Events on Sunday, July 1, 2012

 Original Room

 $23 adv, $25 dos

 Original Room

7-11 p.m. Josh Goldman started his career in food & beverage by bartending while in college. He developed a passion for the industry which led to formal coursework with the Court of Master Sommeliers where he earned the distinction of Advanced Level Sommelier in 2007. He became General Manger at critically acclaimed Bastide under the helm of Chef Walter Manzke, who he would eventually follow downtown to Church & State. At both establishments, they earned back-to-back 3-star ratings from the Los Angeles Times. In 2009, he joined Chef Michael Voltaggio at The Dining Room at the Langham, overhauling the wine program to complement Voltaggio’s innovative menu. In 2011 Chef Voltaggio and Goldman opened
Voltaggio’s first restaurant ink., where Josh was General Manager and Beverage Director. The restaurant was awarded the title of “Best New Restaurant in the County” from GQ Magazine. Josh now works with acclaimed bartender Julian Cox on various projects around Los Angeles including the soon to open Mess Hall.

 $15

 $25 adv, $28 dos

 Original Room

 $10 adv, $15 dos

$15, Original Room. Ages 21+. Full lineup and to purchase tickets. 

 $12 adv, $15 dos

 $25 adv, $30 dos

 Main Room

 Millions have already been to Gary and Elaine’s. Isn’t it time you dropped by?

Have you ever flipped through the pages of a Pottery Barn catalog and thought, “Who actually lives that way?” Rest assured, you are not alone. Pushed too far by a photo depicting a plate of figs placed under a table, actor and Second City-alum Molly Erdman created Gary and Elaine, a well-heeled and deeply superficial couple living happily amongst abundantly pillowed chairs, giant abacuses, and decorative fruit. Inspired by Erdman’s popular blog, Catalog Living, Decorating Takes (Wicker) Balls takes home décor catalog photos and sends them up with wickedly funny captions mockumenting Gary and Elaine, their lives, and their absurdly over-decorated rooms.

“‘Catalog Living’” taps into thoughts many have had … about how things are sold to us.” —Chicago Tribune

 $10 adv, $15 dos

 Belly Room

 By turns poetic, blunt, and hallucinatory. Geek City Apocalypso is a tragi-comic elegy to lost love set in the grungy underbelly of turn of the millenium San Francisco. A roller coaster meditation on life, love, and existence that takes you from Tenderloin residence hotels to corporate cubicle farms and back. (Superstition Street Press) 

 $15

 Main Room

 Belly Room

 Main Room

An astonishing story of triumph and a fierce determination to give back...

Carissa Phelps was a runner. By twelve, she had run away from home, dropped out of school, and fled blindly into the arms of a brutal pimp, who made her walk the hard streets of central California. But even when she escaped him, she could not outrun the crushing inner pain of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. With little to hope for, she expected to end up in prison, or worse.

But then her life was transformed through the unexpected kindness of a teacher and a counselor. Miraculously, by the time Carissa turned thirty, she had accomplished the unimaginable, graduating from UCLA with both a law degree and an MBA. She had left the streets behind, yet her path would eventually draw her back, this time working to help homeless and at-risk youth find their own paths to a better life.

This is Carissa’s story, the tale of a girl who lost herself and survived, against all odds, through the generosity of strangers. It is an inspiring true story about finding the courage to run toward healing and summoning the strength to light the way for others. 

 $10 adv, $12 dos

 Original Room

A novel about second chances from a writer of "stirring, poignant, and profound" work (Wally Lamb). Twenty-five years after his high school graduation, David Halpert returns to a place that most people flee. But David is making his own escape—from his divorce and the death of his son. In Detroit, David learns about the double shooting of his high school girlfriend Natalie and her black half-brother, Dirk. As David becomes involved with Natalie’s sister, he will discover that both he and his hometown have reasons to hope.

As compelling an urban portrait as The Wire and a touching love story, Say Nice Things About Detroit takes place in a racially polarized, economically collapsing city that doesn't seem like a place for rebirth. But as David tries to make sense of the mystery behind Natalie’s death and puts back the pieces of his own life, he is forced to answer a simple question: if you want to go home again, what do you do if home is Detroit? 

 $10 adv, $15 dos

 Original Room

Happy hour from 4-7 p.m.

 Belly Room

 Original Room, $20. For the full lineup and to buy tickets:

http://hollywood.thecomedystore.com/show.cfm?id=160051&cart

 Belly Room

 $12 adv, $15 dos

 Main Room

 Original Room

Featuring adult published writers, as well as local children writers (ages 6-16), reading original, imaginative poems and stories that both children and adults can enjoy. This is a family friendly event for parents who want to inspire their children to love reading and writing. The event is one hour, with writers readings and a musical guests performing a song in the middle.

Brendan Constantine, Jack Grapes, and students from Horace Mann School will be reading. Musical performance provided by guest Ivor "Jerry" Moore, a Freedom Rider from the 60's, and a wonderful folk musician. 

 Main Room

In the insightful narrative tradition of Oliver Sacks, Monkey Mind is an uplifting, smart, and very funny memoir of life with anxiety—America’s most common psychological complaint.

We all think we know what being anxious feels like: It is the instinct that made us run from wolves in the prehistoric age and pushes us to perform in the modern one. But for 40 million American adults, anxiety is an insidious condition that defines daily life. Yet no popular memoir has been written about that experience until now. Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.”

In Monkey Mind, Daniel Smith brilliantly articulates what it is like to live with anxiety, defanging the disease with humor, traveling through its demonic layers, evocatively expressing both its painful internal coherence and its absurdities. He also draws on its most storied sufferers to trace anxiety’s intellectual history and its influence on our time. Here, finally, comes relief and recognition to millions of people who want someone to put what they feel, or what their loved ones feel, into words. 

 $15

 Belly Room

 Main Room

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow. Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams. 

 $10 adv, $15 dos

 Original Room

"Let me tell you something, son. 
When you’re young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand-new penny, 
but before you get to wonderful you’re going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good, long look, because that may be as far as you’re ever going to go.”

It is the summer of 1948 when a handsome, charismatic stranger, Charlie Beale, recently back from the war in Europe, shows up in the town of Brownsburg, a sleepy village of a few hundred people, nestled in the Valley of Virginia. All he has with him are two suitcases: one contains his few possessions, including a fine set of butcher knives; the other is full of money. A lot of money.

Finding work at the local butcher shop, Charlie befriends the owner and his family, including the owner’s son, Sam, who he is soon treating as though he were his own flesh and blood. And it is through the shop that Charlie gradually meets all the townsfolk, including Boaty Glass, Brownsburg’s wealthiest citizen, and most significantly, Boaty’s beautiful teenage bride, Sylvan.

This last encounter sets in motion the events that give Goolrick’s powerful tale the stark, emotional impact that thrilled fans of his previous novel, A Reliable Wife. Charlie’s attraction to Sylvan Glass turns first to lust and then to a need to possess her, a need so basic it becomes an all-consuming passion that threatens to destroy everything and everyone in its path.

Told through the eyes of Sam, now an old man looking back on the events that changed his world forever, Heading Out to Wonderful is a suspenseful masterpiece, a haunting, heart-stopping novel of obsession and love gone terribly wrong in a place where once upon a time such things could happen. 

 Original Room

 Belly Room

Sex, Life, and Hannah, the juicy woman-on-top book series authored by Dorota Skrzypek, will unveil its third installment at Book Soup in Los Angeles on June 1st. The Summer Season picks up where its predecessors left off, chronicling the exploits of Hannah, a female professional trying desperately to make sense of the L.A. single life. Through broken hearts, broken dreams, and nearly-broken bed frames (yes—there is a lot of sex), Hannah grapples with the modern late-twenty-something's conundrum: Does the fairytale life exist, and is it worth having? Sex, Life, and Hannah is acclaimed by audiences as jaw-dropping, frank, and relatable. Writer’s Digest hails it as “an honest, sensitive, and intelligent investigation of the human heart… [with] wit, charm, pathos, and passion.”

Dorota Skrzypek was born in Poland, grew-up in Canada, and moved to Southern California in 1997. After many years of flying airplanes, designing airports, exploring the world, and dating a swarm of eligible bachelors, she started writing fiction. Dorota resides in Los Angeles with her husband, writer and producer, Scott Frazelle. 

 Original Room

It’s the end of the summer in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and an eager group of high school teenagers pack into a bus for a well-planned week at a summer camp.  What could possibly go wrong?  Everything does! After a devastating accident, the surviving students find themselves all alone against the untamed wilderness, pitted against each other, with no idea how to get home and no means of survival. Will this group of friends endure the hardships of the Forest Mountains? Will they be able to work together in order to survive? Or will they destroy each other before the darkest elements of nature beat them to it.

 $15

 Main Room

 Belly Room

 Original Room

 Brooklyn 1958, long before he created and hosted Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, the most dynamic rock-and-roll series in television history, before he developed The Monkees and created The Archies, Don Kirshner was a 23-year-old kid with just a dream in his pocket. Five years later he was the prince of pop music. He did it by building Aldon Music, a song publishing firm, from scratch. By 1960, at the ripe old age of 25, Kirshner had built the most powerful publishing house in the business, leading Time magazine to call him "the Man with the Golden Ear." In five short years he coaxed and guided his teenage prodigies (Bobby Darin, Carole King, Neil Sedaka, and others) to write more than 200 hits... and they weren't just hits, as it turned out, but standards including "On Broadway," "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "Up on the Roof," "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," "I Love How You Love Me," "Who Put the Bomp," and "The Locomotion" - songs that have become the soundtrack of a generation. "We weren't trying to write standards," said one songwriter. "We were just trying to please Donnie." 

 Original Room

 Original Room

 $10 adv, $12 dos

 Belly Room

 Shoot It! is a revealing history of how Hollywood, with its eye on the bottom line, arguably lost its ability to support the work of creative filmmakers; it is also a passionate portrait of the American independents, and others inside the international film scene, who have risen up to fill the void.

The book examines the Hollywood studio system over several decades, from the period when moguls like Harry and Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer produced quality yet commercially viable films, to today, when studios seem only interested in surefire sequels and comic-book adaptations aimed at a global audience. By the same token, Shoot It! also celebrates today's great movies produced outside of the studio system, chronicling the international independent film movement in seven countries (the United States, Canada, Mexico, Britain, France, Romania, and South Korea), from its roots (French New Wave, British kitchen sink, the New York scene) to the revolutionary impact of digital technology. It also features new interviews from indie film notables such as Gus Van Sant, Mike Leigh, Claire Denis, Atom Egoyan, Catherine Breillat, Sally Potter, John Sayles, and Ken Loach.

While the studios envisage a generic universe, repressing local film cultures along the way, talented independents continue to tell local stories with universal appeal. This book is a celebration of those determined filmmakers who, despite it all, overcome every obstacle and just shoot it.

 Original Room

 $10 adv, $12 dos

 Original Room

Funny: The Book is an entertaining look at the art of comedy, from its historical roots to the latest scientific findings, with diversions into the worlds of movies (Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers), television (The Office), prose (Woody Allen, Robert Benchley), theater (The Front Page), jokes and stand-up comedy (Richard Pryor, Steve Martin), as well as personal reminiscences from the author's experiences on such TV programs as Mork and Mindy. With allusions to the not-always-funny Carl Jung, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler, Funny: The Book explores the evolution, theories, principles, and practice of comedy, as well as the psychological, philosophical, and even theological underpinnings of humor, coming to the conclusion that (spoiler alert!) Comedy is God. (Applause Theatre & Cinema Book Publishers) 

 $10

 Belly Room

 $10 adv, $12 dos

 Original Room

 Belly Room

 About Savages:

A breakthrough novel that pits young kingpins against a Mexican drug cartel, Savages is a provocative, sexy, and sharply funny thrill ride through the dark side of the war on drugs and beyond.

Part-time environmentalist and philanthropist Ben and his ex-mercenary buddy Chon run a Laguna Beach-based marijuana operation, reaping significant profits from their loyal clientele. In the past when their turf was challenged, Chon took care of eliminating the threat. But now they may have come up against something that they can't handle -- the Mexican Baja Cartel wants in, and sends them the message that a no is unacceptable. When they refuse to back down, the cartel escalates its threat, kidnapping Ophelia, the boys' playmate and confidante. O's abduction sets off a dizzying array of ingenious negotiations and gripping plot twists that will captivate readers eager to learn the costs of freedom and the price of one amazing high.

Following "the best summertime crime novel ever" (San Francisco Chronicle on The Dawn Patrol), bestselling author Winslow offers up a smash hit in the making. Savages is an ingenious combination of adrenaline-fueled suspense and true-crime reportage by a master thriller writer at the very top of his game.

 Original Room

 $20

 Original Room

 Original Room

Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar — the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild — is the person thousands turn to for advice.

Tiny Beautiful Things brings the best of "Dear Sugar" in one place and includes never-before-published columns and a new introduction by Steve Almond. Rich with humor, insight, compassion—and absolute honesty—this book is a balm for everything life throws our way. 

 $10 adv, $12 dos

 $15

A New York story, a dark comedy, Balls tells of the thirty-year-old Henry Schiller, a songwriter and lounge-player, in love with a woman far younger and more musically gifted than himself, one with her eye on other men and the rise of her own career, whose crisis deepens when he discovers he has testicular cancer. 

 $10 adv, $12 dos