this week in literature

MEET MIKE DOUGHTY: THE BOOK OF DRUGS

Mike Doughty will be at TriBeCa B&N on February 2 for a special performance, signing, and discussion (photo by Deborah Lopez)

Barnes & Noble
97 Warren St. at Greenwich St.
Thursday, February 2, free, 6:00
212-587-5389
www.barnesandnoble.com
www.mikedoughty.com

Mike Doughty first entered the New York scene back in 1991, when he was writing about life and music for the New York Press in its early heyday; using the names M. Doughty and Dirty Sanchez at the alternative weekly, he was part of a cast of characters that also included Sam Sifton, Jim Knipfel, Jonathan Ames, and Amy Sohn. The forty-one-year-old former Knitting Factory doorman started the band Soul Coughing in 1992, releasing such well-received albums as Ruby Vroom and Irresistible Bliss before breaking up in 2000. Doughty digs deep into the details of that time in The Book of Drugs (Da Capo, January 2012, $16), a no-holds-barred look at that old music cliché, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. “I can’t renounce drugs. I love drugs,” he writes in the memoir. “I’d never trade the part of my life when the drugs worked, though the bulk of the time I spent getting high, they weren’t doing shit for me. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t do drugs first. This part of my life — even minus the bursts of euphoria — is better, sexier, happier, more poetic, more romantic, grander.” Doughty gets right down to business in the book, telling it like it is, at least as far as he can remember, making no excuses or philosophizing about the things he did as Soul Coughing exploded and then imploded. He talks about hanging out and doing drugs with Jeff Buckley, spends three pages listing random women that he screwed, admits that “puking became so normal that I stopped kneeling,” and regularly questions his own talent. Well, he needn’t worry about that last thing, as Doughty is damn good at what he does, as evidenced by this lighthearted yet involving memoir, his work with Soul Coughing, and such solo records as 2005’s Haughty Melodic, 2009’s Sad Man Happy Man, last year’s Yes and Also Yes (named after his profile headline on an online dating site), and the just-released The Question Jar Show, a live album interspersed with Doughty answering questions from the audience in between songs. The Brooklyn-based Doughty will be at the TriBeCa Barnes & Noble on February 2 at 6:00, signing copies of The Book of Drugs, talking about his life and career, taking questions, and playing a few songs as well.

BRAINWAVE: IT COULD CHANGE YOUR MIND

Artist Sean Scully and neurology professor Anjan Chatterjee will examine “Abstract Cognition” as part of the Rubin’s fifth annual Brainwave festival

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
February 4 – April 23, $14-$30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org/brainwave

Don’t forget to pick up tickets for the Rubin Museum’s fifth annual Brainwave festival, in which artists and neuroscientists team up to discuss personal and professional aspects of this year’s central topic, memory. Each session includes a brief mnemonic art tour of the galleries and a karma “telephone” chain that will wind down the spiral staircase left over from when the space belonged to Barneys, if you can remember that far back. The series begins this Saturday afternoon, February 4, with painter Sean Scully and neurology professor Anjan Chatterjee delving into “Abstract Cognition” and is followed by such other pairings as broadcaster Jane Pauley and computational neuroscience professor Sebastian Seung discussing “Welcome to Connectome” on February 8, roboticist Heather Knight and brain researcher Dave Carmel screening and discussing Alex Gabbay’s documentary Just Trial and Error: Conversations on Consciousness on February 18, actor Scott Shepherd and hippocampus expert John Kubie getting into “Committing the Great American Novel to Memory” on March 4, comedian Lewis Black and Johns Hopkins neurologist Dr. Barry Gordon screening Gaylen Ross’s Caris’ Peace and asking “What’s My Line?” in regard to short-term memory on March 7, author Diane Ackerman and clinical neurologist and professor Dr. Todd C. Sacktor examining “Using and Losing Language” on April 14, and gourmand Ruth Reichl and psychology professor Paul Rozin exploring Proust and “The Madeleine Syndrome” on April 23. In conjunction with Brainwave, a new Cabaret Cinema series, “You Must Remember This,” begins Friday night with Casablanca, introduced by artist Samuel Cucher, and continues February 10 with Claudia Shear introducing Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, Fern Mallis introducing Gigi on February 17, and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas on February 24, with other films scheduled through April 27. “In this year’s [Brainwave] series we will look at the role memory has played in the past,” notes Rubin producer Tim McHenry, “and the debatable role it plays in our contemporary cut-and-paste culture.”

METS IN THE MORNING: MILESTONES, MEMORIES, MIRACLES, AND MORE

Mets legend Bud Harrelson will take part in fiftieth anniversary conference on January 28

Society of American Baseball Research
Mid-Manhattan Library
40th St. & Fifth Ave., sixth floor
Saturday, January 28, $25 with preregistration, 10:00 am – 3:30 pm
www.nyc.sabr.org

Back in 1962, a new baseball team came to town, a group of ne’er-do-wells that finished a woeful 40-120 under the leadership of the great Casey Stengel. For the New York Mets’ first seven seasons, they finished either ninth or tenth out of ten teams in their division but then miraculously pulled off the amazing feat of winning the World Series in 1969. The franchise has been back in the doldrums for the last three seasons, and not much is expected of them this year either. But you can expect lots of special events surrounding the team’s fiftieth anniversary, looking back at both the good days and the bad. On January 28, the Society of American Baseball Research will honor the Mets at its annual Casey Stengel Chapter meeting, which is open to the public. At 10:30, Ernestine Miller will moderate “Mets in the Morning: Milestones, Memories, Miracles, and More,” a panel discussion and Q&A with shortstop Bud Harrelson, statistical analysts Benjamin Baumer and TJ Barra, and memorabilia collector Harvey Poris. Following a lunch break, historian Lee Lowenfish, Yankees scout Cesar Presbott, and Cubs scout Billy Blitzer will talk about the state of professional scouting. At 2:00, George Vecsey will lecture on his sports writing career and his latest book, Stan Musial: An American Life. Stan Teitelbaum will conclude the all-day symposium with the research presentation “How Sports Writers Influence the Image of Major Leaguers.”

ETHAN NICHTERN: YOUR EMOTICONS WON’T SAVE YOU

237 Lafayette St. near Spring St., tenth floor
Thursday, January 19, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
www.ethannichtern.com

Shastri Ethan Nichtern, a Shambhala teacher and founder of the Interdependence Project, has followed up his 2007 nonfiction trade paperback, One City, in which he examined egolessness, interdependence, enlightenment, and spirituality in a fun and fascinating way, with his fiction debut, the digital book Your Emoticons Won’t Save You. The breezy tale is set in 1998, when Alex Bardo and a group of his college-aged childhood friends are on a road trip to the camp they went to when they were kids, setting the stage for a series of memories and flashbacks about life, love, friendship, and growing up. “She looked like she was about to say something else about me, something très annoying about who I am and who I used to be and who I should become, but she didn’t,” narrator Alex says at one point about his former girlfriend. The story involves bad mix tapes, naked frolicking, car games, micro-losses of virginity, and the Wannabe Poets Brigade; the novel concludes with a selection of Alex’s poetry, featuring such titles as “A Wary Invitation to My Future Child,” “Urban Planning,” “Aw, Nuts,” and “A PostPostModern Definition of Egolessness.” If you read the fine print, you’ll discover that “aggression still tantalizes us,” “obsession’s like a bungee cord,” “delusion emits a steady hum,” “kids don’t get to make any decisions,” “parents argue over money and then slam doors shut,” “when people smile they look guilty,” and “you will become what you hate — it’s inevitable.” Nichtern will be reading from Your Emoticons Won’t Save You at a release party on January 19 at 237 Lafayette St. In addition, Ethan and his father, David Nichtern, a musician, composer, producer, Emmy winner, and senior Buddhist teacher, will be teaming up for the weekend workshop “The Art of Being Human” January 20-22 at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara team up in English-language remake of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (David Fincher, 2011)
Now in theaters
www.dragontattoo.com

David Fincher knows how to make movies. The director of such standout films as Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Social Network has scored another critical and popular success with the hotly anticipated English-language remake of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s 2005 posthumously published runaway bestseller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And “remake” is the key word, as Fincher’s film, adapted by Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, American Gangster), feels like it was based more on Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 Swedish version than the book itself, but no matter, it’s still a highly entertaining, if overly long, thriller with elements all its own. Daniel Craig stars as Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who loses a high-profile case, accused of slandering a powerful businessman. Blomkvist is hired by wealthy patriarch Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), who believes Blomkvist was right, to search through the dysfunctional Vanger clan and find out who murdered young Harriet forty years earlier. Blomkvist is soon joined by investigator Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a ward of the state who is being horrifically abused by her new guardian (Yorick van Wageningen), as they combine cutting-edge technology with old-fashioned detective legwork to get to the bottom of the mystery. Craig plays Blomkvist with a stark vulnerability, letting Mara drive the film with her quiet, unassuming power that’s ready to explode at any moment — and when it does, well, watch out. The soundtrack, by Trent Reznor (look for the Nine Inch Nails T-shirt in the movie) and Atticus Ross, who also composed the score for The Social Network, opens with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” sung by Karen O, that is played over a bizarre title sequence that looks like it was meant for the next James Bond adventure. The first of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an exciting psychological drama that sets the stage for the follow-ups, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, with Craig and Mara reprising their roles.

FIRST SATURDAYS: OUT AND PROUD

Charles Demuth’s “Dancing Sailors” is part of “HIDE/SEEK” exhibition at Brooklyn Museum (courtesy Demuth Museum, Lancaster, Pennsylvania)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, January 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum will be celebrating gay pride in its January First Saturday program, featuring a screening of Rent (Christopher Columbus, 2005) hosted by Peppermint, live performances by Nhojj, Ariel Aparicio, Melissa Ferrick, and 3 Teens Kill 4, an artist talk with Lyle Ashton Harris and a curator talk with Jonathan Katz about the exhibition “HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” live-model sketching, a dance party led by DJ Tikka Masala, a book club reading of Chulito by author Charles Rice-Gonzalez, an artist talk with Kymia Nawabi, the second-season winner of Bravo’s Work of Art, and a multimedia, interactive Brown Bear performance installation by A. K. Burns and Katherine Hubbard that includes free haircuts. Among the other special exhibitions on view are “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties,” “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk — An Introspective,” “Lee Mingwei: ‘The Moving Garden,’” “Eva Hesse Spectres, 1960,” “Matthew Buckingham: ‘The Spirit and the Letter,’” and “ReOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio.”

SON OF PONY: ANNUAL BUKOWSKI TRIBUTE READING

Fourth annual Bukowski tribute takes place January 6 at Cornelia St. Cafe

Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia St. between West Fourth & Bleecker Sts.
Friday, January 6, $7 (includes free drink), 6:00 – 8:00
212-989-9319
www.corneliastreetcafe.com

If the massive New Year’s Day marathons at the Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club were a little too much for you to take all at once, the Cornelia Street Cafe is holding its fourth annual tribute to the rather iconoclastic, eclectic, and iconic Charles Bukowski, author of such books as Factotum, Barfly, Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window, Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts, and Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit. Hosted by Kat Georges, the evening includes poetry readings and performances by Peter Carlaftes, Thomas Fucaloro, Angelo Verga, George Wallace, and Ron Singer, videos of Bukowski, prizes, book giveaways, and, appropriately, one free drink with admission. Also appropriately, a post on the bukowski.net forum notes that this is “an event that would have made Bukowski wretch.” And if you want to read your own favorite piece by Bukowski or your own poem inspired by the writer, you can sign up to participate as well, but you need to get there before six.