Our event with Amy Poehler and Jane Lynch supports the Adopt the Arts Foundation who’s mission is to bring together well-known artists, public figures, business, and the general public to save the arts in America’s public schools. Adopt the Arts is raising money to keep arts education in public schools in Los Angeles.

We caught up with Jane Lynch to answer some questions…

You recently did a PSA for arts in schools. How did you get involved with supporting arts in schools?  What was the arts program like when you were in school?

My daughter goes to a public school in LA and we have a very active parent’s organization to raise the funds needed for  art and music programs which the state no longer pays for. Not every public school is able to raise the money so Matt Sorum (Guns and Roses) and others asked me to join a brand new organization called Adopt the Arts to fund these programs to other public schools in LA.  My refuge in high school was the hour I spent every day in choir.

What was your favorite TV show when you were in highschool?

My favorite TV show in high school was The Brady Bunch which was actually in re-runs at that time.

What’s your favorite of the Oscar nominated movies?

The Artist, The Iron Lady

What’s a day of relaxation like in Lynch/Embry household?

Playing with our dogs and eating Lara’s fabulous cooking!

Favorite fiction author of all time?

John Irving

What are a couple books you’ve recently read that you really liked?

Girls Like Us, Sheila Weller
The Paleo Solution, Robb Wolf

What book are you looking forward to read?

Geting back to and finishing Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs book which I started over Xmas.

If you could travel back in time to meet any famous person, who would you choose? 

Greta Garbo
Abraham Lincoln
Carole King circa 1970
Theodore Roosevelt
Benjamin Franklin

Which five notable people from history do you think could work together to achieve world peace? 

I don’t think any one from the past present or future including Jesus Christ, the Buddha or  Ghandi, can make a place peaceful if the people are determined to fight and defend and see “other” and the enemy.

Milch (Deadwood, NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues) is creator and writer of HBO’s new series, Luck, which debuts on January 29th and stars Dustin Hoffman and is directed by Michael Mann.

Hoffman appeared at Live Talks in 2010 interviewing Scott Turow.  Here’s  the video from that event.

Here are some links of recent articles about David Milch that may be of interest.

* Q&A: David Milch talks William Falkner and his new deal with HBO (Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2011)
* HBO takes a gamble on ‘Luck’ (Los Angeles Times, January 22)
* HBO: Lucky at the racetrack? (USA Today, January 13)
* HBO Takes Its Money to the Track (Wall Street Journal, January 13)
* David Milch Luck Interview — On Deadwood Movie, True Grit and Luck (Esquire, January 14)
* David Milch will tackle William Faulkner’s works for HBO (Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2011)
* David Milch Strikes Deal to Bring Falkner Works to HBO (New York Times, November 30, 2011)
* David Milch and Michael Mann Gamble with Luck (Written By magazine, January 2012)

See you February 1 at Track 16.

Pico Iyer in conversation with Lisa Napoli
The Joy of Quiet: Desperate to Unplug (or coping with the age of always-on)

TICKETS ON SALE MARCH 1, 2012

The Fowler Museum at UCLA
Click here for directions.

Join us for a lively discussion about the impact of the modern era of connectedness on our ability to think, create, and participate in the world.

TV-free resorts.  Internet addiction camps.  Yoga retreats that promise restoration from our busy lives.  In this busy, always-on age, more of us are eager than ever to find ways to disconnect.  This winter, Pico Iyer (who has yet to own a cell phone) extolled the virtues of peace and quiet. In the NY Times, he wrote:

For a quarter of a century, he has been an essayist for Time magazine, while also writing constantly on literature for The New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper’s, and on many other topics for venues from The New York Times to National Geographic. His 2oo8 book, The Open Road, describing more than 30 years of talking and traveling with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, came out in a dozen countries.  His most recent book, on Graham Greene, hauntedness and fathers—The Man Within My Head—came out earlier this year.

Lisa Napoli is a journalist and author. She was as reporter and back-up host for public radio show Marketplace. She covered the Internet revolution and the cultural impact of technology as a columnist and staff reporter for the New York Times’ CyberTimes, and as a correspondent for MSNBC.  In her 25 year career in media, she has also worked for CNN. She is author of  RADIO SHANGRI-LA: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth. Presently, she is the local host of NPR’s All Things Considered on KCRW. Visit her website.

An Evening with John Irving
discussing his upcoming novel In One Person

TICKETS ON SALE MARCH 1

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

John Irving published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968. He has been nominated for a National Book Award three times-winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. He also received an O. Henry Award, in 1981, for the short story “Interior Space.” In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules-a film with seven Academy Award nominations. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In One Person is John Irving’s thirteenth novel.

“This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny—it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. The unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the ’80s was the defining moment for me as a physician. With my patients’ deaths, almost always occurring in the prime of life, I would find myself cataloging the other losses—namely, what these people might have offered society had they lived the full measure of their days: their art, their literature, the children they might have raised. In One Person is the novel that for me will define that era. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best.”
—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone and My Own Country

“In One Person is a novel that makes you proud to be human. It is a book that not only accepts but also loves our differences. From the beginning of his career, Irving has always cherished our peculiarities—in a fierce, not a saccharine, way. Now he has extended his sympathies—and ours—still further into areas that even the misfits eschew. Anthropologists say that the interstitial—whatever lies between two familiar opposites—is usually declared either taboo or sacred. John Irving in this magnificent novel—his best and most passionate since The World According to Garp—has sacralized what lies between polarizing genders and orientations. And have I mentioned it is also a gripping page-turner and a beautifully constructed work of art?”
—Edmund White, author of City Boy and Genet: A Biography 

An Evening with Christopher Buckley
discussing his latest novel, They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? 

TICKETS ON SALE MARCH 1, 2012

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

Christopher Buckley was born in New York City in 1952.  He was educated at Portsmouth Abbey, worked on a Norwegian tramp freighter and graduated cum laude from Yale.  At age 24 he was managing editor of Esquire magazine; at 29, chief speechwriter to the Vice President of the United States, George H.W. Bush.  He was the founding editor of Forbes FYI magazine (now ForbesLife), where he is now editor-at-large.

He is the author of fifteen books, which have translated into sixteen languages.  They include: Steaming To Bamboola, The White House Mess, Wet Work, God Is My Broker, Little Green Men, No Way To Treat a First Lady, Florence of Arabia, Boomsday, Supreme Courtship, Losing Mum And Pup: A Memoir and Thank You For Smoking, which was made into a movie in 2005.  Most have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year.

He has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, New York Magazine, The Washington Monthly, Forbes, Esquire, Vogue, Daily Beast and other publications.

He received the Washington Irving Prize for Literary Excellence and the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

An Evening with Michael Sandel

The Moral Limits of Markets

TICKETS  ON SALE FEB 1, 2012

All Saints Church
132 North Euclid Avenue,
Pasadena, CA

Michael Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University. Sandel’s legendary ‘Justice’ course is one of the most popular and influential at Harvard. In 2007, Harvard made Sandel’s course available to alumni around the world through webstreaming and podcasting. Over 5,000 participants signed up, and Harvard Clubs from Mexico to Australia organized local discussion groups in connection with the course. In May 2007, Sandel delivered a series of lectures at major universities in China and he has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, Paris. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. Sandel is the author of many books and has previously written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic and the New York Times. He was the 2009 BBC Reith Lecturer.  His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to 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?

In What Money Can’t Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn’t there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don’t belong? What are the moral limits of markets?

In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues that we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.

In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our every- day lives. Now, in What Money Can’t Buy, he provokes a debate that’s been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

Purchase Tickets:
$20 Live Talks Los Angeles with Michael Sandel, 7:30pm (doors open at 7:00pm)
$40 also includes this book, What Money Can’t Buy
$95 includes pre-event reception (6:00-7:00pm), and the book
$32 Purchase book (includes tax and shipping to anywhere in the US)

Henry Diltz 
in conversation with Kristine McKenna
discussing his work photographing rock musicians for the last 40+ years

PURCHASE TICKETS ($20, general admission, $55 includes coffee table book, $95 includes book + Reception)

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

Henry Diltz is a visual historian of the last four decades of popular music.  A founding member of the Modern Folk Quartet, Diltz is as much at home as a musician on tour, as he is a music photographer.  The rapport he’s developed with his musician friends enables him to capture the candid shots that convey a rare feeling of trust and intimacy with his subjects.

For Diltz, the pictures began with a $20 second-hand Japanese camera purchased on tour with the Modern Folk Quartet. When MFQ disbanded, he embarked on his photographic career with an album cover for The Lovin’ Spoonful. Despite his lack of formal training, Diltz easily submerged himself in the world of music: the road, the gigs, the humor, the social consciousness, the psychedelia, the up and down times.

For over 40 years, his work has graced hundreds of album covers and has been featured in books, magazines and newspapers. His unique artistic style has produced powerful photographic essays of Woodstock , The Monterey Pop Festival, The Doors, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jimi Hendrix and scores of other legendary artists. Diltz continues his distinguished career, generating new and vibrant photographs that inspire the rock n’ roll fan in each of us.

His recently published book, Unpainted Faces, showcases a collection of over 150 photos of rock legends and celebrities, along with Henry’s personal insight into each image.  Visit his website.

Kristine McKenna is a Los Angeles curator and writer who’s covered the arts for numerous publications. Two volumes of her collected interviews were published by Fantagraphics Books, and she’s edited and written more than a dozens books on various aspects of west coast culture.  She last appeared at Live Talks Los Angeles to interview Roger McGuinn of The Byrds.  See the video here.

The following are selections from Diltz’s newly published book.

Neil Young & Moose ● 1975 “Sharing his Corona beer with a moose head we discovered in the garage of a house Neil was buying in Malibu.” (© Henry Diltz/Morrison Hotel Gallery)

Michael Jackson ● 1971 “Rolling Stone called one day and asked me to go to the Motown Records office in L.A. to photograph the Jackson 5 answering fan mail. This picture was used on the cover of Rolling Stone.” (© Henry Diltz/Morrison Hotel Gallery)

Keith Richards ● 1979 “I spent three weeks touring with Ron Wood’s group, the New Barbarians, which included Keith Richards. All we saw were airplanes, hotels and concert halls but there was never a boring moment. The band rarely went to bed and always had reggae tapes blasting. Here is Keith just off the plane and waiting by the limo to ride to the next concert.” (© Henry Diltz/Morrison Hotel Gallery)

Keith Richards and Ron Wood ● 1979 “Ron Wood’s New Barbarians record promo tour with Keith in the band was the Rolling Stones without Mick as the leader. I flew in a small plane with these two guys for the last concert in San Diego. They were a captive audience for my camera but I was the captive audience for their amazing energy.” (© Henry Diltz/Morrison Hotel Gallery)

PLEASE  NOTE THAT THIS EVENT IS BEING RE-SCHEDULED.
NEW DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON. 

An Evening with David Milch
discussing his writing career and new HBO series, Luck

Tickets on sale when new event date is posted ($20, $95 includes pre-event reception)

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

David Milch, Emmy-Award-winning writer and producer, is the creator and Executive Producer of Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman, which debuts on HBO on January 29, 2012. Milch, who won the Tinker Prize for highest achievement in English at Yale University and earned an M.F.A.from the Writer’s Workshop at The University of Iowa; left a teaching career at Yale to write for Hill Street Blues. He subsequently served as Executive Story Editor and then Executive Producer for Hill Street Blues. In 1992, Milch co-created the history-making police drama NYPD Blue. Milch took home Emmys for Best Writing in a Drama for the 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 seasons. Milch created another police drama, Brooklyn South, and co-authored, along with NYPD Blue producer Bill Clark, True Blue: The Real Stories Behind NYPD Blue, and served as creative consultant for Steven Bochco’s Murder One and Total Security. From 2002-2006, Milch produced Deadwood, a dramatic series for HBO, where he served as creator, writer, and executive producer. Milch is currently developing a legal drama for NBC with Steven Bochco, and the feature film Heavy Rain for Warner Bros.

In November of 2011 HBO announced that it had entered into a deal with David Milch’s Redboard Productions to produce films and television series based on the literary works of William Faulkner. The deal would cover all of the 19 novels and 125 short stories in the William Faulkner estate, as well as other works, with the exception of those currently contracted with other parties.

David Milch will be in conversation with Richard Stayton, Editor, Written By magazine