Events on Saturday, June 2, 2012

$22.50 adv, $25 dos

Original Room

Belly Room

Original Room

Belly Room

Original Room

Decades in the making, On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde is a fast moving and gut-wrenching, highly original exploration into the personalities of the star-crossed lovers and "public enemies" Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. A thoroughly researched, in-depth study of the true natures of these notorious outlaws, by an acclaimed author well versed in the dark fields of violence, On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde breaks away from the usual police-blotter procedurals on these outlaw lovers. Delving deep into their character in his unique and uncompromising style, Gilmore places the reader squarely inside a stolen 1932 V-8 with the desperadoes on a dusty, two-year, devil-take-the-high-road spree of robberies, shoot-outs and murder. Through the dark windshield of legend, the short lives of these outlaw desperadoes on a relentless ride to an infamous end-in a torrent of blood and bullets-emerges as an essential and compelling narrative of these undying icons of American crime lore. On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde includes a controversial critical perspective of the unlawful ambush murder of Bonnie Parker, who was never officially accused of a violent crime. Heavily illustrated with rare photos from the author's collection.

Main Room

Original Room

$21 child, $34.50 senior, $42.50 adult

$10 adv, $12 dos

Belly Room

Belly Room

$10 adv, $12 dos

A woman goes on the run in this intense and cinematic thriller by an award-winning writer. To escape the awful life she has descended into, Luz plans carefully. She takes only the clothes on her back, a Colt .45, and all the money in her husband's safe. The corpses in the hallway weren't part of her plan. Luz needs to find the daughter she left behind years earlier, but she knows she may die trying. Her husband isEl Principe, a key player in a high-powered drug cartel, a business he runs with the same violence he has used to keep Luz his perfect, obedient wife. With the pace and relentless force of a Scorsese film, Angel Baby is the newest masterpiece from one of the most ambitious and talented crime novelists at work today.

Belly Room

Belly Room

$15 adv, $17.50 dos

 
Group event presenting and signing We Got the Power!: Hardcore Punk Scenes from 1980s Southern California
Participants: Tony Adolescent, Jack Brewer, David Markey, Jordan Schwartz, Jennifer Schwartz, Janet Housden, Chuck Dukowski and Daniel Weizmann
In 1979, punk was over . . . but by 1981, hardcore was born. As teenagers in 1981, David Markey and his best friend Jordan Schwartz founded We Got Power!,  a fanzine dedicated to the first-generation hardcore punk music community in their native Los Angeles. Their text captured the early punk spirit of Black Flag, the Minutemen, Social Distortion, Suicidal Tendencies, and Husker Du at the height of their powers. Meanwhile, their amazing photographs captured the dilapidated houses, abandoned storefronts, and disaffected youth culture of the early Reagan era. Never before seen, except in crude fanzine form, these detailed and richly narrative photos are now collected to present an intimate document a uniquely fertile creative moments. (Bazillion Points Publishing)

$10 adv, $15 dos

Main Room

$10 adv, $15 dos

Original Room

It's 1930. The stock market crashed. The Great Depression is beginning. Hollywood is starting to rot underneath its glamour and lights. Nobody knows this better than producer Paul Russell. He has to save a movie studio from financial ruin. All he has at his disposal are a stack of horror scripts, some old sets, and unknown actors. The Hollywood pecking order applies to people as much as studios. Actress Lillian Nelson learned this lesson shortly after arriving in Los Angeles. Although she is dating Paul, she refuses to let him give her parts at his studio. She wants to make it on her own. Her attempt to overcome obstacles in order to insert herself into the public's heart is the stuff dreams and nightmares are made of in Hollywood. James Cagney, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Louis Brooks, and Jack Warner act as your guides while Take Her for a Ridepeels back the skin of Hollywood's most glamorous age to reveal a core of talented businessmen, competent directors, and radiant stars. (Crucson Publishing)

$15

Belly Room

$22.50 adv, $25 dos

$10 adv, $12 dos

$20 adv, $25 dos

$15 adv, $20 dos

$20 adv, $25 dos

Original Room

$15

When twenty-three-year-old Emily Cavenaugh's marriage to her abusive high school sweetheart ends, she trades in her dull small town life for an all-access pass to see the world as a flight attendant. Hoping for a new start, she moves to San Francisco to bunk with six other new flight attendants. Among them is KC Valentine, a free spirit who encourages Emily to shed her mousy ways and start collecting experiences as exciting as her passport stamps. Emily soon follows KC's advice a little too well, falling in love with an older, married co-worker named Tien, a father to two young girls. But as Emily and Tien become more deeply entangled, KC grows distraught. Neither her friends nor co-workers know the real reason she became a flight attendant: to find her father who abandoned her as a child. As Emily and KC fly from Vegas to Boston, San Francisco to London, Chicago to Delhi, each searching for love and acceptance, they're torn between passion and moral conviction, freedom and belonging. An assured debut from a former flight attendant, Love Me Anyway deftly captures the complexities of love, friendship, and family, the excitement and loneliness that come from living everywhere and nowhere, and the surprising detours life can take when you set out to discover the world. (Thomas Dunne Books)

Original Room

In Middle Men, Stegner Fellow and New Yorker contributor Jim Gavin delivers a hilarious and panoramic vision of California, portraying a group of men, from young dreamers to old vets, as they make valiant forays into middle-class respectability. The men in Gavin's stories all find themselves stuck somewhere in the middle, caught half way between their dreams and the often crushing reality of their lives. A work of profound humanity that pairs moments of high comedy with searing truths about life's missed opportunities, Middle Men brings to life a series of unforgettable characters learning what it means to love and work and be in the world as a man, and it offers our first look at a gifted writer who has just begun teaching us the tools of his trade. (Simon & Schuster)

Main Room

Original Room

From "American Beauty" (overrated) to "The Night of the Hunter" (masterpiece), this collection of Peter Rainer's film criticism spans the course of his illustrious 30-year career, which dates back to the early 1980s. It is drawn from a wide range of publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Los Angeles magazine, the Los Angeles Times, New Times Los Angeles, and New York magazine, and is arranged thematically. Rainer covers films both well-known and obscure and writes in depth about many film auteurs--Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock --and New Generation icons, such as Sofia Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson. No film buff's collection is complete without this comprehensive compilation that showcases the best work from a master contemporary film critic. (Santa Monica Press)

By the author of the bestseller Hello, He Lied, a veteran producer takes a witty look at the new Hollywood. Lynda Obst returns to dish on the experts, tastemakers, and moguls of today's Hollywood and the movies they make. She describes how the movie business has lost its MO--and is now losing its talent to network and especially cable TV. With the collapse of the DVD market, the movie industry was crippled. The business reacted by producing tentpoles (mega-hits) or tadpoles (which nobody gets a chance to see). Why? Since the majority of their revenue comes from the foreign market, especially China and Russia, studios are no longer dependent on expensive stars or dialogue (i.e. writers). Special effects and 3D replace people. Obst speaks from the front lines. Her subjects are friends, moguls, former employers, mentors, and even relatives, who express their opinions with disarming bluntness and hilarity. Obst combines her experiences with insights from the smartest people in the business.  In what Obst calls the New Abnormal (because Hollywood wasn't normal to begin with), studios are paralyzed. Can the movie business be resurrected? Can it once again make the movies that make us laugh, cry, and wish we could own the DVD? Obst is ready. (Simon & Schuster)

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics? Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art's sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction--history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert's secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov's family is the story of his century--and both are woven inextricably into his fiction. (Pegasus)