What Next for St. Mark's Bookshop?

Almost two weeks ago, St. Mark's Bookshop, the 35-year-old independent East Village and New York City treasure that was nearly ousted from its home last year, met its crowd-sourcing goal on Lucky Ant, and raised the $23,000 it was seeking to show potential landlords that it did have the money for a down-payment on a new lease. (According to the Lucky Ant page, the store has now raised about $28,000.) It will be vacating its old home, no...

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Ives House Spared + Zweig Brazilian Home Now Museum

The Charles Ives House in Redding, ConnecticutDanbury, Connecticut native Charles Ives (1874-1954) was one of the most original composers the US has produced, a genius to the ears of Arnold Schoenberg, another genius and his exact contemporary, and to those of many others, including Gustav Mahler, Leonard Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski, and José Serebrier. Like his soundworld, with its competing and often clashing layers...

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Phyllis Diller, My Homegirl + Artists Battle for Home in Rio

Phyllis Diller (UPI)Shortly after my parents moved us from the city of St. Louis to the suburb of Webster Groves and we joined Holy Redeemer Roman Catholic Church, I began attending its parish school. It was a little over half a mile from my house, and there was no bus service, and my parents both worked so they couldn't drive me to school, which meant I had to walk. (This was in the 1970s when such things were a matter of course.) There were two...

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Economics and Occupy

Scrambling, between libraries, offices, cities (and states, that sit right across a river from each other) these days, so in lieu of a longer post (a few are coming), here's a link directly from Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal Blog," on economics and the Occupy movement (let's not forget them!)....

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Note to Readers + Olympic Withdrawal Syndrome

I want to begin by thanking all J's Theater's readers. I haven't done this in a while, and these are slow days, but the site stats state that people are dropping in, mostly from the US, Canada and the UK, but also from other parts of the globe (most recently and most frequently, Russia, France, Indonesia, Ukraine, and India, which amazes me), so I appreciate it. I also wanted to let readers know that because I've instituted Ghostery (which blocks...

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Ryan's Hope

Too many things going on for a real post, so instead, a very recent animation. (It's crude, but hey, I tried to complete it in less than an hour.) UPDATED: I slowed down the frame per second rate because C mentioned that it was too hard to read the scrawl, er, text, beneath the images. I also added a few splashes of color.) This was not sponsored by or coordinated in any fashion with Obama-Biden 2012. (As if.)Ryan's Hope (or Some truths about the GOP VP nomin...

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Texas Executes Mentally Impaired, Cites Steinbeck Character + Russian Punk Protesters in Politlcal Show Trial

Marvin Lee WilsonYet another travesty of justice and a human tragedy, as well as a grotesque misuse of prose fiction, has just unfolded in Texas, where Marvin Lee Wilson, a 54-year-old man with a neuropsychologist-reported IQ of 61 was killed on Tuesday evening, by lethal injection, for the abduction and murder of Jerry Robert Williams, 21, a police department confidential informant, in 1992. Originally the court sentenced Wilson to death in 1994,...

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10 Most Difficult Books? + Coelho Slams Joyce

So often I'll Tweet things I hope to blog about, then I look up and an entire week has passed without the planned post. I do accomplish the required tasks, though, so I guess that's what's most important. But before another week zipped by I said I must write even a brief entry about this list, originally posted by Emily Colette Williams and Garth Risk Hallberg (I love that name) at The Millions, of what they find to be the top 10 most difficult books,...

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