As mentioned in my last post, ManitobaMusic.com held its annual showcase in Manhattan last night, at Arlene’s Grocery on the lower east side. It was a great night of live music, with four talented acts taking the stage–The Magnificent Sevens, JP Hoe, Chic Gamine, and Greg MacPherson–and a good crowd in the comfortable venue. Happy to share some photos I took during the showcase. Please click here to see all photos.
Tuesday night from 8-10:30 PM Arlene’s Grocery on the Lower East Side will feature a great bill with musical acts visiting NYC from the Canadian province of Manitoba. It’ll be the second year in a row that ManitobaMusic.com is hosting this showcase. Last year I had the good fortune to discover two of the acts who are returning tomorrow night, along with two new acts I’m eager to hear for the first time.
The two acts making return visits are Chic Gamine (pictured above) a five piece outfit composed of four female singer/instrumentalists from Winnipeg, and the lone guy, the drummer, from Montreal. With great verve and stage presence, they perform an energetic melange of anglophone, francophone, and First-Nation tinged rootsy pop. Songs like “Closer,” on video here from their website show their tremendous talent and inspired songwriting.
I love their sound, their style, their great look, and am eager to hear them and meet them once more, and their outgoing manager Jeff Horowitz, who made sure I knew about this gig.
The other artist I’m eager to hear again is singer/songwriter JP Hoe (pictured below) also from Winnipeg. A year ago he gave me a demo of his forthcoming album, “Mannequin,” with terrific songs such as “Bingo Palace” and Do I Know You?, and I’m glad to see it’s since been released and he’s been touring North America in support of it, including dates in Los Angeles, Portland, OR, and NYC, as well all over Canada.
Their are two other acts tomorrow night, The Magnificent 7s and Greg MacPherson. I’m eager to hear them too, since ManitobaMusic.com has shown themselves to be so adept at presenting great talent to New Yorkers. If you’re eager to hear some great music, I suggest you come out to Arlene’s Grocery on Stanton St. to hear these talented musicians from Manitoba. The cover is just $5. Here’s the line-up:
A good article in the Saturday NY Times zeroes in on memoirist Domingo Martinez whose book The Boy Kings of Texas is one of five nonfiction finalists for the National Book Award, which will be handed out this Wednesday in a black tie ceremony here in New York City. Laura Tillman reports that Martinez’s book is a frank and raw portrait of his troubled young life and violent upbringing in Brownsville, TX. The dateline on the article is Brownsville, which is key, because Tillman had the opportunity be with Martinez on a recent trip he made to his hometown. Tillman writes,
“It was the first time Domingo Martinez had returned here in nearly 10 years, and it seemed as if nothing and everything had changed. His street, once rutted caliche, was now potholed pavement. Favorite stores had shuttered, but new mom-and-pops still sold tamales and tacos, and the 18-foot border fence between the United States and Mexico slashed rust brown through farmland panoramas.
Mostly, Mr. Martinez marveled at how the decade had worn on his grandmother Virginia Campos Rubio, softening that gun-slinging lioness into a slow-moving 85-year-old with a gentle smile. Ms. Rubio is one of the central characters in Mr. Martinez’s book. . . . In the book Mr. Martinez describes how an abusive, starvation-plagued childhood filled Ms. Rubio with rage, making her both loved and feared in the barrio where he grew up. She still keeps a pistol on her bed, alongside a copy of the Bible, a doll and a bag of cheese puffs.”
Martinez approached the visit with some trepidation, actually fearing possible reprisals from people he’s written about.
“’I was terrified about coming back to Texas,” Mr. Martinez said. “I was afraid that I was going to have a violent confrontation—that I’d get shot.’”
In short, not everyone is happy with the portrait he’s painted. Lecherous neighbors and abusive relatives populate the memoir’s pages. Mr. Martinez said the accounts themselves hadn’t been disputed, but that didn’t make the public airing of dirty laundry easier to bear. . . . No brawls took place on the trip. Instead Mr. Martinez was fed caldo de res, a beef-and-vegetable soup (prepared by his father) and mole with chicken and rice (prepared by his grandmother). He was applauded by more than a thousand students, visited by old teachers and given many congratulations. His immediate family supports the book, though he said it had been too painful for his parents to read. His grandmother doesn’t speak English, and Mr. Martinez said he hoped she wouldn’t be exposed to the book’s contents.”
I’m eager to read such an honest memoir, and more than happy for the author and the people involved in its publication. His literary agent is Alice Fried Martell, whom I mentioned on this blog when we both attended the Publishing People for Obama fundraiser last June. As an in-house acquiring editor I always enjoyed reading submissions from her clients. I learned from Keith Wallman, a longtime editorial colleague when we were both with Carroll & Graf, now at Lyons Press, that Alice sold the book to another editor there, Lara Asher. Lyons Press is a Connecticut house that has never before had a National Book Award nominee. There I’m friendly with publisher Janet Goldklang, who last year brought out James Kunen’s superb Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life.
The Boy Kings of Texas is nominated alongside books by fellow finalists Robert Caro, Anne Applebaum, Katherine Boo, and the late Anthony Shadid. I congratulate Mr. Martinez for the acclaim he’s receiving, and for his candor in exploring this personal terrain so movingly. I’m also happy for my publishing friends involved with such an exceptional book
Wow, for the first time in months I found the Friday night commentary of Shields & Brooks on the PBS NewsHour fair and reasonable toward President Obama. They weren’t so carping and snarky as usual.
One remarkable piece of information: Mark Shields reported that an Obama campaign staffer told him that following President Obama’s emotional remarks at Chicago campaign HQs, video of which I featured here last night, the president shook hands with and greeted all 700 staffers.
#FridayReads, Nov. 9–“The Dogs of Riga,” a Kurt Wallander novel by Henning Mankell. I find myself getting totally absorbed by Mankell’s sympathetic characters, intriguing criminal puzzles, and compelling narrative style.
Perhaps because my tutelage in the media world began as as a bookstore owner, it’s been a long time since I’ve been surprise when an author and his or her book lands in the center of a swirl of current events. The latest connection between the book world and current events is the revelation, as reported tonight by Richard Engel on NBC, that the woman with whom David Petraeus had the affair prompting his resignation today as DCIA is his biographer. Her name is Paula Broadwell and in January 2012 Penguin Press published her book All IN: The Education of General David Petraeus. Last week, she published a piece drawn from the book, in the Daily Beast, as pointed out by Josh Marshall on Twitter.
The romantic link between Petraeus and his biographer, reported by Fred Kaplan of Slate among others, is pretty stunning. If a spy novelist presented me with that plot point in a thriller I’d question its plausibility. On the other hand, there’s something so human–but also predictably tawdry–about a writer being seduced, taken in, by her subject. Yet, there are times when it works differently, so perhaps this is the other way around. Writers like Janet Malcolm are known for so closely examining their subjects that they are able to write intimate portraits of their biographical subjects, far more revealing than their willing subjects ever imagined or intended.
Please note post below, “NBC’s Richard Engel, on the Petraeus Resignation.” I will continue following the Petraeus story, and the frequent intersection of the book world and current events.