Sunday, December 5th , 2004
7pm
Sunday's @ Sunnys
Sunny's Bar

Once again you are invited to come hear some of New York's finest published authors read in a beautiful old waterfront bar. The next SUNDAYS AT SUNNY'S reading will take place at 3 p.m., Sunday, December 5.

These days it would be easy to feel a bit despairing about the worth of political activism. That’s why this might be a particularly good time to hear about the life of Joe Strummer, a modern-day Woody Guthrie who may help to remind us that fighting the good fight is not just something we do once every four years—and he made some damn good music, to boot. Poetry is also a great consolation in such times, and a wild adventure may do wonders to raise the spirits. The December reading promises to be an exceptionally diverse one, set to the backdrop of some rousing music by The Clash [more...]


The reading will feature:

Antonino D’Ambrosio
Author/Editor of Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer

Jonathan Green
Journalist

Vijay Seshadri
Poet, author of Wild Kingdom and The Long Meadow

Antonino D’Ambrosio is a writer, lecturer, and filmmaker, and is the founder and director of La Lutta New Media Collective, a documentary film and media activist group with 33,000 members worldwide. He has lectured on the media, political popular culture, music, film, and grassroots activism throughout the U.S. and Europe. His new book Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer features his own essays about the life of The Clash’s lead singer, as well as essays by Billy Bragg, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Chuck D, and many others. Jonathan Green is a freelance writer who specializes in George Plimpton-style participatory journalism. He has broken a world high-altitude skydiving record, fenced a Cuban Olympic foil champion, and ridden a bull (for one and a half seconds). He has also penetrated a number of secret worlds, including death row in a Southern prison, a cockfighting arena in the Southwest, and a sword dueling society in Germany. His work has been featured in Esquire, Men’s Journal, GQ, and the Financial Times Magazine. Vijay Seshadri is a winner of the James Laughlin award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Poetry. Of his new collection Wild Kingdom, Publishers Weekly said that “In a compassionate, perceptive spirit, Seshadri offers us works that belong among the broadest, most intelligent poetry of this decade.” Says Booklist, “Long a New Yorker, he sings with manic elegance of the city’s polyglot populace.”

The series, co-sponsored by BookCourt bookstore (718-875-3677), will continue on the first Sunday of every month at 3:00 p.m. at Sunny’s, a legendary old bar on the Brooklyn waterfront in Red Hook at 253 Conover Street (between Beard & Reed Streets). You can buy books and get them signed by the authors. Suggested donation: $3. The bar (cash) will be open. Free coffee and Italian pastries and cookies will be provided. Bar telephone (only available when the bar is open): 718-625-8211.

Upcoming schedule: Jan. 2: novelist Amy Sohn, author of My Old Man; poet/novelist Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Roughhouse. Feb. 6: Village Voice journalist Jennifer Gonnerman; Voice food critic Robert Sietsema. March 6: poet Brenda Coultas. April: novelist Reed Farrel Coleman; novelist Natasha Radojcic. April or May: Alicia Erian.

Getting to Sunny's is easy:

By bus: take the B61 toward Red Hook from Atlantic Ave. & Court St. (or from the A train midtrain exit at Jay Street Borough Hall). Get off near the end of the line at Van Brunt & Beard streets., walk 1 block right and 1/2 block left. Or take the B77 bus down 9th Street from Park Slope (or from the Smith and 9th Street F train stop--exit at the rear of the train and come down the stairs to street level and the corner bus stop.) Take the bus in the direction of Van Brunt Street and Red Hook.

If you're driving: From Manhattan, take the Brooklyn Bridge and get off at the Court Street exit--then take a left on Cadman Plaza West, which will turn into Court St. Go about a mile, past Atlantic Avenue, and take a right on Sackett Street. Continue straight for five blocks, across the overpass over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and take a left on Van Brunt Street. Continue down almost to the end of Van Brunt (you'll see the waterfront up ahead) and take a right on Reed Street. Go one block and take a right on Conover Street--you'll see a big sign that says BAR. That's Sunny's.