Tonight is the night! The Bushwick Book Club Seattle Presents:A Homemade Life is only moments away, but before the show begins we thought we would check in with the author, Molly Wizenberg. (We’re so excited to have her at the show tonight!) She shared with us the books and music she currently has on her list.
“I am the world’s slowest reader, and I only make it through a handful of full-length books a year. But a few months ago, some of us ladies at Delancey started a book club, and it’s been a great way to force myself to speed up a bit. (I can get really bogged down in details, analyzing a writer’s language and style. No fun for anybody.) A couple of months ago, we decided to tackle Madame Bovary. I was glad to finally check it off my list, though it made me feel like throwing myself out of a window. But this past month, man oh man, we read a great one: The Fault in Our Stars, by YA author John Green. It was so good that I haven’t been able to start another book since I finished it. I’m not ready to move on. I had read Green’s earlier novel Looking for Alaska a number of years ago, and I liked it, but TFIOS really knocked me out. The characters felt so true, so fully realized, so clever and smart and lovable. They felt like characters in one of those ’80s high school movies starring Molly Ringwald. I had been warned that TFIOS would make me cry, but I doubted that it really would (up until this point, only one book had ever made me cry: Plays Well With Others, by Allan Gurganus), but I wound up crying semi-hysterically for a good half hour or so at the end. My daughter’s babysitter arrived while I was still mopping up my face, and I scared the crap out of her as I clutched the book and weepily tried to explain myself. Anyway, all of this to say that I am now a giant John Green fan. Me, and about a million teenage girls.
I should add that I also read the New Yorker. In general, I tend to gravitate more toward nonfiction than fiction, and The New Yorker is my favorite place to read nonfiction.
And as for listening, well, to be perfectly honest, lately I’ve been revisiting stuff from the early- to mid-90s, like Hole’s Live Through This and all the Fugazi albums I used to listen to in high school. I remember being at a Fugazi show when I was 21 and thinking, I hope I’m never too old to like this, and it makes me very happy to see that I still do, 14 years later. I also dug out Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat the other day – I can’t believe it’s already 12 years old – and Ted Leo’s Shake The Sheets. Ted Leo’s songs are so catchy, and he seems to just keep churning them out. Very inspiring.”
– Molly Wizenberg
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Song of the Week: The Stance by Wes Weddell | inspired by Nick Wong’s essay entitled A Fight for Shared Spaces
/0 Comments/in Song of the Week /by Wes WeddellBushwick’s annual collaboration with the Jack Straw Writers Program has become one of my favorite shows of the season, with a different songwriter paired with each writer to produce a song inspired by the different pieces (which range from fiction to poetry to journalism to memoir and beyond in any given year). In 2012 I drew wandering pugilist Nick Wong, who had contributed an essay titled “A Fight for Shared Spaces” about his experiences in boxing gyms across Latin America.
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Bookshelf Report: Books, Knick-Knacks, and a Cat
/0 Comments/in Bookshelf Report /by Mike VotavaThe Bookshelf Report is an ongoing series where a Bushwick reader shares a little bit about the books that occupy their shelves.
Today’s bookshelf comes from the loveable Lisa Marie Schattenkirk. By now you’ve probably seen her at one of our shows, she is a frequent attendee. Her photography skills are off the charts. You should hire her to take pictures of things – check out her portfolio when you get the chance.
How do you organize your books?
I don’t have a bookshelf at the moment, but when I do I organize them by size. I like my books to be mixed in with chachkies, knick-knacks, and my cat! She’s been known to get cozy on a shelf or two.
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Bushwick Picks: SIFF Edition
/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Cassie CrossThe Seattle International Film Festival is currently ripping through theaters all over the city and continues for one more week with a bevy of intelligent, provocative films. Below you’ll find a list of our upcoming picks, full of films that show love for books and music.
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Song of the Week: Dish’s Lament by Ryan H Barber | inspired by Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove
/0 Comments/in Song of the Week /by Mike VotavaThe first time I heard Dish’s Lament by Ryan H Barber I was at Slim’s Last Chance Saloon. It was beautiful late summer day. Everyone was outside in the courtyard, eating chili and listening to the Bushwick artists perform songs inspired by Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. There weren’t enough wooden benches to go around. I ended up sitting on the dirt steps next to a girl who I was in love with at the time.
A few weeks earlier she broke my heart. She really crushed me. I sat by her anyways. Ryan took the stage and played his song.
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9 Great Shel Silverstein Quotes
/0 Comments/in Quotes /by Kerry GarvinShel Silverstein wrote super funny poems and said a lot of great words. Here is but a small selection of his work in celebration of today’s Bushwick show at Folklife.
Song of the Week: Cool To Be Weird by Tai Shan | inspired by Dr. Seuss
/0 Comments/in Song of the Week /by Tai ShanI remember my father reading Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches and Other Stories to me as I lay on the floor and colored one night for reading time. Reading was always a nightly event. It started when my mother would leave to work the night shift and would go until my brother and I would fall asleep in our crayons. When The Bushwick Book Club Seattle asked me to write a song inspired by one of Dr. Suess’s stories I told the curator, Geoff Larson, that I’m a late addition to the show so let everyone else choose their favorite story and I will take what’s left. The Sneetches was the last picked mostly because it shirted around issues like segregation and bigotry, some of our darkest parts of society.
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5 Reasons to Give BIG to Bushwick Seattle
/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by Cassie CrossListen up, Bushwick, because Tuesday is a big day. A BIG day, as in the Seattle Foundation’s Give BIG 2014, a one-day online giving frenzy where donations received by participating organizations qualify towards a pro-rated matching fund. If you’ve been looking for ways to help out your favorite nonprofit, now is the time.
To donate to Bushwick during the GiveBig on Tuesday May 6th – click here.
We came up with five reasons to consider the Bushwick Book Club Seattle on Tuesday May 6th.
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Bushwick Picks: Wes Weddell Edition
/0 Comments/in Bushwick Picks /by Wes WeddellEditorial Note: Wes wrote this for us last month, but we weren’t able to post it until now. Fortunately, the weather is still beautiful and the Mariners are playing as I type this, so we think it still applies. Our apologies to Wes for the delayed posting, but we think his picks are pretty stellar nonetheless.
The temperature hit 70 degrees Monday, the Mariners were in first place after one week, and I found myself joining the foolish chorus of overzealous—but sympathetic—Seattleites prematurely welcoming the arrival of summer. For many summers I read only books about baseball or country music (or, in the case of one brilliantly-titled if weakly-researched bit of “scholarship” that I still enjoy seeing on my shelf, both), and this week I let those same whimsies take me away again with the fleeting warmth.=
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Ten Inspirational Norton Juster quotes from The Phantom Tollbooth
/1 Comment/in Uncategorized /by Kerry GarvinIn honor of our upcoming May 3rd show inspired by Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, here are ten of our favorite inspirational quotes from the book.
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Bushwick Picks: Molly Wizenberg Edition
/1 Comment/in Uncategorized /by Cassie CrossTonight is the night! The Bushwick Book Club Seattle Presents:A Homemade Life is only moments away, but before the show begins we thought we would check in with the author, Molly Wizenberg. (We’re so excited to have her at the show tonight!) She shared with us the books and music she currently has on her list.
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