winchester and Dar Williams — will be stepping onto the stage at City Winery to ruminate on the theme “Plays with Matches”. I don’t know what they’re going to say. But it’s a fantastically potent theme — fiery metaphors abound in world literature, and fire has played a major role in the history of literature. So, in advance of gala night, I thought I’d share some of my own thoughts and a few excerpts from my reading notes. To start with, fire is of course the metaphor of choice for all kinds of passion, noble or ig-: “Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.” Venus attempting to sway the passions of Adonis in William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Humbert Humbert in the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Even when said passions turn out […]
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Curtain Call: Meet Our Special Guests

It’s now just five days till our opening gala, “Plays with Matches”, and now seems a good time to bring all our hosts and special guests together. So, without further ado… Meet Andy Borowitz, our host, talking here about sex education and the difference between “continuously” and “continually” at the 92nd Street Y: “I guess I failed to ask a key follow-up question because I came away from this explanation thinking that all this transpired between a man and a woman while the couple was asleep. And it wasn’t until years later that I realised that one of you has to be awake…” Andy will be joined by Hollywood superstar Uma Thurman, who hosts our literary quiz, “The Tip of My Tongue”. Here’s Uma sharing a $5 milkshake with John Travolta in 1994’s Pulp Fiction. “I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna go to the bathroom and powder my nose. You sit here and think of something to say…” Storytelling collective The Moth has featured writer Adam Gopnik as a guest several times. Here he is in 2006 on how he learned to LOL. “…and I thought to myself, This is the real nature of every communication between parent and child: we send them […]
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Susan Orlean Does Her Own Stunts

Over the last three weeks it’s been my pleasure to introduce you to the line-up for the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala: comedian and host Andy Borowitz; Hollywood superstar Uma Thurman, who will host literary quiz “The Tip of My Tongue”; writer Adam Gopnik; historian Simon Winchester; singer-songwriter Dar Williams; and finally, the author Susan Orlean. Susan Orlean hails from Ohio and is typically direct and witty in her assessment of the Buckeye State in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (ed. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey; Ecco, 2008). “The flatness, it turns out, is a myth,” she begins, before going on to dispel other such preconceptions: The vast cornfields are also a myth […] The hard, nasal, cawing accent is mostly a myth, though now and again, as you roam through Ohio, you will certainly hear words shaped without any roundness or melody […] Even the Midwesternness of Ohio is a myth. She finds in the character of Ohio “a certain regularness, a lack of wild distinction, a muting of idiosyncratic extreme”, and feels the need to make it sound livelier. At summer camp as a child: I boasted that Sam Sheppard, the osteopath who murdered his wife in […]
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Earth’s Immeasurable Surprise: Simon Winchester on the United States

We’re thrilled at the House of SpeakEasy to be joined for our sold-out opening gala by the British-born historian Simon Winchester, whose work includes books on China, the Oxford English Dictionary, and, most recently, the United States of America… The United States. This unique national quality — of first becoming and then remaining so decidedly united — is a creation that, in spite of episodes of trial and war and suffering and stress, has been sustained for almost two and a half centuries across the great magical confusion that is the American nation. The account that follows, then, is on one level a meditation on the nature of this American unity, a hymn to the creation of oneness, a parsing of the rich complexities that lie behind the country’s so-simple-sounding motto: E pluribus unum. So writes Winchester in the preface to his engrossing, enthralling, enlightening The Men Who United the States (Harper, 2013). Here is encapsulated the glorious freewheeling nature of his working method, more hymnal than forensic, leavened as much with personal experience as names and dates. Many of the reviews of his book have commented on Winchester’s evident love for the US (see the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Telegraph) — the passion, in fact, […]
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The Luminous Uma Thurman

In 1991 the New York Times marked the “earth-shattering news” that Pauline Kael was retiring by interviewing her. The great iconoclast of film criticism, whose put-downs made her unpopular with publicists but delighted readers of the New Yorker for more than twenty years, nevertheless found much to admire in the latest crop of Hollywood stars. She listed among her favourites Tim Robbins, Annette Bening, Uma Thurman, John Cusack and Wesley Snipes. That this is a list of some of the most significant screen actors of the two decades since Kael’s retirement is a testament to her uncannily splendid taste. That it features one of the special guest hosts for the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala — Uma Thurman — is merely delightful coincidence! On the night of the gala, Uma Thurman will be leading guests through “The Tip of My Tongue”. The Oscar-nominated actress will read out selections from three mystery books, all carefully chosen to reflect the theme of the evening (“Plays With Matches”),  and invite the audience to identify the title, the author, and the decade in which the books were written. The winner will receive signed books from the authors appearing at the gala. Thurman began her acting career at seventeen, four […]
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The Music of Dar Williams: Many Great Songs

Dar Williams, who is our special musical guest at the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala at City Winery, has more than twenty years of recording and performing to her name. Described by the New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg as “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters“, Dar’s back catalogue includes nine studio albums, two live albums, a handful of EPs, a greatest hits compilation (warmly titled Many Great Companions), and two rare early recordings, distributed at concerts or to family and friends and available only on cassette, for the eBay hounds to sniff out. For those of you new to Dar’s witty, incisive brand of pop folk, here’s a quick video introduction… “I will not be afraid of women!” sings Dar on “As Cool As I Am”, originally featured on Mortal City (1996) and re-recorded in this splendid acoustic version for Many Great Companions. It’s a defiant refrain, one that announces her feminist credentials with thrilling boldness, and its confidence is no doubt part of what makes “As Cool As I Am” one of her most popular songs. Many of her lyrics describe the search for truth in the everyday; and it’s a transformative truth, “just like time, it catches up and it just keeps going”. By the end of the […]
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