Posts by Live Talks LA
Parking info for Bryan Cranston event: Barnum Hall, Santa Monica
We expect a big audience for our event with Bryan Cranston in conversation with Jay Roach, so plan on arriving early. You can begin checking in at 6:30pm.
Doors to the theatre open at 7:15pm and we start at 8pm.
Parking is available in the lot and structure listed below.
According to the City of Santa Monica website, parking rates are as follows:
First 30 minutes…Free
Next Hour…$1.00
Each additional 30 minutes: $1.50
— Civic Center Parking Lot at the corner of 4th Street and Pico Blvd.
Access to the parking lot is via Main Street or 4th Street
— Civic Center Parking Garage, at corner of 4th Street and Civic Center Way
— There is limited parking for those with handicapped parking permits in the Olympic parking lot and Barnum parking lot.
There is a Walkway off of 4th street, next to the Double Tree Hotel that has direct access to the Santa Monica High School campus. Look for direction signs and attendants providing directions.
Terry McMillan with Lisa Napoli
8pm (Reception, 6:30-7:30pm)
in conversation with Lisa Napoli
I Almost Forgot About You
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$30 Reserved Section Seat
$43 Reserved Section Seating, copy of McMillan’s book
$95 Reception (6:30-7:30pm) Reserved Section seat + Book
Terry McMillan is the bestselling author of Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, A Day Late and a Dollar Short, and The Interruption of Everything and the editor of Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction. Each of Ms. McMillan’s seven previous novels was a New York Times bestseller, and four have been made into movies: Waiting to Exhale (Twentieth Century Fox, 1995); How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Twentieth Century Fox, 1998); Disappearing Acts (HBO Pictures, 1999); and A Day Late and a Dollar Short (Lifetime, 2014). McMillan fell in love with books as a teenager while working at the local library. She studied journalism at UC Berkeley and screenwriting at Columbia before making her fiction debut with Mama, which won both the Doubleday New Voices in Fiction Award and the American Book Award.
Visit her website.
In I Almost Forgot About You, Dr. Georgia Young’s wonderful life–great friends, family, and successful career–aren’t enough to keep her from feeling stuck and restless. When she decides to make some major changes in her life, quitting her job as an optometrist, and moving house, she finds herself on a wild journey that may or may not include a second chance at love. Like Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, I Almost Forgot About You shows what can happen when you face your fears, take a chance, and open yourself up to life, love, and the possibility of a new direction.
Lisa Napoli is a career journalist who has worked at The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and has covered arts and culture for KCRW. She’s the author of the book, Radio Shangri-La, about her time in and around the kingdom of Bhutan, where she went to start a radio station at the dawn of democratic rule. She is the author of the upcoming book, The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away, to be published November 2016. She is the proud recipient of the 2014 Halo Award from the Deutsch Family Foundation for a monthly volunteer cooking group she leads at the Downtown Women’s Center on Skid Row.
Walter Mosley with Karen Grigsby Bates
7:30pm (Reception, 6-7:00pm)
Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Easy Rawlins
& dramatic readings from Charcoal Joe and Devil in a Blue Dress
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$43 Reserved Section Seating, copy of Charcoal Joe
$95 Reception (6:30-7:30pm) Reserved Section seats, copy of Charcoal Joe
Twenty Five years ago, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins came onto the literary scene—just back from World War II—and opened the door on a Los Angeles that had not been part of the signature Los Angeles noir novels written by the masters, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. Walter Mosley’s books on Easy Rawlins and his neighbors and friends touched a nerve; his deft capturing of the conversations, the deep connections and frustrations of his characters made his books both critical and popular successes.
Since Devil in A Blue Dress set Easy out on his first job of detection, Mosley has published close to 50 books across genres and formats. His characters’ popularity and the critical acclaim his books drew opened doors for another generation of writers of color, not only in the mystery field but in other genres as well.
At this quarter century mark, Mosley is being recognized for this series’ deep cultural importance and impact by his award of Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America organization. With the publication of the new Easy Rawlins, Charcoal Joe, we look forward to celebrating the anniversary of the Easy Rawlins series as well as the wider intellectual and political scope of the writer himself.
Walter Mosley’s indelible detective Easy Rawlins is back, with a new detective agency and a new mystery to solve. Picking up where Rose Gold left off in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Easy Rawlins finds his life in transition. He’s ready to—finally—propose to his girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and start a life together. And he’s taken the money he got from the Rose Gold case and has, together with two partners, started a new detective agency. But, inevitably, a case gets in the way: Easy’s friend Mouse introduces him to Rufus Tyler, a very old man everyone calls Charcoal Joe. Joe’s friend’s son, Seymour (young, bright, top of his class at Stanford), has been arrested and charged with the murder of a white man from Redondo Beach. Rufus tells Easy he will pay and pay well to see his nephew exonerated, but seeing as how Seymour was literally found standing over the man’s dead body at his cabin home and the racially charged motives behind it, that might prove to be a tall order.
Between his new company, a heart that should be broken but is not, a whole raft of new bad guys on his tail, and a bad odor that surrounds Charcoal Joe, Easy has his hands full, his horizons askew, and a life in shambles on the ground around his feet.
Karen Grigsby Bates is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for NPR News, where she covers race, ethnicity and culture and how they each affect several aspects of American life. In addition, Bates often reports on authors and their work for NPR shows, especially Morning Edition. She’s been a reporter and substitute host for the Tavis Smiley show, and a correspondent for Day to Day. In her spare time, Bates has written several books, including two mysteries featuring reporter-sleuth Alex Powell.
Stephanie Danler with Teri Hatcher
8pm
in conversation with Teri Hatcher
Sweetbitter
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS/RSVP for comp tix
Free General Admission
$30 Reserved Section Seat, 1 copy of Danler’s novel, Sweetbitter
$35 Two Reserved Section Seats, 1 copy of Sweetbitter
This event is part of our Newer Voices Series where we feature debut authors and authors with one or two books whose writing we’d like to draw more attention to. Free tickets are available 7-10 days before the event. We encourage purchasing advance tickets that include the book and a reserved section seat.
— “And Our Fiction Special Tonight Is…,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2014
— “Stephanie Danler talks about her much-buzzed-about debut novel,” Time Out New York, Mar, 15, 2015
— “Restaurant Toil Serves O.C. Novelist Well,” Orange County Register, Jan. 7, 2015
Stephanie Danler is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. Sweetbitter is her debut novel.
“Stephanie Danler arrives on the literary scene with a fully-fledged, original voice that’s wry, watchful and wise beyond its years—acutely attuned to the pleasures of the senses and to the desperate stratagems of self-invention among young urban seekers. Sweetbitter is a stunning debut novel, one that seems destined to help define a generation.” —Jay McInerney
You will develop a palate. A palate is a spot on your tongue where you remember. Where you assign words to the textures of taste. Eating becomes a discipline, language-obsessed. You will never simply eat food again.
These are the words that introduce us to Tess, the twenty-two-year-old narrator of Sweetbitter—and you will never again read a debut coming-of-age novel as stunning as this one.
Shot from a mundane, provincial past, Tess comes to New York in the stifling summer of 2006. Alone, knowing no one, living in a rented room in Williamsburg, she manages to land a job as a “backwaiter” at a celebrated downtown Manhattan restaurant. This begins the year we spend with Tess as she starts to navigate the chaotic, enchanting, punishing, and privileged life she has chosen, as well as the remorseless and luminous city around her. What follows is her education: in oysters, Champagne, the appellations of Burgundy, friendship, cocaine, lust, love, and dive bars. As her appetites awaken—for food and wine, but also for knowledge, experience, and belonging—we see her helplessly drawn into a darkly alluring love triangle. With an orphan’s ardor she latches onto Simone, a senior server at the restaurant who has lived in ways Tess only dreams of, and against the warnings of coworkers she falls under the spell of Jake, the elusive, tatted up, achingly beautiful bartender. These two and their enigmatic connection to each other will prove to be Tess’s most exhilarating and painful lesson of all.
Stephanie Danler intimately defines the crucial transition from girl to woman, from living in a place that feels like nowhere to living in a place that feels like the center of the universe. She deftly conjures the nonstop and purely adrenalized world of the restaurant—conversations interrupted, phrases overheard, relationships only partially revealed. And she evokes the infinite possibilities, the unbearable beauty, the fragility and brutality of being young in New York with heart-stopping accuracy. A lush novel of the senses—of taste and hunger, seeing and understanding, love and desire—Sweetbitter is ultimately about the power of what remains after disillusionment, and the transformation and wisdom that come from our experiences, sweet and bitter.
Sebastian Junger & Maximilian Uriarte
8pm (Reception, 6:30-7:30pm)
and Maximilian Uriarte
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
The White Donkey
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
Some tickets available at the door ($20 cash)
$20 General Admission
$40 Reserved Section Seating, copy of Tribe
$95 Reception (6:30-7:30pm) Reserved Section seats, copy of Tribe
Sebastian Junger has spent decades of his life reporting from conflict zones worldwide. He is the New York Times bestselling author of War, The Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the documentary Restrepo based on his embed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an Academy Award nomination. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism.
Maximilian Uriarte enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 2006 at the age of nineteen and served for four years. During his first deployment to Iraq in 2007 he served as an MRAP turret gunner and dismount of India Company’s Jump Platoon in the Zaidon region southeast of Fallujah. He deployed to Iraq again in 2009 as a billeted Combat Photographer and Combat Artist. In 2010 Uriarte created the popular comic strip Terminal Lancewhile still on active duty. The strip is now published in theMarine Corps Times and has grown immensely in popularity, with over 490,000 Facebook followers and one million unique hits per month at terminallance.com. Uriarte has a bachelor’s degree from California College of the Arts.
Combining history, psychology and anthropology, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging picks up where War left off—specifically with the problems Vets face when presented with the irony that there are elements of battle that they, counterintuitively, miss. These positive feelings come from the innate human preference to live in small groups defined by clear purpose. This connection has been lost in modern society, and regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival.
Tribe explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. Junger explains the irony that—for many veterans as well as civilians—war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Tribe explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today’s divided world.
Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians-but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction are combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the incredibly intimate bonds of platoon life. The loss of closeness that comes at the end of deployment may explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by military veterans today.
Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, Tribe explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that-for many veterans as well as civilians-war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Tribe explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today’s divided world.
Mark Kurlansky
in conversation with Terrence McNally
Paper: Paging Through History
William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$43 Reserved Section seat + Book
$20 General Admission Seat
$30 Reserved Section Seat
Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times best-selling author of twenty-eight books and a former foreign correspondent for The International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
In his new book, Paper: Paging Through History, the best-selling author of Cod and Salt, offers a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world.
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. One has only to look at history’s greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Máo zhuxí yulu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong)—which doesn’t include editions in 37 foreign languages and in braille—to appreciate the range and influence of a single publication, in paper. Or take the fact that one of history’s most revered artists, Leonardo da Vinci, left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. And though the colonies were at the time calling for a boycott of all British goods, the one exception they made speaks to the essentiality of the material; they penned the Declaration of Independence on British paper.
Now, amid discussion of “going paperless”—and as speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society grows rampant—we’ve come to a world-historic juncture. Thousands of years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that written language would be the end of “true knowledge,” replacing the need to excise memory and think through complex questions. Similar arguments were made about the switch from handwritten to printed books, and today about the role of computer technology. By tracing paper’s evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times.
Terrence McNally, a strategic communications consultant who helps organizations tell better stories, hosts a weekly interview show on the Progressive Voices Network on TuneIn and a monthly podcast with Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. All podcasts can be found here. For 17 years he hosted an interview show, Free Forum, on KPFK.