Bathsheba Monk
Bathsheba Monk Explains Everything
High Wire Acts
Spider sliding down his five foot stand of silk, which traverses the roof of our giant porch to the tip of the Dusty Millers in vases on our old oak table, then working his way back up like a mountain climber on his life line; squirrel tiptoeing across the cable line with a chestnut in his mouth. It's worth the effort to get up before eight o'clock and hang out on the back porch to see how others live..
Dana McGowan, Jennifer Apple, Tom Kelleher, Josiah DeAndrea, and Chelsea Mojallali...Nude Walker street performers
The Nude Walker street performers wonderfully tell the tale of Max Asad and Kat Warren-Bineki, Duck Wolinsky and Jenna Magee and the feisty Houda Asad. Our New York City gig is over now, but look for us in the fall in NYC and Philadelphia.
NUDE WALKER STREET PERFORMERS YIELD TO GAY PRIDE PARADE....
....AND MAZEL TOV. SEE YOU NEXT WEEKEND IN CENTRAL PARK, LOCATIONS AND TIMES TO BE ANNOUNCED.
The Nude Walker Street Performers in NYC
The Nude Walker Street Performers and moi were in NYC this past Sunday. June 19th from noon to two we will be on the High Line in NYC. From two-thirty to four we will be in Washington Square Park. See you there. Pics taken by Spanish fashion photographer Franklyn Espinal who just happened to be walking by and was taken by the Nude Walker characters played by Jennifer Apple, Tom Kelleher, Josiah DeAndrea, Chelsea Mojallali, and Dana McGowan. Vanessa Lancellotti, director of the theater group, Punch, put it all together. 
Is that YOU in there....
Did an informal poll of friends and acquaintances and the results are that 95 percent of them are on anti-depressants. So are their pets. So, am I friends with Abilify or Zoloft or Prozac or Betty Sue? What is all this stress everyone can't deal with...I think that's called life which is messy and confusing and disappointing at times and joyous and wondrous a lot and heartbreaking more often than not and I'm not just talking about the personal heartbreaks of interpersonal feuds and finding out your kid deals and does heroin but the major heartbreaks of nuclear reactors run amok and societies waking up from a stupor and saying "I am a man" and getting mowed down with machine guns for their trouble and finding out that the ONE MAN who could apparently save the world economy is a rapist and then where are we going to be? Pass the pills.
Live and Lowdown at the Nighthawk
Bruce (yes, that Bruce) sent his regrets and isn't that just like someone truly great to communicate that he had other plans but was there in spirit? Everyone else was there...standing room only, must have been spillover from the Rutgers graduation and St. Georges Greek festival...but who knows how this stuff gets started? Gracious host Steve Hart closed the doors to keep the spillover inside...although some Indian guy was selling boxes of mangoes in the back room and Indians kept coming in and everyone would point to the back room, racial profiling at its finest, but the fact is they didn't want books they wanted mangoes...friend Nick DiGiovanni brought lovely Mary...and I did my stand-up then read Chapter two--a Barbara Warren-Bineki chapter--and the questions were mostly about how did I know so much about mental illness and there was real concern--people seem to think that they have the only family with a couple of cracked eggs in the carton although my personal observation is that there are more cracked than not in most cartons with the cracked showing up in surprising places, usually in positions of control over your life hahahahaha-and a lot of discussion about the future of publishing and everyone there was starting their own imprint for god's sake--and why not, I guess. My hand cramped from signing best wishes then Steve threw everyone out and Nick and Mary and Paul and Steve and I opened some wine, Mary went home to retrieve linens and silver while the men fetched some Greek food from the festival and in the middle of a candle-lit dinner Steve regaled us with tales of working on the Hometown News which was an annoying line item on the Forbes ledger and going to a fancy dinner at the Forbes residence and making small talk with Henry Kissinger and Jerry Hall and how some woman started stealing all their swag (Tiffany bowls and leather bound books) and they didn't realize until she left what she had done and Steve did his Walter Cronkite impersonation, which was excellent, and the Indians kept coming in and we kept saying "back room" until we went back there to see for ourselves just how good a mango could be.
The New York Times says this about Nude Walker
Dodging I.E.D.’s in Afghanistan might seem a logical, if not inevitable, destiny for the alienated youth of Warrenside, Pa., a moribund steel town where crack dealers and strip clubs beckon the unemployed, everyone owns a hunting rifle and junior warriors dress “in Kmart camouflage.” For Kat Warren-Bineki and Max Asad, the ill-fated lovers and Afghan war veterans in Monk’s mordant novel, an added incentive is the chance to escape their oppressive families. Kat returns to an embezzler dad and an unhinged mom with a penchant for parading naked in public. Max awaits a dreaded arranged marriage and a future managing the empire of his Lebanese father, an erstwhile scholar whose devotion to humanism has been replaced by a drive to amass a real estate empire. Virtually everyone in Monk’s precision-choreographed subversion of American myths is looking to swap the cards they’ve been dealt, most notably the local country club’s neighbor, Wind Storm, a self-styled Indian “Love Shaman” who has thrown off the Scandinavian half of her Swedish-Lenape heritage in favor of an earth-motherly identity, hunting and gathering stray golf balls in the woods. Jan Stuart, Fiction Chronicle. March 31, 2011
My Mom Likes It
So, I don't know what means more to me, the New York Times Sunday Book Review of Nude Walker, or the fact that my mother said she liked it...and it made her cry. Thanks, Mom.
Bread and Butter Note
Rob and Harvey of Clinton Book Shop hosted me last Saturday, as I signed my book, Nude Walker, and talked with real live readers, the reward for all those months of solitary writing. Clinton Book Shop is right on the main street in Clinton, in the heart of the a cool little berg that has coffee shops, boutiques, the Hunterdon Art Museum and a bakery with possibly the best brownies I ever ate. Visit them and buy lots of book or download books from them. Cheers.
That Barry Girl rides again....
My great good friend, Fanny Barry, has just spiffed up her website, her life and...is that a new hat, kiddo? Hang out at her site for a while www.thatbarrygirl.org and see if you don't get a hankering to visit Tulum.
