Back in 2009 we had famed photographer Annie Leibovitz in front of a camera, posing for a Seattle Met shoot after the release of her new book Annie Leibovitz at Work. When isn’t she at work? Since her first magazine job—a plum gig shooting for Rolling Stone at age 21, through the years spent crafting celebrity photo portraits for Vanity Fair, Leibovitz has been on the go, cementing her status as a “living legend.” (A Library of Congress–certified living legend.) It wasn’t until she had children “and a life I liked being in” that she learned to resist shooting everything in sight, Steve Wiecking wrote for Seattle Met. He quotes Leibovitz: “‘I had spent years, decades, looking at everything as if it was a photograph. I’m looking at you right now and…I can’t help myself.’ She raised her hands to form a makeshift frame near my face. ‘There’s my rectangle, there you are, I’ve taken the picture,’ she said. ‘It’s not like you stop taking pictures. It’s just you’re not picking up the camera to do it.’”
For her latest photo book, Pilgrimage —which she’ll page through at Elliott Bay Book Company on December 12 —Leibovitz picks up the camera for an entirely new subject. No Hollywood A-listers in this collection. Instead, she visited the homes of Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and Sigmund Freud to capture the spaces where her intellectual heroes lived and worked. She explored Yosemite Valley, honoring one of her favorite photographers, Ansel Adams, and traveled to Concord to capture Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. And though she couldn’t ask the Niagara Falls to pose, the book still has Leibovitz all over it. "It was an exercise in renewal,” she says. “It taught me to see again.”
Annie Leibovitz will read from Pilgrimage and sign copies at Elliott Bay Book Co on Dec 12 at 7.
Posted by: Laura Dannen on Nov 02, 2011 at 03:00PM0 Comments
“If you are not concerned about identity theft and ferrets, then you are living in a fantasy world.” — John Hodgman
What, you haven’t heard of Ragnarok, the coming global superpocalypse? (Not to be confused with the Mayan apocalypse, which some say already came and went. Surprise!) We’re talking about the latest prediction by John Hodgman, The Daily Show’s longtime resident expert and purveyor of fake facts, in the final installment of his Complete World Knowledge trilogy, That Is All (on sale November 1). He’ll coach us on how to prepare for the end of the world at Town Hall next Monday, but before then, here’s a handy tip on “how to make essential household products yourself” postapocalypse.
“Like all things with computers inside of them, microwave ovens will be rendered useless by the omega pulse. So if you want to enjoy good, old-fashioned microwave popcorn, you’re going to have to dip into your dried corn stockpile, and then kidnap one of the descendants of Orville Redenbacher, about a third of whom still carry his telepathic mind-popping gene."
Posted by: Allison Williams on Apr 18, 2011 at 10:00AM0 Comments
From Ellis Island to the Great War David Laskin follows 12 new Americans who fought for the U.S. during WWI in his book The Long Way Home.
As a writer for Seattle Met, David Laskin has gotten lost in the Oregon prairie, deciphered Northwest weather and unearthed a dream island in the Georgia Strait. But the busy traveler stays put for his latest project, The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War, which profiles 12 newly minted Americans who fought for their adopted country in World War I.
As part of the research process, Laskin also interviewed fellow Seattelite Tom Gudmestad, a Great War historian who managed to contact some 500 WWI veterans before they passed, collecting tales of death in the trenches and terrified teenagers. Laskin will talk war stories at Elliott Bay Books on Wednesday, April 20, at 7pm.
Also this week: If Joyce Carol Oates makes you feel lazy (she’s written 50 novels, numerous short stories and has won the National Book Award and National Humanities Medal), you’re not alone. The literary luminary speaks tonight at Benaroya Hall; tickets ($15–$70) are available at lectures.org. The man who actually gets to call them my Seattle Seahawks, Paul Allen, reads from his new memoir on Friday, April 22, at 7:30pm at Town Hall. Tickets are $5 at 800-838-3006 or townhallseattle.org.
Need a little vice in your life? We’ve got you covered.
Posted by: Allison Williams on Apr 11, 2011 at 10:00AM0 Comments
Rock star name: Nikki Sixx. Real name: Frank Carlton Serafino Ferrana Jr.
Sex What happens when every woman in town stops wanting sex? Find out when Meg Wolitzer reads from her new novel about that unlikely occurrence, The Uncoupling, tonight at 7 at the Seattle Public Library (free).
Drugs Recovering addict Nic Sheff did something even braver than deal with his meth addiction—he let his dad David write a book about it (the bestselling Beautiful Boy). Nic responded with his own memoir, Tweak, and the recovery process continues in his new book for young readers, We All Fall Down: Living with Addiction. Hear him talk on Thursday, April 14 at 7:30pm at Elliott Bay Books (free).
Rock ‘n’ Roll Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx married two different Playboy bunnies and has multiple Xs in his last name. That’s graduate-level rock star; must be why he’s signing his latest book, This is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx, at the University of Washington Book Store. See him Wednesday, April 13 at 7pm (free with book purchase).
Don’t forget:Caroline Kennedy reads from her new collection of poetry tonight at 7 at Third Place Books, and paleontologist Donald Johanson talks about his discovery of the 3.2-million-year-old “Lucy” fossil tonight and tomorrow at Benaroya Hall.
Get your verse on with Billy Collins, Henry Rollins and that guy named Neruda.
Posted by: Allison Williams on Apr 04, 2011 at 10:00AM0 Comments
Got a problem with poetry? Yeah, Henry Rollins didn’t think so.
Throw on your beanie, beatnik, it’s National Poetry Month. Here are a few choice offerings from around the city:
—Standouts from Port Townsend’s Copper Canyon Press come to Town Hall on Tuesday, April 5 for Always Beginning: A National Poetry Month Reading. The event, featuring Chris Abani, Chase Twichell, Lucia Perillo, and Jean Valentine, benefits the nonprofit publisher; tickets are $25.
—If anyone dares doubt that verse can be masculine, Henry Rollins will beat some spoken-word knowledge into their skull at the Triple Door. Hear the former Black Flag frontman on Wednesday, April 6; tickets are $35.
—Billy Collins is that rarest of birds—a poet making a good living off his work. The former U.S. Poet Laureate is back for his second Seattle engagement in five months, this time reading from his brand-new collection of poems at Elliott Bay Books on Wednesday, April 6. This event is free.
—Bring your own genius-level work to the Green Lake Branch of the Seattle Public Library on Saturday, April 9; Copper Canyon cofounder William O’Daly will warm up the crowd with a Pablo Neruda reading (his translation) at 4pm, followed by an open-mic session. Don’t worry, everyone pales next to Neruda.
—No time for live poetry? Stop playing Angry Birds and download the National Poetry Month’s official app, which will deliver some daily culture to your iPhone.
Also this week: Back in 2007, Jackson Holtz had the Barefoot Bandit beat, tracking the movements of Colton Harris-Moore across Washington for the Everett Herald. Hear him discuss his book Fly, Colton, Fly: The True Story of the Barefoot Bandit at Elliott Bay Books on Tuesday, April 5. Earlier that day at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Jacqueline Winspear signs her eighth installment in the Maisie Dobbs series, about a post-WWI private investigator, at noon.
In West of Here (Algonquin Books; February 15), Bainbridge Island writer and Washington State Book Award winner Jonathan Evison braids two tales, one set in the 1890s, the other in 2006, about Port Bonita, a fictional town on the Olympic Peninsula. We like the cast of characters in this wild, Thomas Pynchon–esque romp—Lewis and Clark–grade explorers, greedy dam-builders, ex-cons, environmentalists, and an erstwhile high school basketball star–turned–cryptozoologist (a bigfoot hunter). But we love the way Evison renders a Northwest storm even more: “…snow fell slantwise in sheets, whistling as it came, stinging with its velocity, gathering rapidly in drifts against anything able to withstand its force.”
Why a new biography of Gypsy Rose Lee is just like Gypsy’s act.
Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Jan 01, 2011 at 09:00AM0 Comments
American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Leeby Karen Abbott (Random House, $26)
What a ripe subject Gypsy Rose Lee must have seemed—the unsinkable survivor of an itinerant vaudeville childhood and a stage mother from hell, who despite a flat chest and even skimpier stage talents used burlesque as a vehicle and wit and attitude as engines to fashion a kind of stardom unknown before but reprised since. Madonna avant la lettre. Lady Gaga’s spiritual godmother. And, as it happens, Seattle’s most famous daughter.
How little Rose Louise Hovick from West Seattle, the daughter of a Seattle Times ad salesman and a stage mom from hell, transformed herself into Gypsy Rose Lee is a bittersweet Horatio Alger tale for the roaring ’20s, hard-scrabble ’30s, hard-charging ’40s, and sexual pre-revolution ’50s. And though she surfed more than influenced these eras, her career offers a promising lens on them—even when, as here, burlesque was tamed for Hollywood:
Author Karen Abbott strains for sweep and significance. She paints a panorama of vice, gangsterism, high society, and Tammany politics in New York—a Gotham echo of her previous book, Sin in the Second City—and describes so many outlandish vaudeville acts that they run together like a nickelodeon loop. She even builds a third narrative on the Minsky brothers, New York’s colorful burlesque impresarios, though Gypsy only worked about a year for them. The first two narrative recount Gypsy’s life, sort of, in two alternating threads: one, in present tense, from its career-high midpoint, the other, from the beginning, in past. How cinematic.
This elaborate contrivance makes for much scene-setting, some confusion, and little illumination. Abbott stitches and weaves artfully. But her historical material is half-digested and often just distracting—notably the parallel Minsky saga. Is it another would-have-been book shoehorned into this one?
Abbott muddies the essential story even more, the love-hate triangle between Louise/Gypsy, her monstrous mother, and her more gifted (and maltreated) kid sister, the actress June Havoc, who hoed an even harder row to build a distinguished stage and screen career. Perhaps Abbott puffs and gussies up this tale so much because she knows how oft it’s been told—recently in two other sounder but more pedestrian biographies, most famously by the two sisters themselves, and in the hit musical and movie based on Gypsy’s version.
June and Gypsy were mean storytellers, but both were partial and Gypsy at least was scarcely reliable. Abbott lifts reconstructed dialogue wholesale* from these highly partial memoirs, with no sources indicated save in vague endnotes. And with little evident attempt to sift fact and fiction, though she protests much on that point: “Anything that appears in quotation marks, dialogue or otherwise, comes from a book, archival collection, article," etc. You can trust it, it was in a book! She reports hearsay—notably one third-hand tall tale about Mom fatally defenestrating a hotel manager—as fact. She also fails to inspire confidence on subjects I happen to know something about. Young Louise’s traveling menagerie couldn’t have included a “poisonous horned toad”; horned-toad lizards aren’t poisonous. A self-defense plea is not an “alibi,” and if it’s upheld the killing’s not “murder.” Litigants usually seek writs of mandamus, not “stays, writs, mandamuses.” And she skips lightly or entirely over important aspects of Gypsy’s life—her sexuality, her political activism, the talk show that was her happiest achievement.
“When I occasionally slip inside Gypsy’s head, I do so using the most careful consideration of my research,” Abbott’s also avows in her introduction . In fact she persistently presumes to reveal not just Gypsy’s but others’ deepest thoughts and feelings, but never achieves a coherent, consistent portrait of any of them. Her sharpest insights seem borrowed from a 2003 Vanity Fair article by Laura Jacobs, apparently with permission; Abbot thanks Jacobs for sharing her files and notes.
But hollow as American Rose is behind its razzle dazzle, it’s an apt homage to Gypsy Lee Rose in one sense. As one patron said of Gypsy’s act, “It’s more tease than strip.”
Karen Abbott reads from American Rose February 3 at Elliott Bay Books.
A new Seattlecentric account of the race to conquer the skies may not soar, but it still explores a fascinating history.
Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Oct 18, 2010 at 11:00AM0 Comments
And the winner is….
Source: jetagebook.com
Tonight Seattle-based journalist Sam Howe Verhovek will present his new Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World at Elliott Bay Books. Jet Age leads off with an inspired question: What would “medieval serfs or the Founding Fathers” find most amazing about our time? Perhaps Google Earth or the iPhone, but more likely “our jetliners, whizzing around up there at more than 500 miles an hour.”
Really? Humans had imagined flying for millennia and tried to for centuries—from Daedalus to Leonardo to the brothers Montgolfier. But today’s digital technology defies and surpasses the wildest dreams of a few decades ago. Verhovek cannily excludes them in another sweeping assertion: The jet plane “is undeniably the machine that has connected our world in the most real, tangible of ways, truly linking more people in more places than any other invention in history.” But if you’re going to celebrate the blessings of ubiquitous jet flight, you might also note some downsides: cultural homogenization and the cheapening of travel, the lightning spread of terrorism, disease, and invasive species, the fastest-growing share of greenhouse gas emissions.
Verhovek dispenses with broad claims to tell his story: how America’s (and, at that time, Seattle’s) Boeing and Britain’s de Havilland raced to build the first successful commercial jet. But he frontloads the highpoints and gives away the outcome, in a structure recalling a classic newspaper pyramid. (Verhovek was Seattle correspondent for the New York and LA Times.) We learn on page 17 that de Havilland’s Comet was a “tragic failure” and watch Tex Johnston barrel-roll the proto-707 to glory on page 35.
Still, the back story that follows is rich enough to overcome prose that sometimes reads like the New York Times’s front page on a bad day. Especially fascinating: the forgotten jet gambits of France, Canada, and Russia, and how Hitler botched the Messerschmidt.
Perhaps someone someday will weave it all together, as Daniel Yergin did the petroleum age in The Prize. But writing on jets and the industry that created them never seems to soar, and this brief account, though sprightly and superbly researched, is no exception. Sailing ships, car trips, horses, canoes, even trains have all inspired great writing. Jet flight, for all its globe-leaping speed, hasn’t. Perhaps it’s outraced our imaginations—or simply become too commonplace, a victim of its own success.
Sam Howe Verhovek will also speak at Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE, Lake Forest Park, Saturday, Nov 13, 7-9pm. Town Hall, 1119 8th Avenue, Tuesday, Dec 7, 7:30-9pm. University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE, Monday, Dec 13, 7-9pm.
Enjoy food, brew, and live music from 4-7 tonight on Capitol Hill.
Posted by: Laura Dannen on Apr 15, 2010 at 11:00AM0 Comments
Capitol Hill loves a good block party—and that’s what it’s getting tonight.
Capitol Hill businesses lining the Pike/Pine corridor at 10th Avenue welcome their newest neighbor, Pioneer Square transplant Elliott Bay Book Co., with a party worth cutting out of work early for. Fun starts at 4pm (with a ribbon-cutting at 4:30) and includes plenty of food (highlights: Oddfellows Cafe, Molly Moon’s, and Rancho Bravo’s taco truck), a New Belgium Ale beer garden, and live music from local band Let’s Get Lost. The store officially reopened yesterday.
Before joining Seattle Metropolitan, Laura Dannen covered all things A&E as deputy editor of Time Out Singapore. She’s an award-winning reporter and editor whose team of entertainment junkies delivers daily doses of news, reviews, and interviews.
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