Posts From Author: dar williams

Seriously Entertaining Gala Sets Social Pages Alight

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.”  — Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice” (1923) So wrote Robert Frost in 1923, eerily prescient in his choice of imagery of this past Monday night. For inside the walls of City Winery NYC, as temperatures outside dipped into the low 20s, the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala night turned out to be a sizzling-hot celebration of writers and their art. For Page Six, the evening marked the coming-together of “a pride of literary lions”. For the House of SpeakEasy team, it marked the successful start of a series of Seriously Entertaining shows to come in the months ahead. Playing emcee for the night was comedian Andy Borowitz, creator of The Borowitz Report. In the words of Vogue: [The show] opened with writer and host Andy Borowitz regaling-slash-horrifying the legions of literary-minded folk in attendance with a tale of being asked to live-tweet the Oscars last year by an unnamed newspaper owned by “an Australian man” and turned the offer down once informed it was for no actual fee. “They said they would mention my website,” he dryly quipped. Borowitz’s elliptical anecdote laid bare one of the House of SpeakEasy’s […]
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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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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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Five Minutes with Andy Borowitz

Happy new year, friends! Welcome to the first blog of 2014. Now the holidays are over, we’re all getting tremendously revved up ahead of the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala at City Winery NYC on January 27! The theme for said gala is “Plays with Matches”, and we’re lucky enough to be joined by two amazing hosts to guide us through this fiery subject: comedian Andy Borowitz and Hollywood megastar Uma Thurman. In the weeks leading up to opening night, I’ll be introducing you to Andy and Uma as well as our special guests, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Dar Williams and Simon Winchester. I spoke to Andy Borowitz over the holidays to get his views on the year past and his hopes for the year ahead. Something of a comic polymath, Andy has to his name credits including TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (creator), 1998 movie Pleasantville (co-producer) and hit satirical website The Borowitz Report (founder). He is the primary host of The Moth, a storytelling platform launched in New York that has now gone nationwide and recently spawned a New York Times bestseller. Andy won an NAACP Image Award for The Fresh Prince and the inaugural National Press Club Award for Humor in 2004. You might have seen his face […]
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