Here are some mentions in the press about Gregg Allman and his memoir, My Cross To Bear:

– In The Washington Post, Love, family, drug addiction: Gregg Allman tells it all in new memoir

– In The Miami Herald, Gregg Allman’s memoir brims with road stories and family pain

– In USA Today, Allman bares wounded soul in memoir ‘My Cross to Bear’, April 30

– Rolling Stone, an excerpt from the book, April 27
– in Entertainment Weekly, Gregg Allman talks life behind the scenes in new memoir, ‘My Cross to Bear’ (VIDEO), April 24
– from CBS News,Gregg Allman passes heart tests, ready for book tour and summer concerts, May 2
– Huffington Post: Gregg Allman Remembers Cher–Was She A Mermaid, A Little Girl Or General Patton?!, April 30 

An Evening with Frank DeFord
in conversation with John Salley 

discussing his memoir, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter 

Track 16 at Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Bldg C-1
Santa Monica, CA

PURCHASE TICKETS:  
$20, $40 includes DeFord’s book, $95 includes the book + pre-event reception

Frank Deford is senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated, where his byline first appeared in 1962. A weekly commentator for NPR’s “Morning Edition,” — where he recently read his fifteenth-hundred commentary – he is also a regular correspondent on the HBO show “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” As a journalist, Deford has won the National Magazine Award for profiles, and has been elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters. Voted by his peers as U.S. Sportswriter of the Year six times, he was also cited by The American Journalism Review as the nation’s finest sportswriter and was twice voted Magazine Writer of the Year by the Washington Journalism Review. He has been presented with a Christopher Award and awards for distinguished service to journalism from the University of Missouri and Northeastern University. Deford and Red Smith are the only authors with more than one piece in The Best American Sportswriting of the Century, edited by David Halberstam. For his radio and TV work, Deford has won both an Emmy and a George Foster Peabody Award.

Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter is as unconventional and wide-ranging as Frank Deford’s remarkable career, in which he has chronicled the heroes and the characters of just about every sport in nearly every medium. Deford joined Sports Illustrated in 1962, fresh out of Princeton. They called him “the Kid,” and he made his reputation with dumb luck discovering fellow Princetonian Bill Bradley and a Canadian teenager named Bobby Orr. These were the Mad Men–like 1960s, and Deford recounts not just the expense-account shenanigans and the antiquated racial and sexual mores, but the professional camaraderie and the friendships with athletes and coaches during the “bush” years of the early NBA and the twilight of “shamateur tennis.”

Join us for an evening with Frank DeFord as he is interviewed by John Salley discussing his memoir – packed with people and stories, from the insightful and hilarious to the poignant and moving, especially the chapters on Deford’s visit to apartheid South Africa with Arthur Ashe, and his friend’s brave and tragic death. Interwoven through his personal history, Deford lovingly traces the entire arc of American sportswriting, from the lurid early days of the Police Gazette, through sportswriters Grantland Rice and Red Smith, and on up to ESPN.

John Salley is an NBA veteran of 11 seasons.  He is the first basketball player in NBA history to win four championships with three different teams. Drafted out of Georgia Tech in 1986 by the Detroit Pistons, Salley was a member of the “Bad Boys” squad which included Isaiah Thomas and the infamous Dennis Rodman; a team that went on to win back-to-back championships in 1989 and 1990. Following stints with the Miami Heat and Toronto Raptors, Salley played with Michael Jordan as part of the Chicago Bulls 1996 championship team. After a brief retirement to co-host NBA on NBC, Phil Jackson invited Salley to come join the Los Angeles Lakers where he was on the 2000 NBA Championship team.

Since his retirement from the NBA, Salley has worked in television, film, radio, print and new media. Salley was a co-host of the Emmy nominated series The Best Damn Sports Show Period (FOX) for seven years. He is presently host and Executive Producer of his interview show, Game On! with John Salley on the Reelz Channel.  He has written on food, wine and wellness, for Wine Spectator, Cigar Aficionado and LA Confidential.

PURCHASE TICKETS

$20, $40 includes DeFord’s book,
$95 includes pre-event reception (6:30-7:30pm)

Track 16 at Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Bldg C-1
Santa Monica, CA

And on The Colbert Report…

We host Harvard’s Michael Sandel on May 9th at All Saints Church in Pasadena. He’ll be in conversation with Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times columnist and host of The Patt Morrison Show on KPCC. Ticket info here…

He argues that the spread of ‘market philosophy’ has created what he calls “a consumerist idea of freedom,” in which we think our highest freedom is what we consume. Our obsession with consumption limits our freedom to engage in a full civic life.  He applauds markets for driving economic prosperity around the world, but he still thinks markets shouldn’t replace our moral judgment.  His hugely popular course he teaches at Harvard, “Justice,” was broadcast on PBS and the BBC.

Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades?  Should we put a price on human life?  Decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs?  What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for- profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay?  Hear what Sandel has to say on the “moral limits of markets.”

An Evening with Gregg Allman
in conversation with Alan Light
discussing his memoir My Cross to Bear

PURCHASE TICKETS
$25, $45 includes book, $95 includes pre-event reception + book
(Allman will sign books at the end of the event) 

The Aero Theatre
1328 Montana Avenue (at 14th Street)
Santa Monica, CA

Gregg Allman is a  founding member of the Allman Brothers Band and in his own storied solo career, he has long been a gifted natural interpreter of the blues, his soulful and distinctive voice is one of the defining sounds in the history of American music. His  2011  Low Country Blues marked the legendary Rock & Roll Hall of Famer’s seventh solo recording and first in more than 13 years.  Like any genuine bluesman, Allman’s own life has been colored by myriad triumphs and too many tragedies.  Low Country Blues was initially slated for a mid-2010 release, but that plan changed when Gregg, who had long battled chronic Hepatitis C, was notified that he was a candidate for a liver transplant.  In June 2010, he entered the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida where he successfully underwent the difficult surgery.  Knowing that he had only just made one of the defining albums of his recorded career proved to be the best medicine, giving Allman the inner strength he needed to fully heal. At this year’s 54th Annual Grammy Awards, the Allman Brothers Band was honored with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, and Low Country Blues received a nomination for Best Blues Album.  Allman’s upcoming memoir chronicling the highs and lows of his legendary life and music is My Cross to Bear.

Alan Light has been one of America’s leading music journalists for the past twenty years. Currently, he is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Rolling Stone; a columnist for msn.com; and the Director of Programming for “Live from the Artists Den,” a concert series now in its fourth season on PBS.  Alan is the co-author of Gregg Allman’s forthcoming memoir, My Cross to Bear. 

Alan was the founding music editor (1993-’94) and editor-in-chief (’94-’97) of the urban culture monthly Vibe.  He then served as the editor-in-chief of Spin magazine from January 1999 until March 2002. His most recent publishing position was editor-in-chief and co-founder of Tracks, a magazine dedicated to “Music Built to Last” that published from November 2003 to April 2005. Before coming to Vibe in 1993, Alan was a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone, where he began working in 1989. He has interviewed and profiled artists including U2, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, and Prince. Alan’s writing has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Mother Jones, and the Oxford American. Alan is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism.

In addition, since 2003 he has overseen “Live From Home,” a monthly music series, for the Housing Works organization, a group fighting AIDS and homelessness in New York City. The series has presented such performers as John Mellencamp, Bjork, the Black Keys, Lyle Lovett, John Mayer, Tracy Chapman, Ryan Adams, and Bright Eyes. He serves as co-chairman of the board for the Housing Works Bookstore Café.

PURCHASE TICKETS

$25 Live Talks Los Angeles with Gregg Allman, 8:00 pm (doors open at 7:30pm)
$45 also includes Gregg Allman’s book
$95 includes pre-event reception (6:30-7:30pm), plus Allman’s book
$33 Purchase signed copy of Gregg Allman’s book (tax and shipping included to anywhere in the US)
* books will be signed at the event

No, says Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild.  We host him at Live Talks Business on June 22nd for breakfast to discuss this and other challenges in the world of book publishing. He’ll be in conversation with Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times’ Jacket Copy blog about all things books.

Scott Turow observes this from two perches: As the writer of bestsellers, including Presumed Innocent, Innocent, One L, and Ultimate Punishment.  And, as the current president of The Authors Guild, the leading advocate for writers’ interests.

Here’s an excerpt from an Op-Ed piece in Bloomberg this week on the issue by Turow…

The Justice Department has been investigating whether the publishers colluded in adopting, for the sale of e-books, the same “agency model” pioneered by Apple in selling iTunes. Under that setup, Apple acts as the publishers’ sales agent, taking a cut (usually 30 percent) and leaving it to publishers to set the prices of the e-books they publish.

I have no way of knowing whether the publishers colluded. My friends in publishing insist that price was never part of the discussions, but the Justice Department prosecutors seem to think they have a compelling case. All I can say as an author — and as president of the Authors Guild, the nation’s largest membership organization of professional book writers — is that if the government wants to intervene in the literary marketplace, I hope it will consider the complex ecology of bookselling in the U.S.

Here’s a link to the Live Talks Los Angeles page on the Bio website where you can see more of our videos.

The Jason Alexander talk was amazing. My husband, who is a fellow USC grad and also attended the event, is a huge Seinfeld fan. No joke, me watching (and loving) every episode of Seinfeld was a basic requirement in order for us to date. We first saw the event advertised because we were lucky enough to attend the Michael Caine Live Talk before (which was another amazing evening). It was a life long dream of his to see Jason Alexander in person…..The talk itself was amazing. Mr. Alexander was intelligent and well spoken, and it was helpful to hear him talk about new media in the way that he did – as an opportunity to explore and try things out, instead of thinking of it as the end all and be all of where media is going. It was also of course thrilling to hear him recount tales from Seinfeld and Broadway days, and I always find those types of stories encouraging because often times it makes me feel like success isn’t as impossible to reach as it may seem right now. Everyone has kind of been in similar positions when they are starting out. It was also wonderful to hear Mr. Alexander discuss his thoughts on the Middle East situation, and how the group he’s associated with is trying to bridge the gap, and how respectfully they’ve used their celebrity participants. It was a whole view point of marketing that I had never thought about. — Cat Youell via email

We welcome emails, suggestions and comments.  Contact us at info@livetalksla.org