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In times of disaster, there are those who run. And then there are those who run directly into the fray. Journalist Chris Faraone is one of the those people. The former reporter for the Boston Phoenix, the now defunct alt-weekly, is an immersive journalist (a Gonzo journalist, really,) the kind who doesn’t mind getting a little dirt on his hands while hunting for the facts other journalists might leave un-dug. The kind who relishes it.

Faraone has camped in the trenches of the Occupy movement — following the movement tirelessly, some might say doggedly — reporting from hotspots in Dewey Square and camps across the country. These months spent exhaustively reporting the grassroots protests for the Phoenix birthed the 34-year-old writer’s first book, the self-published 99 Nights with the 99 Percent.

Now, just two weeks after the bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, he’s penned his second book. Heartbreak Hell is an e-book that chronicles Faraone’s experiences reporting the attack on the marathon —both as a journalist and a self-appointed Bostonian — over many sleepless hours fueled, by his own admission, by a lot of drugs and a lot of heart.

Faraone recently won Boston-based online news site BostInno’s Write to Power Books distinction in the media category of their 50 on Fire awards, which honor those “setting the Boston scene on fire,” the wording now imbued with a kind of eerie symmetry, considering the content of Heartbreak Hell. We caught up with Faraone in preview of the e-book’s release — available for free at heartbreakhell.com — before he left town for a much-needed vacation (the reporter’s first real bit of time off in some 10 odd years). “If people read the book, they’ll understand why,” he said.

How the hell did you manage to write an entire book, in the span of two weeks, while juggling all your various freelance assignments?

Some of those assignments — for Dig Boston, for the American Prospect —were incorporated into the book, but they only account for a bit of it. Otherwise, this is a work of gut reaction and reporting. I was just a few blocks away when the bombs went off. From that point on, I was reporting and writing for about 20 hours a day — whether on Twitter, walking the streets filling notepads, or sitting at bars processing it all the best I could.

What was your initial, gut reaction when you first became aware what was going down that day?

First my reaction was that there was no way this was an attack. I thought it must have been some sort of accident. And then, amidst the people who were still going about their business merrily, I saw more and more people crying, and even sobbing uncontrollably, lost. Having been in New York City on 9/11, my thought at that point was that I really can’t believe something like that is happening again. Then I thought to start reporting.

What has this experience these past few weeks been like, as both a Bostonian and a reporter?

As someone who lives in Boston by choice, it’s strange to see so much attention put on the place from outside. I’m from New York, and one thing I love about Boston is that it’s not the focus of attention. It’s a great place, we know it, a lot of tourists love it, the teams win, and that’s good enough for us. It’s been interesting to watch the reaction from outsiders this time around, because from their perspective it’s hard to see that there were different reactions, that not everyone was just holding up “Boston Strong” banners and acting like we won the World Series. As a reporter, I set out to show the different types of impacts that this heinous act of violence had on people and circumstances that we didn’t see much of in most reporting in the immediate aftermath.

Did you pitch this book around at all, or immediately decide to put it on the web?

Maybe one day this — or some version of Heartbreak Hell — will come out as a regular print book. At this point, though, that’s the last thing on my mind. I just want to get the story out there to as many people as possible. Whether it’s cathartic, or just a different take on things, the stories I tell are the kinds that I think people will want to remember down the line. The book is kind of a time capsule.

Why did you decide to package this as a free online book?

I think it just matched the spirit of the whole reaction. The last thing I want to do right now is run around hawking a book about this tragedy. These are just stories that I want to get out there, while they’re fresh. I got help from my friend Clarence Smith Jr. (of Bold Edition) to develop what I can honestly say is one of the most dynamic and beautiful-looking online e-books ever released by anyone. There’s also a version on Amazon for Kindle, and that cost me a little bit to format, so that one is 99 cents. A little secret though — it’s not nearly as cool looking as the free version.

Check out Chris Faraone’s “Heartbreak Hell” at HeartbreakHell.com.

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Fun drink recipes from the book, “Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist”, by Tim Federle. Cheers to good books and great drinks!

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He’s proven his skills as a country music star and actor on film, TV and live on Broadway. Now, Billy Ray Cyrus can add published author to his accomplishments. His new memoir, “Hillbilly Heart,” takes a candid look back at Cyrus’ childhood, rise to fame, and personal life as a successful entertainer.

You go into a lot of detail about pain in your past. What was it like to write about that?
It was difficult and therapeutic. I visited some places that I’d put in the back of my mind, locked the door and thrown away the key. They were things that hurt just a bit to go back to. But what I learned was reliving those moments prepares you to move on for the future.

How is writing a book different than writing songs?
Songs come to me very quickly, usually in a moment of inspiration colliding with desperation. The book was a long process: homework, diligence and getting the facts right. I had to sit and think of it a whole lot more.

You know I can’t interview you without asking about Miley. What kind of advice have you given her about the business?
A lot of the advice I gave was advice my dad gave to me, like, “If you ain’t happy, it ain’t workin’.”

What’s up next for you?
I’ve written a TV pilot. I still love film, I love acting, and I’ve written a new album. I’ve been writing songs as I wrote the book; it’s been an infinite source of emotions, and I’ve been able to translate it into music. No sense in slowing down — I love what I’m doing.

One sillier question. What is the craziest rumor you’ve heard about yourself?
I always get a kick out of the Chippendales dancer one. I think that’s pretty funny.

The post Billy Ray Cyrus lays bare his ‘Hillbilly Heart’ appeared first on Metro.us.

Elise is a single mother whose only child is killed in a freak accident. Distraught, she at first wants to join her son —  but then realizes she must stay alive to care for his beloved cat, which gradually draws her back into life. “The Cat,” by award-winning Israeli-born author Edeet Ravel, got its start from the July 2011 news that a gunman had opened fire at a youth camp on a Norwegian holiday island, killing 77 people, setting off a compulsion that had her writing so rapidly she completed a draft of the book in six weeks. Ravel spoke with Reuters about her writing, loss and why she chose a cat to help her heroine return to life.

What got this book started?
I began writing the book on July 23, 2011, a day that I remember very well because it was the day after the horrific attack in Norway. I read about the terrible tragedy and I thought of the parents. Many writers try to understand these horrific events by writing about the event itself — the violence, the perpetrators, the victims — but I turned my attention to the bereaved parents, and friends and relatives, because their lives can never be the same, and I began writing “The Cat.”

With this novel, even though it was extremely hard to write — in fact, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my writing career — I had at the same time a compulsion to tell Elise’s story. That was really unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. I simply couldn’t stop writing. I’d go to bed scratching sentences in the dark as I fell asleep. I woke up with sentences ready to go and I’d have to rush to the computer to get it all down before doing anything else. I had to leave my exercise class to scribble sentences in the margin of the schedule. Like the time that I left a bar mitzvah in the middle and I went to the ladies’ room and I began scribbling on the bar mitzvah program. It was going on constantly for about six weeks, until the first draft was finished.

Why was there such a compulsion?
I think it was something that had been on my mind for a very long time because I was close to two people who lost children, and because as a parent, like all parents, I live daily with my inability to protect my child from harm, try as I may. So it’s a very emotional topic and probably because it was so difficult to write I pushed it away and tried not to write it. I think there was a build-up. There will always be things we can’t control with our children, and yet the loss of a child is unimaginable — except that a parent lives with that possibility every minute of every day, from the minute our child is born.

She came into your head fully developed?
Yes. It must have happened overnight because I read about the events and I went to sleep. I think I was thinking about what had happened all night. When I woke up, I just wrote on my computer screen “The Cat.”

When you were living so closely and intensely with that world, was that hard for you?
Yes. During the time that I was writing, I can’t remember what else I was doing. The novel took over my life and I was writing every free minute that I had, and it was very emotional. It was difficult. I was extremely involved in the story and I felt that I was not inventing events. In one sense I was creating a fictional world, but in another sense I was writing about something so real that happens, sadly, to so many people.

Why a cat, why not a dog?
I think that she would not have forgotten, even for a few minutes, that she had a dog to take care of. When she comes home from the hospital, she actually has forgotten that there’s a cat in the house. Of course, cats can hide away in a corner and be very quiet and unnoticeable; they can blend in. That beloved creature is the key to her survival, and the cat represents both the spiritual dimension that keeps her alive but also, I think, a more primal energy or instinct that gives us the energy to go on after a loss like that. … I was thinking in terms of both that instinct and the spiritual dimension.

Cats give you more space in general.
Yes. A dog can actually communicate more directly. Many dogs have that ability to communicate with humans, but with the cat there’s more guesswork involved. … [It's] a mirror of her isolation, the mystery and the inability to understand what has happened to her.

The post Mother finds her way back to life with the help of ‘The Cat’ appeared first on Metro.us.

The nameless protagonist in Pakistani native Mohsin Hamid’s third novel, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” leaves his poor village behind for the glamour of the big city. Written in the style of a self-help book, the story traces the protagonist’s transformation from a simple rural boy to a swank urban tycoon. Along the way, Hamid’s funny, poignant novel explores Asian urbanization, materialism, love and loss.

Can you tell me a bit about the inspiration for the book?
I wanted to write a novel about the huge changes in Asia and much of the world as billions of people move out of the countryside, move to huge cities and start new lives in a new urban environment. My hometown had about a million people when I was born 41 years ago, and it has 10 million today. The same thing that happened to America in the 20th century, when people were leaving the countryside for the cities, is now playing itself out in Asia, Latin America and Africa. There are more economic opportunities in the city.

Not many books are written in the second person. What was your reason for this?
On the surface, the novel is about urbanization and the ferociousness of the market. But underneath that, it is a spiritual quest — how does one find happiness in the midst of this dislocation and materialism? It is really about trying to find some antidote to the anxiety we all feel. It was important for me to be able to talk to the reader. It allows a kind of honesty between us.

The post Mohsin Hamid on his new novel, ‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’ appeared first on Metro.us.

When syndicated parenting columnist Tracy Beckerman gave up her high-powered Manhattan TV career to focus on motherhood, she, her husband and their two young kids left their quintessential New York lifestyle behind for a different one in the Jersey suburbs. Her new life as a full-time mom, however, left Beckerman in a funk. “Lost in Suburbia: A Momoir: How I Got Pregnant, Lost Myself, and Got My Cool Back in the New Jersey Suburbs” tells the story of how the author found her groove in Jersey and learned how important a sense of humor is in raising a family.

How did you decide to swap your city life for a suburban one, and what was the transition like?
After I had my son and went back to my job as a writer and producer for the local news, I never expected that I was going to not really care about it anymore. I felt like I was missing out by not being with my son. So we made the decision that I was going to quit my job. Then we realized that we couldn’t afford to stay in the city! So we moved to New Jersey. I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t have my job to define me anymore and I just sort of lost it. It made it tough to be comfortable in my new role.

How did things begin to change?
My low point is when I got stopped by a cop driving in my dumpy bathrobe. I thought, I’ve got to turn my life around! When my kids went to school, I thought about what I could do that is just for me. One day my son came home from school and told me something funny that happened, and I wrote it down. [The story] came flooding out of me, and the local paper ran it. Soon after, two more papers expressed interest. I realized this was going to be my second act. Finding the humor in parenting made me so much happier.

What should women in this situation keep in mind?
If you defined yourself by your career, it can be very hard when all of a sudden your job title is Stay-At-Home Mom. You need something for yourself that’s not just about your kids — something just for you that you feel good about. I think you end up feeling happier, and it makes you a better parent.

The post How Tracy Beckerman found herself ‘Lost in Suburbia’ appeared first on Metro.us.

Ophira Eisenberg is a stand-up comedian, writer and host of NPR’s new weekly trivia show, “Ask Me Another.” But she is also quite the expert in sleeping around. Or was, until she met “the one.”  Hoping from one futon to another? Just practice. As she puts it, “I think it’s my large sample size and many experiences that led me to the right guy.”

What does NPR think about one of their employees writing a book about sleeping around?
I’m certain almost every one at NPR has had sex so they are okay with it. Almost everyone.

Why are so many comedians so terrible in the sack? Not that I’m asking from experience or anything.
Of course —  it’s a friend of a friend who wants to know right?! I’m a comedian and from what I’ve heard, I’m pretty decent — at least from the comment cards I’ve received.
But if I had to take a guess, it’s because they’re going for the laugh. My advice is that if you don’t like what’s going in the sack, feel free to heckle.

If there is one thing the Ophira of now could tell 20-year-old Ophira, what would it be?
Stop worrying so much! There will always be another beer and another boyfriend in your future.

The post ‘Screw Everyone’ — with pen firmly in hand appeared first on Metro.us.

Marc and Maya Silver

When Maya Silver was grappling with her mother’s breast cancer, she noticed that there weren’t many resources available for teens dealing with a parent’s cancer. So she tag-teamed with her dad — the author of “Breast Cancer Husbands — to create a survival guide for teens undergoing such duress, “My Parent Has Cancer and It Really Sucks.” We asked the father-daughter duo about the best ways to help this underrepresented group cope.

You interviewed many teenagers for this book. Were there any recurring topics?

Maya: The friend issue came up over and over again, like, “My friends don’t really get it” or “I feel like I can’t talk to them about it.” Another thing was communication. [There was] a lot of variation in how much they wanted to know about their parent’s cancer. I think every teen valued being told the truth and being communicated with. We had a lot of teens say that their parents didn’t tell them right away or told them in a weird way and withheld information or made things seem sunnier than they really were. That really made the teens feel betrayed or like they didn’t know what was going on. We emphasize that in the book that communication is very important. It’s gonna vary from family to family, what works best and what everyone wants, but it has to be there.

Marc: Yeah. Some families have a family meeting tradition, and that’s fine, but some families don’t like family meetings and you don’t want to call the first meeting in your family’s history to present this news. Maybe your family works better just chatting in the car. Some people said maybe leave a notebook where everybody goes, and the kids write their questions and the parents read them and write their answers. The idea is that there’s no one size fits all way to tell the kids but like Maya said, you’ve got to be honest.

We often try to lend support to friends going through a rough time by saying something like, “If you need anything, let me know.” But Maya, what are some concrete words or actions that you appreciated when your mom was ill?

Maya: Just understanding. If I didn’t want to have any friends over to the house when my mom was really sick, or if I just wanted to get away and stay busy, I had people there to help me do that. You definitely hear a lot of “I’m so sorry!” [and] constant asking how you’re doing, how you’re family’s doing. That was not very helpful for me. Knowing that I had good friends around me and a strong family was very helpful.

What else did teens find not helpful?

Marc: One girl [we interviewed], Caitlin, went to school, and the teacher asked a question so Caitlin raised her hand to answer. And the teacher goes, “Oh, Caitlin, how’s your mom?” And Caitlin was so mad because she did not want to talk about or have to think about her mom at that moment  — she wanted to answer the question. Kids don’t want to be constantly reminded. A social worker at MD Anderson [Cancer Center] told me about a middle school’s boy’s mom who was diagnosed with cancer, and the school announced it over the [PA system]. They did it out of the best of intentions, I think to rally everybody around this kid, but this is not what that kid needed.

Maya: Another thing is an artificial sense of compassion. We had a couple of really out-there examples, like, “I know exactly how you feel, my gecko just died.” [Or] you tell someone that your mom has a serious form of breast cancer and they’re like, “Oh, my grandma’s sick too.” You want to be like, “You have no idea.”

What were some of most popular ways you found teens deal with their stress?

Marc: They found all kinds of ways to cope, and a lot of the ways they found were really positive, like listening to music, or going for a run, or writing in a journal, or playing video games. What’s cool about that is you’re learning how you can get through a tough time in life, and that’s something you can carry with you throughout your life.

Did you find any differences in how boys handled the issue, versus girls?

Marc: I interviewed a bunch of guys in Cleveland and two of them said that they punched a hole in their bedroom wall or in the house because they were so mad. After that, I asked every boy I interviewed, “So did you punch a hole in the wall?” and almost all of them said they did. (Laughs) There’s a little note in the book that’s how to repair that hole in the wall.

How much information should people at the teen’s school have?

Marc: It’s good if someone at school knows because that way the kid has a confidante. I think some kids might feel like, “Oh, I don’t want anyone at school to know.” And in general most of the experts that we interviewed said it’s really helpful to have someone at the school, even if it’s one person, who knows, because that way if there’s a change in the parents’ condition, if something’s going on at home, then you have a go-to person. If you want the teachers in the classroom to know, [that] can be helpful because a lot of kids were affected in the way they did their work at school — some kids overachieved, some kids just kind of stopped doing homework or didn’t focus as they usually did. It’s good if teachers understand why that’s happening.  And the parents and the kids can talk about it together.

In addition to the teens, you also interviewed a lot of experts. Did their advice match up with what the teens said?

Marc: I think they just emphasized that every kid’s gonna react differently and that that’s OK. One thing that’s surprising is they said some kids just don’t want to talk about it, and that’s OK. You can’t force the conversation when the kid doesn’t want to have it. The other thing that one expert talked about that was kind of intriguing, and I think this is something that adults can relate to too, she used this phrase “the tyranny of positive thinking.” The idea is that we live in a society where everybody wants you to be upbeat all the time and optimistic all the time, and you know what? People aren’t like that. It’s perfectly normal to be down and to be upset.

How can parents go about best communicating with their teen about their illness?

Maya: The first step to communicating is communicate about how you’re going to communicate. (Laughs) So instead of just assuming that your kid wants to know every detail, or that they don’t really want to know anything, or that they only want to hear good news, and instead of a parent assuming that the teen doesn’t want to talk about it, you should say from the outset, “We’re gonna have this experience for the next one to however many years —what do you want to know, and how would you like to communicate about this?” Like my dad said, some families, if they have preexisting family meetings, then that makes sense to have a weekly get-together and just kind of touch base and talk about what’s going on. Some teens might want to communicate through text, or email or whatever: Find out how your teen wants to communicate, and how much they want to know, and then you can adjust as needed.

Marc: It’s hard for a teen sometimes to confront a parent and say, “You’re not telling me enough.” A parent could say, like, a day later, “Hey, what I told you yesterday about dad’s surgery or mom’s chemotherapy, was that helpful? Was it too much information? Was it not enough information?” Ask follow-up questions and get a sense of what your kid needs from you.

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He may be regarded as one of the finest exponents of the English language, but there was a darker side to William Shakespeare, according to new research.

He was a tax dodger and was threatened with jail for hoarding crops during a severe shortage, according to academics at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales.

He was also accused of profiteering by selling hoarded food to neighbors at inflated prices during crop failures.

Lead researcher Dr. Jane Archer said that for a 15-year period Shakespeare bought and hoarded grain, malt and barley, and sold them for inflated profits during times of shortage.

The research found that Shakespeare “pursued those who could not (or would not) pay him in full for these staples and used the profits to further his own money-lending activities.”

Dr Archer said food shortages were a regular aspect of Shakespeare’s times and that was reflected in his work. She cited passages from Coriolanus, written at the height of English food riots in 1607, and features a famine exploited by rich food merchants and politicians.

And in King Lear the role of crop growing and food supplies were central to the politics of the play, she added.

The new findings are to be presented at a major UK literary festival in May.

The post William Shakespeare — tax dodger, profiteer appeared first on Metro.us.

Despite official denials of their existence, North Korea’s political prison camps have been in operation for six decades, long enough for generations to have been born and raised within their electrified fences. In all that time, no one born inside the camps had ever escaped — until Shin Dong-hyuk crawled over the body of a dead companion and though a hole in the fence in 2005.

Veteran foreign correspondent Blaine Harden told Shin’s story on the front page of the Washington Post in 2008, hoping his harrowing tale would alert American readers largely ignorant of the camps’ existence. “Shin’s story is so powerful and has so many cinematic elements to it that it’s very effective in catching people’s interest,” Harden says. “It became clear that his story was a way of reaching people who don’t normally pay attention to foreign affairs or to North Korea.”

That initial article grew into the bestselling book “Escape From Camp 14,” which recounts Shin’s life of forced labor and abuse at the hands of camp guards and his own family. It wasn’t until they’d met more than a dozen times that Shin was able to reveal his deepest secret, however: his complicity in the execution of his mother and brother.

Following that confession, Harden was forced to examine Shin’s story in a new light. “As I thought it through,” he says, “it increased his credibility from my point of view. There was no reason for him to tell this story that made him look so bad. And there’s the evidence of the scars on his body, which are not faint etchings that you need a microscope to see; they’re overwhelming, ghastly disfigurements of his body.”

Ideally, Harden says, accounts like those in his book will increase international pressure on North Korea to close the camps, which recent satellite imagery suggests are expanding. “I’m not optimistic that the camps are going to disappear anytime soon,” he admits. “But knowledge is better than ignorance, and Shin feels like all the misery that he went through and all the guilt that he carried has not been for nothing.”

If you go:

Blaine Harden

Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.
Philadelphia Central Library
1901 Vine St.
Free, 215-567-4341
www.freelibrary.org

Wednesday, 6 p.m.
United Nations Association of New York
Institute of International Education
809 United Nations Plaza, Kaufman Center
$15, 212-907-1353
www.unanyc.org

The post Shin Dong-hyuk: Born into a North Korean prison camp appeared first on Metro.us.

Julia Sweeney’s newest memoir tackles motherhood. Credit: Lauren Topel

Julia Sweeney titled her new memoir after a pillow embroidered with “If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother” given to her by her mom that Sweeney hated until she had a daughter — who now dislikes the pillow herself. The former star of Saturday Night Live (“It’s Pat!”) and Broadway (“God Said ‘Ha!’”) writes about her long path to a nontraditional family with insight and warmth. Also, refreshingly candid humor: She received her adopted child, Mulan, in China, from a man who entered a crowded ballroom, holding the baby aloft in the air, while a Muzak version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” played from a boom box.

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You write about investigating your genealogy. How has adopting a child affected your thoughts about it?
People have this idea that in the sea of 7 billion humans, our lineage has a special line from Africa to us. But I’ve been in conferences about it and they say, “In this room of 300 people, if you go back five generations, you’ll have one person in common with all of you.” You’re related to everyone. It’s terribly meaningful. And also completely meaningless. When I adopted Mulan, I felt like I had to not care about my family history. But then I realized, I do care. I just took my niece and nephew to the cemetery, and I said, “So, this is your great-grandfather.” Mulan added, “And my great-grandfather.” I felt bad, because I’d been talking more to them. So I replied, “Yes!” But then I thought, Is it? It’s a gray area.

How does Mulan feel about being in your book?
Right now she likes it, but if we butt heads, she’ll say, “And I will resent you for the rest of my days because you wrote that book.” I just say, “I’m sorry. I know. But when you’re older, you’ll appreciate it.”

The post Julia Sweeney on her new memoir on motherhood, ‘If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother’ appeared first on Metro.us.

In the gripping memoir “Her,” Christa Parravani describes what it was like to grow up alongside – then lose to a drug overdose – her identical twin. And she begins with a startling statistic: after a twin dies, the surviving twin’s life is immediately at risk. The hauntingly honest tale of Parravani’s destruction details why.

Beginning with memories of her sister and their single mother, their lives are all later forever changed when her sister, Cara, who used to call Christa “her,” is brutally raped while walking her dog. For the first time, Christa can no longer share in her twin’s experience. She is unflinchingly honest as she works through the aftermath, even wishing to be attacked to be able to better understand the unraveling of her sister, who masks her pain through drugs, eventually turning to heroin.

When her sister dies, Christa is haunted by seeing her daily when she looks in the mirror, and even when she hallucinates. In her attempts to understand her sister’s spiraling (which starts by eating one of her pills, found wedged in a crack on the kitchen floor) she follows in her footsteps, losing her marriage and nearly her life.

She told Metro about using the book as a way to crawl out of that space – to pen the memoir, she incorporated some of her sister’s writings, found under her bed in a Tupperware container.

Was it strange to try and explain having a twin, something that has always been familiar to you but that most others cannot understand?

It was a challenge for me. Being a twin, it isn’t an unusual experience, but for everyone else, it’s completely unusual. What I needed to do was figure out what normal might feel like and go from there, and try to jump off and explain what that closeness was like. … I decided the best way to do that was to tell the story of our love for each other.

How did you decide when to use Cara’s writings?

When something would get really difficult for me, it felt too emotional or I’d gotten to a place where I felt like I couldn’t go on because I was exhausted, I was sad or I just kind of plain missed her, I thought, here’s the moment to allow Cara into the book. In the beginning of writing, she was appearing a lot. As time went on and I got more confident in my abilities as a writer and I got further from the grief, I found I needed to rely on her less and less.

Did you make a decision to be so unflinchingly honest? Was this part of the healing process for you? It seems like you held nothing back.

I wrote the book as if no one would ever read it. It was sort of a love letter to my sister. It was a way to tell her that I loved her and not to be forgotten. I was writing to her, and I had never imagined that there would be people reading it. In order to write a book that tells truths that are necessary, you have to forget about embarrassing yourself.

Do you ultimately feel you understood your sister any better because of going through much of what she did?

I hope so. This book allowed me to have this honest relationship with my sister that the rape had not allowed us to have in life. I saw her beauty, as far as her kindness. Cara was boundlessly kind. It was hard for me to be able to understand that when she was alive, because she was unraveling so quickly. … Through my breakdown and the grief I endured losing her, I missed her so much that I really found myself turning into the kind of woman that she was. I think that what happened to me is that the closer I came to my sister through writing this book, the farther I was from her in my real life. I was able to shed those qualities through writing. I think I realized at the end of this process that my sister was saving me, even though she wasn’t here any more.

Follow Alison Bowen on Twitter @reporteralison.

The post Author Christa Parravani on life after losing an identical twin appeared first on Metro.us.

When Lauren Drain was 14, her father, a documentary filmmaker, moved his family to Florida to make a movie about the Westboro Baptist Church, the fundamentalist Christian church best known for picketing funerals. But he was soon captivated by Fred Phelps, the group’s charismatic leader. The Drains joined the church, and Laura spent her teens listening to — and accepting — their teachings. She tells her story in a new memoir, “Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church.”

How did Pastor Fred Phelps operate?
At first, he kind of had this intimidating presence. Slowly, he kind of had this charisma. It’s really hard to describe. He had this grandfatherly presence. I would see how he dealt with his granddaughters — he seemed tenderhearted and to care about his family. When you see him on the picket lines or in public shouting, then you see him with his family, it’s like two completely different personas. I got to see his nature with his family and thought, “oh, maybe he’s misunderstood.” That was all in the beginning. It wasn’t until later that I saw the hypocrisy.

What happened on the day you were banished from the church?
My father told me “you’re a bad influence on the kids. I don’t want you in my home anymore. Pack your bags. I’ll pay for your hotel for a few days, but you need to find another place to live.” They didn’t even tell me what I had done. I was begging to stay because I did not want to leave my family. They dropped me off at the hotel and said “don’t contact us, you’re on your own now.”

Are you in contact with your extended family?
I was terrified of contacting my extended family. [My parents] did all these scare tactics, saying bad things would happen. My mind wasn’t right for a good two years. Finally, I realized nothing bad was going to happen to me. My extended family was not evil. People are not evil. I was slowly able to assimilate and stop judging people. I think I’m a better Christian. I want to show that people can change. I am not the same person I was years ago.”

The post Author Lauren Drain on being kicked out of the Westboro Baptist Church appeared first on Metro.us.

Here are five new memoirs about being a mother (shall we call them “momoirs”?) being released just in time for Mother’s Day.

“Baby Steps: Having the Child I Always Wanted (Just Not As I Expected)”
By: Elisabeth Rohm
The “Law & Order” actress details her struggles with infertility while trying to remain in the Hollywood scene in her new memoir. As she writes, “Infertility, especially in Hollywood, is definitely a dirty little secret. … The reason I believe most people hide the fact they have trouble conceiving is very simple: It suggests you are getting older.” It hits shelves May 1.

“Everything is Perfect When You’re a Liar”
By: Kelly Oxford
Oxford is one of Twitter’s favorite personalities, garnering close to half a million followers with her irreverent take on motherhood. Go behind the scenes of her family life in this new collection of essays.

“Lost in Suburbia: A Momoir of How I Got Pregnant, Lost Myself, and Got My Cool Back in the New Jersey Suburbs”
By: Tracy Beckerman
She got a yard, but when Beckerman and her family moved from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey, she learned that her dream of being a fulfilled stay-at-home mother was not what she envisioned.

“Moms Who Drink and Swear: True Tales of Loving My Kids While Losing My Mind”
By: Nicole Knepper
Knepper chronicles the utter lunacy that comes with being a parent in her new memoir. How does she do it? Through drinking and swearing, of course.

The post Five new ‘momoirs’ hitting shelves this Spring appeared first on Metro.us.

In most cases, an interview subject suffering from a bad cough wouldn’t be an ideal situation. But it’s oddly appropriate when the subject is Mary Roach, who can excuse herself with, “Speaking of mucoid substances, I’m launching some of them into your ear right now.”

Roach has built her career on her delight in probing aspects of the science of the human body that most people would rather just ignore. In “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” she followed the body through its many strange post-mortem pathways; in “Packing For Mars,” she uncovered the less glorified side of the space program through zero-gravity toilets and long-term bedrest.

In her latest, “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal,” Roach trains her sardonic, steel-stomached curiosity on the science of eating and digestion, finding laboratories where pet food is taste-tested, windows are opened onto a human stomach (literally), and those aforementioned mucoid substances are gathered and examined.

“It was the last taboo that I haven’t covered,” Roach says of her latest endeavor. “Once you take food off the table and put it into your body, it becomes an object of revulsion. People get very flipped-out and disgusted, so it’s yet another topic that I thought it would be fun to pull apart and explore.”

The post Mary Roach tackles how it all goes down in ‘Gulp’ appeared first on Metro.us.

Dennis Hopper — actor, director, artist and husband to Michelle Phillips for eight days — died in 2010 having never put his turbulent life down on paper. Enter Tom Folsom. The documentarian and writer — of the bestseller “The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Giallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld” — turns to another stranger-than-fiction life with “Hopper: A Journey Into the American Dream,” a slim and rollicking ride culled from hundreds of interviews and much digging through myths.

Hopper died in 2010. When did you get the idea for this book?
Late 2009, I’d say. There was that whole tabloid divorce, there was this big book of his photos that came out. I had gotten a book deal and I thought I’d try to help him finish his memoirs. He’d been trying to do his book for 30 years, and he just never got anything on the page. I write a lot about gangsters and American outlaws, and Dennis’ story to me had that outlaw quality to it. He was dangerous — you can see it on-screen where you’re watching “Apocalypse Now.” Without taking anything away from his acting, but I felt his life was greater than any of the roles he played.

Did you get to meet him before his death?
No, I didn’t. I was able to have a great heart-to-heart conversation with Peter Fonda for three hours over tequila at the Bevery Willishire. He was really quite honest about him. They were these two kids: he was the star of Roger Corman motorcycle movies, and Hopper was this out-of-work contract player. He was on the way down when he was doing “Easy Rider.” He was blackballed by Warner Bros. and they went down to New Orleans, shooting on 16mm and it was chaos. And out of that they revolutionized Hollywood. And after that? It’s a disillusion of their friendship. Fonda was kicked out of Hopper’s funeral. I thought it was pretty tragic.

When you were interviewing people, how did people talk about Hopper? I imagine some were less keen on him than others.
I found they were very open. They were almost confessionals. Hopper had just died and he was fresh in their minds. They sort of unburdened themselves with these stories. I got some really raw, really honest and thoughtful interviews about Hopper.

At the start you quote that Kris Kristofferson song: “He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly fact and partly fiction.” How much of this book is fact and how much fiction?
For me the idea was to show that interplay. This is based on hardcore historical research. I went through old Warner Bros. files to find the story of the three-day showdown between Hopper and [director] Henry Hathaway [on the set of “From Hell to Texas”]. Then you talk to Don Murray, the star of that movie, and he was like, “Well, Dennis was definitely really, really difficult, but I don’t remember a three-day showdown.” I wanted to show both sides: you get to have Dennis in his element, telling his stories, and you counterbalance with the other side. A lot of times those two blend. Did he really go out and shoot a tree because he thought it was a bear? Yeah, he actually did.

It’s not a dry doorstop that upchucks facts. It doesn’t even mention all of his films, and others — like 1957′s “The Story of Mankind,” in which he was cast as Napoleon — you allude to but don’t mention by name.
Well, you can go on Wikipedia for that stuff nowadays. It relieves that burden if you want to do something interesting. A writer finds the truth and compiles a narrative. If you want to learn about all his films it’s just a click away.

What perspective did you want to take on his life?
Dennis Hopper lived his life like it was a movie, but he never got that down on the page. I felt like I wanted to capture that spirit. I wanted to find out what was this crazy movie that begins with a boy in Texas and takes him to the top of a mountain in Peru, flying in his cast, hauling horses up the mountain, with tons of cocaine and tripping on acid. And the end of the ride is the guy is sick and watching old cowboy movies. I thought it was a real narrative.

The post Tom Folsom discusses his new biography on Dennis Hopper appeared first on Metro.us.

Sam Lipsyte reads Tuesday, March 5th at Book Court, 163 Court St. in Brooklyn. [Credit: Ceridwen Morris]

Many of your protagonists chock up their problems, often without resentment, to flawed parenting. What do you think we inherit from our parents?
I have kids myself, so I’m thinking about these things. The scariest thing is that my own parents have no idea which moments that made a difference because they were usually so banal. You would never remember doing them in your own lifetime but your child is studying you and freezes them forever. I hope that with my children I’m saying the right thing when they’re taking the picture.

It seems that we meet each character at the beginning of the end of a major crisis.
I’m always interested in characters that have their backs into the corner as we begin; it adds more tension. We end up getting the back-story anyway to some degree, right? You have to design a machine that will feed information in a way that seems part of the thrill. An old teacher of mine once said, “there’s no getting to the good parts.”

Or in this case, “the fun parts.”
[Laughs] Right.

How do you find humor in life’s unsung tragedies?  
I view everything in a tragic-comic light. Most things [in life] are dead serious and quite funny at the same time. Something can be really funny and then suddenly, as you’re laughing so hard, you begin to see how painful everything is or it shows you some flash of the abyss. We are always seeing things from different angles. I think having just one [way of seeing] is a problem.

The post Sam Lipsyte on his story collection ‘The Fun Parts’ appeared first on Metro.us.

Launched to viral acclaim during last May’s lunar eclipse, Twitter parody account @NotTildaSwinton has been reincarnated into a book. Self-published by comedian Eli Yudin and co-writer Carey O’Donnell, the complete collection of 187 bizarre imagined musings of actress and noted eccentric Tilda Swinton is available online at no profit. Some of the account’s best Tweets? “A mission for you. Go outside, hold an animal to your breast. That is real warmth, not the glow of your screen. I typed this on a rabbit.” Or:  “Of course I have received splinters. I do not remove them. Small branches emerge from me and bear fruit in the shape of my face.”

In an industry veering toward bite-sized content, Twitter’s 140 character limit could be the logical endpoint of increasingly serialized work. So, after spending six hours laying out the book on InDesign, Yudin set up shop on Lulu Marketplace. At $11.06, the book was priced to break even. “We didn’t want to seem like we were selling out,” Yudin said. Not to mention the avoidance of potentially thorny issues with Swinton herself.

“Not Tilda Swinton” is one of thousands of self-published books for sale on Lulu Marketplace, which allows any author to sell their work online. Brian Matthews, an Executive VP at Lulu’s, argues that self-publishing has democratized publishing by removing barriers between readers and authors. “If an author wants to publish a book, we’ll help them publish it as long as we don’t have concerns related to the material,” Matthews said.  Readers can rely on Lulu Marketplace algorithms and reviews to help them pick their next read. Even so, it can be hard to determine quality. “The real issue is that in traditional publishing, you have an agent, editor and sales rep acting as a filter,” said Cathy Langer, long-time buyer at Denver’s independent bookstore, Tattered Cover. “Self-publishing eliminates these filters, and it can be hard to tell what’s going to be good.”

When shopping for self-published work, readers make their own demands. In recent years, this has led to a trend toward shorter spurts of content in self-publishing. “The nature of consuming content is in an increasingly digital format … instead of monolithic books, we’re seeing authors release content more frequently in smaller, consumable amounts,” Matthews said. Serialized content is simultaneously classic and new. Canonical authors like Charles Dickens published novels periodically by chapter in the 19th century. Still, nothing is smaller and more consumable than an artfully composed latter-day tweet — and Yudin is one of the masters.

The post Eli Yudin’s book version of @NotTildaSwinton is a labor of self-published love appeared first on Metro.us.

Meet Jonny Valentine: an 11-year-old pop star who worries about his “chub,” hitting puberty and career longevity. In “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine,” author Teddy Wayne gives us a sly peek behind the velvet rope of a young pop star. Sort of inspired by Justin Bieber, the book delights in mocking an American society obsessed with nubile stars. But it also strikes serious chords, examining what that obsession does to the pint-sized pros themselves. Some serious moments even eerily parallel Bieber news stories after Wayne wrote the book, like violent threats and a marijuana scandal. Wayne, 34, talked to Metro about prepping through celeb glossies and guitar strums.

The book is based on Justin Bieber. How many front-row Justin Bieber concert seats did you buy to research?

I ended up not going to any. I didn’t want to be too beholden to the reality of Bieber concerts. I did watch his documentary film. It’s entertaining, it’s his own official documentary but he’s savvier and smarter about his image than you’d think, than the normal teen pop star. I watched a lot of amateur [Youtube] concert footage.

How did you get the idea for the book?

There wasn’t really a “eureka” moment. I’d been tutoring kids in Brooklyn once a week, and at the same time, I’d been working on a novel that was going nowhere. One time, I saw one of the girls reading Miley Cyrus’ book, “Miles to Go,” and it must have landed in my subconscious because a week later, a friend asked if I had any ideas. I said, “How about we parody these teen pop star biographies?” An hour later, I realized if I treated this with more gravity it could make a more serious novel.

Jonny struggles with a few challenges throughout the book, trying to find his father and deciding whether to go to a regular school. Some authors say they feel like their characters lead them – did you have a good idea of the ending, or did you feel like Jonny surprised you?

I had a general idea of where I wanted to go, but one thing I found with writing is I do a lot of ventriloquism. This novel and the previous novel are both in voices very unlike my own. I do a lot of humor writing for magazines and newspapers that’s also “ventriloqufied,” other characters. When I get into another character’s voice, I start thinking about this character, and it does lead me to their decisions and thoughts.

Why do you think society can get to a place where we idolize 11-year-olds?

We hold them up as these paragons of innocence. …. And then inevitably, they fail us, because it’s impossible to stay innocent forever, and once they do we punish them severely. We’re cruel about it.

The post Living a life like Justin Bieber, in an 11-year-old’s words appeared first on Metro.us.

Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder graduated from Harvard in 1987 and was thrown into a sinking economy — and a job market not terribly interested in English majors. Today she’s a family college consultant, and she sees her clients struggling with the same obstacles she ran into post-graduation — only much worse.

Her latest book, “The Unemployed College Graduate’s Survival Guide: How to Get Your Life Together, Deal with Debt, and Find a Job After College,” mines some of the wisdom she picked up in the ’80s and appropriates it for an even bleaker job market.

“I wanted to create a survival guide that took this job crisis seriously. This isn’t advice you’d give to just any generation. This generation is unique in history, and the same rules just don’t apply,” says Snyder, from her home in Lancaster, Pa. “They’re really caught in a double whammy. There’s obviously a recession, but there’s also a demographic crunch going on: There’s just more older people now, and they’re holding onto their jobs much longer.”
Kerrigan’s guide begins with a strong dose of emotional reassurance for post-grads feeling let down by their job status and judged by their parents.

“In my experience, the kids are more aware of the realities than the parents are. Parents are having a hard time adjusting their expectations,” says Snyder. “There is a way Americans have approached college for generations: Choose a school first, discover what you’re interested in while you’re in school and start thinking about a job in your senior year. The stakes are so much higher for these kids, and we need to start thinking about the payoff of this investment a lot sooner.”

The new realities
In her book, family college consultant Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder dissects the outdated wisdom of American higher education. Here is just one example:
Outdated thinking: A college degree ensures financial security.
The new reality: College can be a risky financial investment, and that risk needs to be hedged. A family only has so much money to help launch a child into the workforce. Diverting some of those resources toward a home or starting a business is a better strategy.

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George Saunders, creative writing professor at Syracuse University and author of “Tenth of December”

These days George Saunders’ talents are more in-demand than perhaps any other American writer: His latest collection of short stories, “Tenth of December,” recently appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine with the headline, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.” Heady times. But back in the ’80s, Saunders found himself out of work with an MFA in creative writing — and looking straight into a pile of looming debt. These days he teaches at Syracuse University — in the very same MFA program he once attended. And, over the years, he has developed more than a few insights into the true value of post-graduate education.

Do your students ever struggle with perceptions that an MFA in creative writing isn’t practical? Did you struggle with this when you were a student?
Some of them do, sure. One of the most satisfying things is when a family that has been skeptical comes to our third-year graduation event, hears their child read from his or her work and is converted. Personally, I never felt that way, no. When I got into the Syracuse program I was working as a groundsman, so being in an MFA program was a big step up.

Do you feel that national conversations about higher education are too focused on job preparation?
It seems to me that it is, yes — although maybe that’s not surprising, given the scary job market and the tricky and shameful way that a student loan has basically morphed from a high-minded government program designed to provide civic benefit, into, well, a credit card [with] high-interest rates and merciless payback conditions.  Students now are so weighed down with this debt — which seems to me is a kind of welfare program that benefits the banks and the colleges but not the student — that there is, of course, pressure on them to start paying it back… and not go loafing around the desert with a backpack and a copy of “On the Road.”

Is there value in a creative writing MFA beyond becoming a better writer?
Well, I’d argue that the task of working through pieces of fiction or poems helps us become not only better writers, but better people. Writing somehow tends to move us from a position of one-dimensional certainty about a topic to a more ambiguous or even confused state — and that is mind-enlarging. On a more pragmatic level, I think the MFA degree has made it easier for our grads to get teaching jobs. This didn’t used to be true, but increasingly it seems so.

The post Is an MFA in creative writing worth the cost? Author George Saunders says ‘yes’ appeared first on Metro.us.

Pete Wentz was apparently not happy with something we said and decided to abruptly end our interview four questions in. In the interest of full disclosure, early on in the discussion, we did try to break the ice by referencing those nude photos that leaked to the Web in 2006. But if that riled him up, we think it would have made more sense for him to hang up at that point, instead of well into our interview, when we asked about the writing process for his debut novel, “Gray.” The book is an account of one musician’s rise to fame and the personal struggles he faces along that catapult ride to the top — not exactly a feel-good story. Maybe Wentz was having an off-day, maybe he’s a permanently grumpy rock ’n’ roller — guess we’ll never know. But at least we were able to salvage these (somewhat) coherent thoughts from our conversation.

You had been working on this book for years. What did it take to finally come out?
Yeah, it’s been in the works for awhile, it’s been like maybe four or five years it’s been going on. I don’t know, I guess it’s just — I mean, I don’t know. I think creative projects don’t really happen overnight, I guess. There’s no rhyme or reason to why it takes a little — I mean, there’s no specific reason, I guess, you know. I just think that, I mean, sometimes things get put on the back burner and stuff while you’re doing other things.

Did the story ever change shape while you were working on it?
I guess, I mean, the premise and the idea were the same. I mean, I think that the narrative took on different directions a couple of times, but you know, that’s the nature of, I guess, writing something.

The main character sounds like you — a Chicago guy who quits school when his band gets big. How much of you is in him?
Yeah, I mean, I would say it’s 100 percent fictional. I mean, there’s obviously, I mean there’s no way of not having your life be informed, you know, like, your art be informed by the way you live, but yeah, I mean, it’s fiction. There’s composite characters in the same way that I think that if you read people’s books throughout history they’re obviously informed by their lives, but I think in the kind of obsessed culture we live in people are like, “Well then that means that it’s autobiographical,” but it’s not. Pretty much none of those situations ever happened — those are all made up. I think if I was gonna write a memoir or something like that I’d wait 40 more years and have it be true, you know what I’m saying? I mean, you write about what you know about. Obviously it’s easier for me to write about Chicago than it is to write [about] Tokyo or something like that, but I mean I think for some reason people really want it to be who I am, but if you read the entire book, those events never happened to me. I could have written it as a nonfiction because you get more bang for your buck. Nonfiction it’s like on the ‘Today’ show … and it’s obviously a lot of easier to get [on the] New York Times Best Sellers list with a nonfiction but, like, I just, at this point in my life — which is not to say that that isn’t something that I’d be interested in, telling, like, the stories and, like, true stories. Like, there’s characters in the book that are composites of people in life, you know, it’s informed by that, but at the same time it’s, you know, I don’t know, I mean, it’s just not the road that I don’t think I would take.

Well thanks for clearing that up. Let’s talk about about your writing style — did you approach this book the same way you’d write a song?
[Click.]

Pete Wentz is at Barnes & Noble (97 Warren St., 212-587-5389) Thursday at 6 p.m.

Follow Meredith Engel on Twitter @MeredithAtMetro.

The post Our falling out with Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz appeared first on Metro.us.

While we can see that naive, religious Jack (Patch Darragh) really loves roller derby, his love for his girlfriend Aurora, lost but not forgotten when he follows his dream of glory in the rink, is a matter of faith. It’s something we’re told but never shown. His enigmatic confessor, Father Kosciusko (Todd Weeks), sometimes pontificating, sometimes down-to-earth, never seems genuine. Jack’s loutish teammates are stereotypes, as is oily Bert Fineberg (Greg Stuhr), a television announcer stuck with a recurring, tired joke about his speechless cardboard sidekick’s silence.

The one glorious exception to the play’s malaise is Jeanine Serralles as slutty Lindy,
who seduces Jack. Recently out of a mental hospital and prone to violence if she
doesn’t take her pills, she manages to be both over-the-top and firmly grounded at the same time. The other women (Keira Naughton and Kate Rigg in a series of roles) also hold their own. But “The Jammer” skates around and around, never going anywhere.

If you go

‘The Jammer’
Through Feb. 10
Atlantic Stage 2,
330 W. 16th Street
$45, www.atlantictheater.org

The post Theater review: ‘The Jammer’ appeared first on Metro.us.

“Carl Hiaasen has the best quote about it: ‘If you want to be a writer in South Florida, you don’t need an imagination, you just need a subscription to the newspaper,’” says the author from his home in Coral Gables, Fla. “It is the weirdest place in the U.S.”

Barry credits the state’s heterogeneous nature for it’s special brand of crazy. “You have all of these cultures bumping up on one another; just this incredible variety. And a lot of them arrive here solely to drink or take drugs or party. And when all of these people come together, they create this permanent cloud of weirdness.”

And things definitely get weird in his first solo adult novel in more than a decade, “Insane City,” out today. The screwball adventure follows Seth Weinstein, a hapless groom who has to handle not only his fiancee’s over-the-top wedding arrangements but a Haitian refugee, a stripper and her pimp, an elite businessman, two dangerous bodyguards and one particularly randy orangutan, as well.
Barry says that he constantly juggles making his books nutty yet believable and in “Insane City” he  found a reality check with Seth.

“Here is a guy who is stuck with a tough choice and he knows he has to make the right decision  even though it might wreck his wedding,” notes Barry. “What happens when all of this stuff happens to a guy who isn’t a hero but just a normal guy? That is the serious engine to the plot.”

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Former company member Katarzyna Skarpe­towska premieres “Black Flowers,” a mysterious mourning dance to music by Chopin. Three women in black dresses suffer, haunted by three luminous young men. Are they dead husbands or sons? Perhaps they are soldiers lost in battle? 

A Parsons premiere, commissioned by the Wolf Trap Foundation as part of its Faces of America series and excerpted for the Joyce season, is “Dawn to Dusk,” an evocation of Southern Florida. Setting dancers against full-stage video projections of wildlife and the built environment, it creates a situation where you ogle the screen and barely notice the actual humans boogying on the floor.

The piece has the dancers immerse themselves in the sunny Everglades wetlands, alongside alligators and an array of gorgeous birds. In front of the screen on the Joyce stage, the same people reproduce many of the same movements — but because Howell Binkley’s lighting favors the video, a lot of their work is in vain.

Final score: birds 10, dancers 3. 

The post Review: Parsons Dance at the Joyce appeared first on Metro.us.

Add a new skill to your repertoire Classes at 3rd Ward
195 Morgan Ave., Brooklyn
718-715-4961,
www.3rdward.com
This Williamsburg ware­house is the new hot spot for personal improvement. From classes in Web design, metalworking and every­thing in-between, this is the place to reinvent yourself.
    
Take a walk … through a cemetery Green-Wood Cemetery
Willow Avenue, Brooklyn
718-768-7300,
www.green-wood.com
Need a quiet place??Consider this: Cemeteries are the least populated outdoor spaces in the city. Among the towering elm trees of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, enjoy the sculpture garden, do some bird watching and visit the final resting places of some of NYC’s most accomplished residents, like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Leonard Bernstein.

Go to high tea Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon
The Inn at Irving Place
56 Irving Pl., 212-533-4466, www.innatirving.com
Over five courses of finger sandwiches, scones and pastries — and, of course, custom teas — it’s impossible not to feel the pace of life slow down for one blissful afternoon at Lady Mendl’s Victorian tea service.

Get lost in celluloid: Museum of the Moving Image,
36-01 35 Ave., Queens, www.movingimage.us
Explore the exhibitions and maybe catch a full-length feature that you’d never see at the multiplex. This museum, dedicated to the art of film, combines the enriching experience of a cultural institution with the visceral pleasure of one of our most universally shared pastimes.

Dine in at Vesta
Vesta, 21-02 30th Ave.,
Astoria, 718-545-5550
The low-lit Queens favorite is the perfect place to enjoy the winter ambience from a view other than your bedroom. Save room for the warm Baby Jesus date cake: We’re pretty sure God himself would find it heavenly.

 Play ping-pong (or pool — or darts!)
Break, 32-04 Broadway,
Astoria, 718-777-5400
If you’re tired of TV, head to Break for a round of pool, air hockey or foosball. The 55-foot-long bar with a rotating selection of 18 beers adds to the fun. Can’t look away from the tube? Break has 10 HDTVs at the ready.

Take a circus class
STREB, 51 N. First St., Brooklyn, 718-384-6491
Elizabeth Streb founded Street Lab or Action Mechanics (SLAM) with a goal of creating “a beta-test for a new cultural paradigm.” At the lab, try your hand at POPACTION, the movement technique at the basis of Streb’s teachings, or trampoline, parkour, tight rope and trapeze — which director Robert Hedglin-Taylor told us to do “once for fear, second for fun.”

 Hit open mic night
Spike Hill, 184 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, 718- 218-9737
Spike Hill in Williamsburg provides a warm atmo­sphere to kick back with a brewski and listen to the city’s best up-and-coming bands. Every Wednesday, the trendy venue hosts an open mic night, giving local acts a chance to shine.

 Take a gallery tour
Two Percent Gallery tours
www.thetwopercent.com
You live in New York City, the Mecca of contemporary art galleries, but you’re too intimidated to stroll in to one. For 90 minutes, allow David Behringer, founder of The Two Percent Gallery Tours, to be your artsy best friend. He’ll walk you through five of his current favorite gallery exhibitions in Chelsea or the Lower East Side.

Spa the day away
Spa Castle, 131-10 11th Ave., College Point, N.Y., 718-939-6300,
www.spacastleusa.com
If a “spa castle” isn’t exactly what your body needs right now, then you’ve just come back from the Caribbean and we’re totally jealous. For the rest of us, this is a relaxation oasis to heal all winter blahs, from lack of warm sunshine (Sauna Valley) to dry skin (Beauty Spa). 

Dress up and go to the opera
The Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center,
212-362-6000, www.metoperafamily.org
For dollars more than a movie ticket, impress your date with a night at the opera. Our pick: Kristine Opolais’ debut in Puccini’s bittersweet romance, “La Rondine.”  Every Monday through Thursday the Opera offers 200 orchestra seats for only $20 each. These rush tickets can be purchased at the Met box office starting two hours before curtain time. Since you’re saving a pretty penny, take a cab!

Play brewmaster: Fifth annual New York City Beer Week
Feb. 22 – March 3
www.newyorkcitybrewersguild.com
Refine your craft beer palette or just drink a bunch of pints with friends at the fifth annual New York City Beer Week. This popular event spotlights 12 NYC craft breweries along with renowned brew houses from around the world. Guests at your next house party will thank you.

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Stan plays Hal, a down-on-his-luck drifter who’s doing yard work for Mrs. Potts (Ellen Burstyn), neighbor to Flo Owens (Mare Winningham) and her daughters Madge (Maggie Grace) and Millie (Madeleine Martin). He’s come to their small Kansas town seeking help from his old college roommate, Alan (Ben Rappaport), who is also Madge’s boyfriend. But Madge proves a more compelling source of succor. She and Hal skip the Labor Day picnic, to the dismay of flinty Flo and smitten Alan. Meanwhile the Owens’ boarder, Rosemary (Elizabeth Marvel), a borderline old maid, decides it’s time to put the screws to her boyfriend Howard (Reed Birney): She desperately begs him to marry her.   

Director Sam Gold and his amazing cast make the ordinary seem luminous. The play’s exploration of life’s daily disappointments and its all-too-rare triumphs is intimate and matter-of-fact, seasoned with broad (and not-so-broad) humor and grand passion. Every cast member pulses with humanity, endowing Inge’s characters with vibrant life.

If you go

“Picnic”
Through Feb. 24
American Airlines Theatre,
227 West 42nd Street,
$42-127, 212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

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The development comes five months after Taymor reached a settlement in principle with 8 Legged Productions, the producer, in her copyright infringement case.

The “parties’ efforts to finalize a settlement have not yet been successful,” Charles Spada, a lawyer for Taymor, wrote in a January 9 letter to U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan. But he said both sides were “hopeful that a final settlement can be reached within the next few days.”

The letter was made public on Thursday, and a trial is scheduled to begin on May 27.

The musical got off to a rough start in 2010 that included opening night delays, poor early reviews, injuries to actors and the firing of Taymor, who had previously won a Tony Award for directing “The Lion King.” She sued 8 Legged Productions in November 2011.

Any settlement is conditioned on 8 Legged Productions reaching a separate agreement with Marvel Entertainment, a unit of Walt Disney Co, to extend its license to produce the musical in other venues, Spada wrote in a December 19 letter to the judge, also made public on Thursday.

At that time, Marvel and 8 Legged Productions had been close to finalizing such an agreement, the letter said.

Dale Cendali, a lawyer for 8 Legged Productions, said settlement talks were continuing, and both sides hope to settle in the near future. She declined to say why a final settlement has not been reached.

Spada, Taymor’s lawyer, in an email, confirmed the “parties are still working together to try and resolve the matter.”

A spokesman for Marvel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Elliot (Armando Riesco) is a wounded Iraq veteran coping with his return to civilian life and the ghosts of his past, including addiction and the loss of family members. His cousin Yasmin (Zabryna Guevara) is also searching for her own way to acclimate into her own city and family. Concurrently, the founder of a website for recovering crack users (username: Haikumom, played with dignity by Liza Colon-Zayas) chats with addicts across the globe; her social network often seems even more like a family than the one Elliot and Yasmin share by blood.

But the watershed moment occurs in the second act, when Elliot finally confronts Haikumom and reveals how they’re connected. Viewers have gotten used to seeing Haikumom as who she’s chosen to become — but the resentment of her kin, let alone details from her past that leak out, merge to reveal a more honest reflection of who she was and what she’s capable of being. It’s these tiny facets streaming together throughout the play, with their individual focus and collective weight, that are the true essence of “Spoonful.” The design and some directional choices can be nitpicked, but the product is an impeccable accomplishment.

If you go

‘Water by the Spoonful’
Through Jan. 27
Second Stage Theatre,
305 W. 43rd St.
$75, 212-246-4422
www.2st.com

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