Posts by Live Talks LA
Do you have a question for Chris Anderson, Curator of TED?
Monday, May 9th we host Chris Anderson, Curator of TED Talks, in conversation with Pico Iyer at a sold out event at the Aero Theatre. The occasion is the release of Chris Anderson’s book, TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking.
If you have a great question for Chris Anderson, here’s your chance to get a signed book. Email your question to info@livetalksla.org; and if we use your question, we will ship you a signed book.
Video from the event will be posted to our Facebook page and YouTube channel soon.
Faith Salie with Annabelle Gurwitch
in conversation with Annabelle Gurwitch
Approval Junkie:
Adventures in Caring Too Much
William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$43 Reserved Section seating + Book
$20 General Admission
Faith Salie is an Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! She also hosts the PBS show, Science Goes To The Movies. As a commentator on politics and pop culture, she’s been interviewed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Bill O’Reilly, and Anderson Cooper. As a television and public radio host, she herself has interviewed newsmakers from Lorne Michaels to President Carter to Robert Redford, who invited her to call him “Bob.” Faith attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, and while her fellow scholars went on to become governors and mayors, she landed on a Star Trek collectible trading card worth hundreds of cents.
Faith Salie has done it all in the name of validation. Whether it’s trying to impress her parents with a perfect GPA, undergoing an exorsism in the hopes of saving her toxic marriage, or maintaining the BMI of “a flapper with a touch of dysentery,” Salie is the ultimate approval seeker—an “approval junkie,” if you will.
In “Miss Aphrodite,” she recounts her strategy for winning the high school beauty pageant. (“Not to brag or anything, but no one stood a chance against my emaciated, spastic resolve.”) “What I Wore to My Divorce” describes Salie’s struggle to pick the perfect outfit to wear to the courthouse to divorce her “wasband.” (“I envisioned a look that said, ‘Yo, THIS is what you’ll be missing…even though you’ve introduced your new girlfriend to our mutual friends, and she’s a decade younger than I am and is also a fit model.”) In “Ovary Achiever,” she shares tips on how to ace your egg retrieval. (“Thank your fertility doctor when she announces you have ‘amazing ovaries.’ Try to be humble about it [‘Oh,these old things?’].”) And in “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me About Batman’s Nipples” she reveals the secrets behind Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! (“I study for this show like Tracy Flick on Adderall”).
Salie reflects on why she tries so hard to please others, and herself, highlighting a phenomenon that many people—especially women—experience at home and in the workplace. Equal parts laugh-out loud funny and poignant, Approval Junkie is one woman’s journey to realizing that seeking approval from others is more than just getting them to like you—it’s challenging yourself to achieve, and survive, more than you ever thought you could.
Annabelle Gurwitch is the author of The New York Times Bestseller I See You Made an Effort a finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor Writing 2015. Other books: You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up and Fired! The former co-host of Dinner and a Movie on TBS, her acting credits include television shows like Boston Legal, Dexter, Medium and Seinfeld and critically acclaimed appearances on stage Off-Broadway and in regional theaters. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, O Magazine, More, The Los Angeles Times and NPR. Her theatrical adaptation of I See You Made an Effort hits the road for a national tour in late 2016. She is currently at work on a new memoir Where Ever You Go, There They Are, to be released in 2017.
Marie Kondo with Jamie Lee Curtis
This event is rescheduled from Jan 25.
discussing her new book,
Spark Joy:
An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up
Note: given the interest in this event we have moved the event to a larger venue, Barnum Hall, at Santa Monica High School.
Barnum Hall
Santa Monica High School
600 Olympic Blvd,
Santa Monica, CA 90405
Parking information
ONLINE TICKET SALES HAVE ENDED
A limited number of General Admission Tickets available at venue
$20 cash only.
If de-cluttering in the name of contentment was on your list of 2016 resolutions, come hear wisdom from the master, the runaway bestselling author, Marie Kondo.
She’ll share wisdom and practical information in her followup to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.
Marie “KonMari” Kondo runs an acclaimed consulting business in Tokyo helping clients transform their cluttered homes into spaces of serenity and inspiration. With a three-month waiting list for new clients, her KonMari Method of decluttering and organizing has become an international phenomenon. The Life- Changing Magic of Tidying Up which has sold more than three million copies worldwide. One of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2015, she and her method have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Fast Company, Good Housekeeping, The TODAY Show, and Good Morning America.
Spark Joy is an illustrated manual on how to organize your home in the service of a better life. This is an in-depth tidying encyclopedia delving into objects from kitchen and bathroom items to work-related papers and hobby collections. User-friendly line drawings illustrate Kondo’s patented folding method as it applies to shirts, pants, socks, and jackets, as well as images of properly organized drawers, closets, and cabinets. Moving and packing will be addressed.
Jamie Lee Curtis made her film debut in 1978 by starring as Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s Halloween. A big hit, the film established her as a notable actress in horror, and she subsequently starred in Halloween II, The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, and Roadgames. Curtis has since compiled a body of work that spans many genres, including the cult comedy films Trading Places, for which she won a BAFTA Award; A Fish Called Wanda, and True Lies, for which she won a Golden Globe.
Curtis is returning to the small screens this fall in the new Fox series Scream Queens, a slasher series also starring Emma Roberts, Lea Michele, Abigail Breslin, Oliver Hudson, Nick Jonas and Ariana Grande.
Parking for Marie Kondo event at Barnum Hall, Santa Monica High School
We expect a big audience for our event with Marie Kondo and Jamie Lee Curtis, so plan on arriving early.
Doors to the theatre open at 7:15pm and we start at 8pm.
Parking is available in these two spaces. According to the City of Santa Monica website is $5 to park:
— 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.
Felicia Day with Wil Wheaton
discussing her memoir,
You’re Never Weird on the Internet (almost)
The Bootleg Theatre
2220 Beverly Blvd,
Los Angeles, CA 90057
PURCHASE TICKETS
$40 Reserved Section seating + Book* –– SOLD OUT
$33 General Admission Seating + book*
$20 General Admission Seat
* Books will be picked up at the event when you check in, and signed immediately after the talk
Felicia Day is an actress who has appeared in numerous mainstream television shows and films, including a two-season arc on the SyFy series Eureka. She is currently recurring on The CW show Supernatural. However, Day is best known for her work in the web video world, behind and in front of the camera. She co-starred — along with Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion — in Joss Whedon’s Emmy Award-winning Internet musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. She also created and starred in the hit web series The Guild, which ran for six seasons and is currently available for viewing on every major digital outlet, including Netflix. She previously appeared at Live Talks Los Angeles interviewing Jeffrey Cranor & Joseph Fink, creators of the hit podcast, Night Vale.
In 2012, she launched a YouTube channel called Geek & Sundry. The network has garnered more than 1.3 million subscribers to date and more than 200 million views. In 2014, the company was purchased by Legendary Entertainment. Day continues to act as CCO and develop web content and television projects with Legendary as a producer, writer, and performer. She is active on social media, has over 2.3 million Twitter followers, and is the eighth most followed person on Goodreads, where she is also the founder of Vaginal Fantasy, a romance and fantasy book club with more than 13,000 members.
Her memoir is funny, smart, and inspiring about achieving extraordinary success on her own unconventional terms. It is irreverent and insightful about her unusual upbringing, her rise to internet stardom, and embracing her “weirdness” to become a leading creator in new media.
Why You Should Embrace Your Weirdness: Growing up “homeschooled for hippie reasons,” Felicia’s isolation from other kids meant she could unabashedly pursue “uncool” passions like video games, advanced calculus, and 1930s detective novels. She found a sense of community on gaming message boards—forming friendships based upon shared interests and developing the raw confidence to forge her own path.
Growing Her Geek Empire: Eight years ago, Felicia stood outside of San Diego Comic-Con handing out bookmarks for her self-made web series, The Guild, shot in her own home with a borrowed camera, unpaid actors, and scavenged props. Just recently, she presided over Geek & Sundry’s massive Comic-Con headquarters at Petco Park and spoke to a sold-out convention hall. Tales of interactions with fans both in-person and online range from hilarious to heartbreaking—and reveal how Felicia went from “oddball to odd baller” (Cosmopolitan).
When Perfection Doesn’t Pay: A violin and math whiz who started college at age sixteen and graduated as valedictorian, Felicia was used to chasing perfection for perfection’s sake. Ever candid, she opens up about the rough patches along the way, recounting battles with writer’s block, a full-blown gaming addiction, severe anxiety and depression—and how she reinvented herself when overachieving became overwhelming.
#GamerGate: In August 2014, a video game designer named Zoe Quinn was attacked by an online hate mob after her ex-boyfriend shared details of their relationship online, including erroneous implications of sexual favors in exchange for positive reviews of her game. Hackers leaked Quinn’s personal information, she received countless violent threats, and anyone coming to her defense risked becoming the next target. Felicia shares the storm of hostility she encountered after speaking out against the online bullying, how it tied into her history with negativity on the internet, and thoughts about how it changed her view of the gaming culture she has always loved.
With a success story for today’s connected culture, in which technology and entertainment are ever-evolving, Felicia Day urges everyone to celebrate what makes them different and be brave enough to share their unique point of view with the world, because anything is possible now—even for a digital misfit.
Wil Wheaton began acting in commercials at the age of seven, and by the age of ten had appeared in numerous television and film roles. In 1986, his critically acclaimed role in Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me put him in the public spotlight. In 1987, Wil was cast as Wesley Crusher in the hit television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Recently, Wil has appeared on Syfy’s Dark Matter and was cast in the upcoming second season of Playstation’s Powers. Wil has held recurring roles on TNT’s Leverage, SyFy’s Eureka; he currently recurs on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory and the Disney Junior animated series Miles from Tomorrowland. He played Axis of Anarchy leader Fawkes in Felicia Day’s webseries The Guild. Off-camera, he is the creator, producer, and host of the wildly successful Geek & Sundry webseries Tabletop, which is currently heading into its fourth season. Wheaton is also an author, blogger, podcaster, voice actor, widely-followed original Twitter user, and a champion of geek culture. For more on Wheaton, visit his website.
Colm Tóibín with Carolyn Kellogg
8:00pm (Reception, 6:30-7:30pm)
in conversation with Carolyn Kellog
discussing James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
and a dramatic reading by Ron Livingston
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$37 Reserved Section Seating, copy of Giovanni’s Room
$60 Reserved Section seats for two, 1 copy of Giovanni’s Room
$95 Reception (6:30-7:30pm) Reserved Section seats, 1 copy of Giovanni’s Room
Colm Tóibín wrote the introduction to upcoming Everyman’s Library edition of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, marking the 70th anniversary of it’s publication.
New York Times, January 24, Alice Walker and Colm Tóibín on Hollywood, adaptations of their work and how life has informed their fiction.
Tóibín is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning author. His novels include The Master, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Novel Award, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night, and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. The movie adaptation of Brooklyn, about a naïve Irish girl who immigrates to the United States in the 1950s, was released in November to stellar reviews and received three Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture. Tóibín lives in Dublin, Ireland
James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of America’s foremost writers. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews. His essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement exploring palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century America. His novels include Giovanni’s Room (1956), about a white American expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and Another Country (1962), about racial and gay sexual tensions among New York intellectuals. His inclusion of gay themes resulted in much savage criticism from the black community. Going to Meet the Man (1965) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) provided powerful descriptions of American racism. As an openly gay man, he became increasingly outspoken in condemning discrimination against lesbian and gay people. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.
Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris. David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni’s Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Carolyn Kellogg is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. She is a recipient of the paper’s editorial award and she is a vice president of the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Kellogg has served as editor of LAist.com, web editor of Marketplace and has been widely published. She has an MFA in creative writing and a bachelor’s degree from USC.
Ron Livingston was most recently seen in Columbia Pictures “The 5th Wave” along with Chloe Grace Moretz, Live Schreiber and Maria Bello, up next is the crime thriller “Shimmer Lake,” directed by Oren Uziel and stars Wyatt Russell, Rainn Wilson and Rob Corddry.
In 2015, he co-starred in 3 films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival — the critically acclaimed “The End of the Tour,” directed by James Ponsoldt, based on Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky’s acclaimed memoir about the time he spent interviewing David Foster Wallace in the mid 1990’s; “James White,” which marked the directorial debut of “Martha Marcy May Marlene” producer Josh Mond and stars Christopher Abbott and Cynthia Nixon; and Joe Swanberg’s “Digging for Fire.”
In November, Livingston starred in NatGeo’s “Saints & Strangers,” which was filmed in South Africa last summer. The two part series, told the story of the crossing on the Mayflower of the first settlers in Plymouth, and the trials and tribulations they endured.
Livingston recently wrapped production on “Shangri-La Suite,” in which he plays Elvis Presley in co-writer/director Eddie O’Keefe’s fictional story about a couple who meet and fall in love in a mental hospital and set out on a cross country road trip with the intent to murder Presley.
Other film credits include Lynn Shelton’s “Touchy Feely” with Rosemarie DeWitt, Allison Janney and Ellen Page; New Line’s supernatural thriller, “The Conjuring” along with Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga and Lili Taylor; “Parkland” alongside a stellar cast, which included Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton and Marcia Gay Harden; “Boardwalk Empire” where he went on to garner a SAG Award Nomination in the Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series category; Walt Disney pictures ‘The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” which starred Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton, and “Ten Year” with Channing Tatum, Rosario Dawson and Anthony Mackie; For HBO’s multiple award-winning “Game Change” along with Ed Harris, Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson and Sarah Paulson; Paramount Pictures film “Dinner for Schmucks” with Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, directed by Jay Roach; “Time Traveler’s Wife” with Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, and the ABC series “Defying Gravity,” a one-hour drama about a team of astronauts on a six-year billion-mile mission in outer space.
Other appearances include Off Broadway in the Neil Labute play In a Dark, Dark House; with Michael Sheen and Melissa George in the “Music Within,” and “Holly,” a film about child trafficking shot on location in Cambodia and screened at several festivals; as Captain Lewis Nixon in the 2001 HBO film “Band of Brothers,”; as Jack Berger on the ever popular HBO series “Sex and the City” opposite Sarah Jessica Parker.
Previous films include “The Cooler,” “Adaptation,” “Swingers,” “Pretty Persuasion,” “Winter Solstice,” “Little Black Book,” and he may be best known as the star of the cult hit “Office Space.”
Raised in Iowa, Livingston graduated from Marion High School and attended Yale University.