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Wine is Good for You

We have always known that, but now someone has written a book explaining why.  These reasons, of course, are vastly different from yours and mine, but might still be valid.  Professor Roger Corder's new book, The Red Wine Diet is all about the life extending properties of procyanidins (whatever those are). 

You can actually ask him what those are, because he will be appearing at The Chelsea Wine Vault this Friday, from 6-8 pm, reading and signing his book.  Also on hand will be free samples of those healthy reds. 

If you can't make it on Friday, check out their events page.  Beginning November 1st, they have free tastings of reds, whites, champagnes, gins, and vodkas nearly every evening for the next two weeks.  And it's all good for you.  The professor said so.

Burlesque at Barnes and Noble

Last night at the 8th Street Barnes & Noble book- store, author Kelly DiNardo read from her fabulous new book, Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique.  Since burlesque is undergoing a revival in New York, DiNardo's book is well-timed.  When St. Cyr performed her famous bubble bath routine (which got her arrested for public indecency), she was as big a box office draw as Dean Martin.  Both beautiful and talented, she made a fortune as an exotic dancer and as a movie star.  She made an even bigger impact on our culture when other entertainers imitated her.  Marilyn Monroe pored over her photos and studied her moves.  Madonna's stylist bought lingerie from her store (The Undie World of Lili St. Cyr).  Her routines are considered classics and are copied by contemporary burlesque dancers.  Yet she died alone and destitute with her memory barely kept alive by Rocky Horror Show fans.

Also on hand was Jo Weldon, winner of the 2007 Village Voice's Best (and Hottest) Teacher Award, who took the opportunity to demon- strate the best way to remove a glove.  Who knew Monday night at the bookstore would be so fun?

Legends of the Chelsea Hotel

Revisit a piece of New York history when longtime Chelsea Hotel resident blogger Ed Hamilton (who also contributes to blogchelsea) reads from his new book “Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca” Tonight, Oct. 23 at 7:00 at Barnes and Noble at 6th Avenue & 21st Street.

Like a Thief's Dream

Photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon read from his latest book, Like a Thief's Dream, at The Whitney Museum this past weekend.  The book is about James Jay Renton, a man who "killed either five people or three people, depending on who you talked to."  He met Renton while photographing inmates and kept up a thirty year correspondence with him.  A dedicated letter writer, Lyon lamented that only prisoners and Larry McMurtry write him back.

Lyon's book, complete with photos, is based on letters and recordings of Renton's conversations.  Renton was a thief, counterfeiter and bank robber. In 1976, he became one of America's Ten Most Wanted Men after murdering an Arkansas policeman.  The book gives a clear account of what happened on the night of the murder, and proves that one of the men convicted of the crime, Harold "Dinker" Cassell, is innocent.  Cassell remains in prison after 27 years.

Alternately funny, cranky and philosophical, Lyon talked about photographing members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, bikers in the northwest and prisoners.  Someone in the audience asked how he first got into the prison system to photograph inmates.  Lyon didn't want to go into all of the details on how he sweet talked the warden at the Texas prison and even managed to use the prison printing press to publish an earlier book.  "I've told that story at least six times.  And it's in the book, too."  He was recently in China and gave a talk to a large audience of students.  "They asked me the same question.  I was working with a translator and you have to speak very simply in answering questions.  My answer was 'I lied.'  Everyone just broke out laughing.  They understood that."

He also talked about the time, when he was living with bikers, he photographed a rape, although he didn't know it was rape at the time.  The woman and her boyfriend were outside, in the bushes.  "It was his date. There was no violence involved. At one point someone asked me if I wanted to screw her," he said.  'I said no, but I did want to photograph it, because that's what I do."  Later, when his processed the film, he didn't like the photograph.  "I felt Iike I had photographed something bad," he said.  "I used to wash to prints for an hour to make them last longer.  I didn't wash this one very long."

Lyon said that today's news reminds him of 1967, "where you would have breakfast with mutilated people and bombings and more atrocities.  I was disgusted with society and felt, like Genet and Dostoyevsky point out, if you don't like society, try looking in the trash.  That was an intentional thing.  I wanted look at criminals, cast-offs, losers and dangerous elements.  It struck me as logical."-Sherry Mazzocchi

Danny Lyon will also read from Like a Thief's Dream at The Strand Bookstore on October 30th at 7:30 pm

His work will be on exhibit at The Whitney Museum of American Art until February 3, 2008

What Will Replace Barnes and Noble?

Racked.com surveyed their readers and discovered a lot of wild guesses!

Make Mine a Double Agent

Even if you are a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The New York Times who has written a brilliant and thoroughly researched book on a fascinating but obscure topic, there is always someone who knows something you don't.  And those people tend to show up at readings in New York.

Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, read at Bottlerocket, the ultra-cool wine emporium located just west of Fifth Avenue on 19th Street.  The evening was the first of their  "Eclectic Salons" where  writers are paired with appropriate wine tastings.  Last night's offerings were a white, Incognito (Viognier 2005) and a red Roshambo (Justice Syrah 2004).

In light of the venue, Weiner read a few alcohol-related passages.  One of them concerned James J. Angleton, a chief counterintelligence officer in the early days of the agency.  He described Angleton as "well on his way to becoming one of the CIA's champion alcoholics--a title held in stiff competition."  When Angleton's plans to parachute CIA operatives behind the Iron Curtain were consistently thwarted and men were captured, tortured and killed, he didn't know why.  He had to look no farther than his drinking buddy, collaborator and counterspy, Kim Philby. Weiner also talked about Aldridge Ames, America's own double agent.  His previous book, Betrayal, was about Ames, whom he interviewed for many hours in prison.  Ames was under the influence of a fifth of vodka nearly every day he worked for the agency.  When the CIA tried to interrogate Ames, his memory was so impaired he couldn't tell them anything.

After the reading, a man asked Weiner if the CIA did anything right?  He said yes.  "They told LBJ that Vietnam could not be won with with bombs and guns.  LBJ didn't listen, because he wanted to nail Ho Chi Minh's hide to the wall," Weiner said.  Eventually LBJ concluded they were right and didn't run for re-election.  The CIA also deftly handled the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.  "They didn't dance on the Berlin Wall," he said.  "Ultimately there were a lot of short term successes but a lot more long term failures," Weiner said.  The man who posed the question, David Hunt, had been a CIA Operations Officer for 32 years.  Hunt had known Angleton nearly all his life and and said, yes, he drank, but wasn't a drunk.  He defended the CIA, saying Clinton had no interest in intelligence.  "You may remember," he said, "that a small plane crashed into the back of the White House lawn in the 1990s.  The joke goes it was then-CIA director Jim Woolsey trying to get into the White House.  When you have a president who doesn't care about the CIA, a lot of top rate people leave."  Wiener agreed, and later made the point that Americans are relatively new at intelligence.  Communists started spying on us at the end of World War I, the British have been at it for 500 years and the Chinese for three millenniums.  "At the end of the Cold War, there was a feeling of "Game Over" and thousands of years of experience walked out the door. Clinton's foreign policy was spreading freedom through free trade and selling sneakers to the Chinese," he said.  The wake-up call came on August 7, 1998.  "Blowing up two embassies isn't twice as hard, it's one hundred times harder."

Weiner said 9/11 was not the failure of the CIA, but of the entire American government.  The CIA's greatest failure was Iraq 's WMD intelligence. --Sherry Mazzocchi

The New York Art Book Fair on September 28-30

Printed Matter, Inc. will be presenting the exciting Second Annual New York Art Book Fair from Friday, September 28th - 30th.  The fair takes place at 548 W. 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) in a two-story 20,000 square foot space. More than 120 international exhibitors from Cape Town to Copenhagen will display new and antiquarian art books, periodicals, catalogs and 'zines.  Friendly Fire, the curated zone of independent artists and publishers displaying their art, books, CDs, DVDs and 'zines will return again this year.  There will also be several free events like book launches, signings, screenings and performances each day of the fair.  Artists  Marilyn Minter and Tracey Moffatt will be present for book signings.  Bec Stupak and Crystal Understanding will perform.  The Fair's feature presentation will be Refocus, Re-title, Release: The Books of Martin Kippenberger, which will showcase over 150 publications by the artist.

Admission is free, and there is a ticketed preview on Thursday, September 27, with proceeds going to Printed Matter. More details are available at their site.

Chelsea Barnes & Noble to Close

We were unhappy to read in Racked and The New York Post that the Chelsea location of Barnes and Noble will not be renewing their lease in May.  It is hard to believe that the store is not profitable.  Nearly every time I've gone there, I've had to wait in a long line and there are usually five or six cashiers--even at nine or ten on a Tuesday night.  It's more likely that the store can not afford the  new rent.  This is bad for the entire community.  Chelsea used to be home to scads of used, new, foreign language and even Communist bookstores.  Small businesses are an endangered species.  Even this giant bookstore chain can't survive here.  Glass towers are destroying their habitats.  What kind of person would spend hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars to live in an urban area without a decent bookstore in the neighborhood?  With all of the rising rents, Chelsea is becoming an arid land. 

Brooklyn Book Festival

Hats off to Brooklyn for having an even more wonderful event than last year.  The emphasis was definitely on Brooklyn authors--Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, Jim Carroll, Pete Hamill and scores more were all in attendance.  It's interesting that Brooklyn Borough President and festival presenter Marty Markowitz chose to interview the Bronx-born Dominic Carter, senior political reporter of NY1 about his book No Mamma's Boy.  Without a doubt, this had to be one of the most moving conversations at the festival.  Carter talked about his early childhood in the Bronx where he was raised by his grandmother and aunt.  He never knew his father and his mother was only an intermittent presence in his life.  He was frank about his mother's mental illness and  the sexual abuse he received from her.  He wrote the book, in part, to heal himself and to reduce the stigma attached to mental illness. 

Carter also talked about some of his famous interviews.  He said that while he and Giuliani would go at it, even to the point where the former mayor would try to have him removed from the press corps, they were pals outside of work.  He asked Nelson Mandela how, after 27 years in jail, could he still smile and be so radiantly happy.  Mandela said, "To be angry would be giving into my captors and I would never do that."  He also said that Curtis Silwa says 'borderline racist' things on the air, but in real life he is not that way at all.  Carter also said Markowitz would make an interesting choice for mayor.   Hmmm...

Nicholas Griffin on Dizzy City

While Nick Griffin’s favorite character in his latest novel, Dizzy City, is the main character Ben, Griffin ends up falling for Katherine, the heroine.   “She is someone who is so caught up in the life through her own wiles and eye for a quick buck.  She doesn’t know how to remove herself.  I rooted for her,” he said.  “In fact, I changed the ending to suit her rather than Ben.”

It’s not surprising that the characters in Dizzy City beguile even the author into doing them favors. The novel is a fast-paced story about Ben, a British soldier who deserts his World War I battalion, arrives in America in 1916 and becomes involved in a series of elaborate bunko schemes designed to fleece the unsuspecting.  Ben is the perfect con man; he’s charming, sensitive and sly, but he has a fatal flaw.  He is haunted by friends who died on the battlefield.

Dizzy City is Griffin’s fifth book and it took the longest to write.  His other books, about pirates, a Grand Tour of Italy, 18th century medicine and one nonfiction book about the Caucasus, all required travel to get the details rights.  For The Requiem Shark, he sailed a tall ship through the Caribbean.  There were months of rugged travel through the Caucasus.  He spent three months on the road in Italy for The Masquerade.  “You can never get to where your imagination wants to go,” he said, “but does help to put yourself in roughly similar circumstances.” 

But writing about World War I, New York City in 1916 and intricate con games, there aren’t many places to visit.  Even Black Tom Island, scene of a spectacular explosion of 2,000 tons of WWI munitions, no longer exists. 

Griffin began writing Dizzy City in 2001.  “The explosion of Black Tom Island originally started the book,” he said.  “That’s what I felt like writing at the time.  You got a real sense of panic and the unknown on that day.”  Black Tom Island and pier was located near Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.  It contained warehouses and ships full of fuel and ammunition that would have benefited the British, French and Russian forces in the war.  In the early hours of July 30, 1916, a fire was lit by German saboteurs.  The explosion rocked lower Manhattan, parts of New Jersey and shattered windows as far north as Times Square.  “For years and years the Statue of Liberty had shrapnel holes up and down the body.  The fact that only seven people died that night is staggering,” he said. 

The explosion at Black Tom and what happened on 9/11 “doesn’t work as a comparison.  But obviously the echoes are there,” Griffin said.  “Today, the war is so distant.  It doesn’t exist on a day-to-day level. You don’t feel it.”  Ben, who is thousands of miles from battle, still has a war raging in his head.  Post-traumatic stress was not an official diagnosis then.  “They didn’t know what it was at the time,” Griffin said.  “The army had no idea.  It wasn’t a question of courage or cowardice.  It seemed that no matter what deeds you had done or how many people you had saved, one day you woke up and you just wanted to get out of there.”

Ben sees his closest friends die on the battlefield.  Griffin said, “It’s an appalling idea that seemed wonderful at the time--Pal Battalions—where you join up with every single friend you have.”  In England, the impact of the war would move in pockets from town to town.  “Whatever group of friends that was sent to the front that morning, that group would be wiped out.” 

In 1916, the U.S. had not yet joined the war.  In America, from 1880 to 1920, it was the golden age of the con.  The heart of Dizzy City is a con game with shifting alliances. Elaborate stings flourished in New York.  “You had these complicated shops with 15 to 20 people who developed these terribly complicated scams.  You can’t imagine that you would be the victim of this elaborate theatricality.  One person, two people, maybe.  But if you have 15 people all telling you the same thing, you’re going to believe it.”

“Above all things,” he said, “it’s fun work.  Con stories are very entertaining for everyone, except for the poor guy on the wrong end of it all.  But then, it’s even entertaining for him while it’s happening, and probably even in retrospect as well."--Sherry Mazzocchi

Chelsea resident Nicholas Griffin will be reading from Dizzy City this Thursday, September 6, at 7 pm at 192 Books, on 10th Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets.