KGB Bar

KGB Non-fiction presents Vietnam, wise old folks, and cultural criticism on the Menendez Brothers and Wittgenstein. Tuesday, 3/31, 7PM • FREE.

GARY INDIANA is the author of thirteen books, including Do Everything in the Dark, Depraved Indifference, Rent Boy, Resentmant, Let It Bleed, and Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World.  His criticism has appeared in the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, BookForum, Art in America, and the London Review of Books.  He lives in New York City.  UTOPIA’S DEBRIS brings together the best of Indiana’s criticism from the past fifteen years in a collection that runs the gamut from the Menendez Brothers to Wittgenstein.  Gary writes in his introduction, “We live in the wreckage of a century I lived through the second half of, a century of false messiahs, twisted ideologies, shipwrecked hopes, pathetic answers.” That debris, he goes on to say, dogs us into the 21st century, and must be examined that we may better understand where we now find ourselves, post-Utopian fantasy.

HENRY ALFORD is the author of two acclaimed works of investigative humor – Big Kiss: One Actor’s Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top and Municipal Bondage: One Man’s Anxiety-Producing Adventures in the Big City. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times and Vanity Fair, and a staff writer at Spy. He has also written for The New Yorker, GQ, New York, Details, Harper’s Bazaar, Travel & Leisure, the Village Voice, and Paris Review. He lives in Manhattan. In HOW TO LIVE: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth), Thurber Prize-winner Henry Alford invites readers to join him on an illuminating and uproarious mission to glean wisdom from some of the men and women who have lived long enough to figure a few things out. 

Over the course of his quest, Alford spends time with celebrities like the encyclopedic Harold Bloom; author, guru, and LSD pioneer Ram Dass, whose recent stroke confined him to a wheelchair; barrier-shattering comedic genius Phyllis Diller; and the assiduous, exacting playwright Edward Albee. Alford explores the meaning of wisdom with family and friends, as well, and with some remarkable people that most of us have never heard of; people like Granny D, who at 89 walked across the country to broadcast her support for campaign finance reform (resulting in the McCain-Feingold bill), and Althea Washington, a 75-year-old survivor of Katrina whose candor, faith and equanimity (to say nothing of her golden voice) bring the generally cynical author to tears of admiration. And then there’s the pastor who believes napping to be a form of prayer, and the retired aerospace engineer who eats food out of the garbage . . . to name just a few of the idiosyncratic sages peopling the pages of this book.

DOUG ANDERSON has written poems two books of poems, The Moon Reflected Fire and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police.  He is the recipient of several grants and awards including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  In addition to poetry, he has written plays, screenplays, fiction, and now a memoir, KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery, which will be published by W.W. Norton in July of this year. He has new poetry in the Massachusetts Review, and is working on a novel about human trafficking.  He teaches at the University of Connecticut, Greater Hartford Campus.

About the Series: KGB Non-Fiction

Every Tuesday