Events

Join us at the TEXAS THEATRE for a screening of six short films with outsize impact — all in Spanish, by Mexican filmmakers, and part of The NY Times’s Op-Docs series of documentaries. The program will be followed by a discussion with one of the filmmakers, Diego Rabasa.

Mexican documentary filmmakers are some of the best in the world today — an underappreciated fact that inspired The NY Times to put together A Moment in Mexico, a special series of six Op-Docs by Mexican directors.

Tickets here. $10

Films to be screened:

Ciudad herida (Ruptured City)
by Santiago Arau Pontones and Diego Rabasa, chronicling the 2017 central Mexico earthquake.

Niños en la narcozona (Children of the Narco Zone)
by Everardo González, following a school teacher and a former gang member.

Un prisionero en la familia (A Prisoner in the Family)
by Indra Villaseñor Amador, about a woman desperate enough to lock up her own child

El buzo (The Diver)
by Esteban Arrangoiz, portraying Mexico’s happiest sewer denizen.

La palabra justa (Justice in Translation)
by Sergio Blanco, on the language gap in the Mexican justice system for indigenous people accused of a crime.

Unsilenced
by Betzabé García, on an activist murdered on-air while hosting his radio show.

Diego Rabasa is an editor, CCO and permanent member of Sexto Piso Editorial Council. He is also the editor of Reporte SP, a monthly magazine published by Sexto Piso. He has collaborated with several media outlets such as Máspormás, El País, Gatopardo, Letras Libres, La Tempestad and La Ciudad de Frente, where he was the editor of the Letras column.

This event is done in collaboration with the Mexican Consulate in Dallas.

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Hosted by Paul & Reverie Koniecki, Stone Soup Poetry Group Peer Workshop is a poetry critique group sponsored by The Writer’s Garret. We write and critique poetry of any genre. We meet at The Wild Detectives from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM, on 4th Tuesdays of the month.

Pieces should be no more than 2 pages, double-spaced, in a readable font. Bring about 8 copies for distribution to the group. Group members are free to make notes on the copy for the poet’s consideration. During the session, we will have a group member read the piece aloud, then have the poet read the piece aloud. After this, the poem will be discussed by the group as if the poet were not there, like an editorial board; comments or questions are not directed to the poet. This encourages objective, honest, impersonal commentary and group interaction.

The author does not speak during the critique of their piece. After the critique is done, the author can interact, give feedback, ask/answer questions, etc. At the conclusion of the critique, all copies will be returned to the author. It is important to remember that this is a workshop format, not a performance. Come prepared to have your work critiqued. If you feel that a particular poem is finished, you may feel more comfortable saving that item for a public reading event.

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Our next pick for The WD Book Club will be Feast Your Eyes, by author Myla Goldberg.

Feast Your Eyes, framed as the catalogue notes from a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art, tells the life story of Lillian Preston: “America’s Worst Mother, America’s Bravest Mother, America’s Worst Photographer, or America’s Greatest Photographer, depending on who was talking.” After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school’s photo club, Lillian rejects her parents’ expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition.

Narrated by Samantha, Feast Your Eyes reads as a collection of Samantha’s memories, interviews with Lillian’s friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian’s journals and letters–a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity.

“This ambitious novel about a pioneering midcentury photographer draws from the real-life work of Sally Mann, Diane Arbus and Berenice Abbott.”” –The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice

“Inventive … Goldberg offers a searching consideration of the way that the identities and perceptions of a female artist shift over time.” –The New Yorker

“With cleverness and imagination, vivid historical detail and great heart, this catalog tells the story of Lillian’s life…Lillian Preston also represents an exciting turn of events in the career of her creator, Myla Goldberg, [who] has reemerged with a stunning success, what feels like the book she was always meant to write…Through its intense focus on a series of photographs, a group of quirky characters and a particular time in our cultural history, Feast Your Eyes becomes a universal and profound story of love and loss.” –Marion Winik, Vogue

“A mother-daughter story, an art-monster story, and an exciting structural gambit.” –Lit Hub

Myla Goldberg is the bestselling author of Feast Your Eyes, The False Friend, Wickett’s Remedy, and Bee Season, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, and was adapted to film and widely translated.

As always, Book Club members (meaning you just show up) will enjoy a 10% discount on the next book club title and on every item they’ll ask for at the bar during the Book Club meeting.

Let’s meet up and talk Literature.

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Fink at The Wild Detectives | 2019 Solo North American Tour
Doors: 7p / Show: 8p

Tickets here.

Fin Greenall aka Fink started as a DJ/Producer before making guitar-based folk/blues/indie music. Growing up in Bristol’s blossoming 90’s scene, Greenall signed to legendary label Kickin’ Records in 1994 and subsequently signed with Ninja Tune in 1997, releasing the critically acclaimed Fresh Produce in 2000 and DJ’ing worldwide.

A renowned and prolific artist, Fink has worked with notable musicians, including Amy Winehouse. He wrote and recorded her earliest demos and songs, a fact revealed on her posthumous record Lioness. Fink’s Sort of Revolution featured a collaboration with John Legend on “Maker”, after Fink had co-written 2 tracks on Legend’s album Evolver, leading to 3 prestigious BMI awards.

In 2006, Fink became a band with the addition of Tim Thornton on drums and Guy Whittaker on bass, and recorded, engineered and produced Biscuits for Breakfast in his Brighton Loft. Distance and Time followed in 2007, produced by Andy Barlow (Lamb, U2), leading to numerous film and advertisement placements as well as extensive worldwide tours. Perfect Darkness (2011), produced by Billy Bush (Beck, Garbage), led to Fink’s invitation to perform with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. This concert was released as a live album in 2013, and the version of “Yesterday Was Hard On All Of Us” from the record was used by Ava DuVernay in her Oscar nominated film Selma. In the same year, Justin Vernon & Colin Stetson teamed together to remix “Warm Shadow,” which was later prominently featured in AMC’s The Walking Dead.

The studio album Hard Believer released in 2014, courtesy of Fink’s Ninja Tune sub-label R’COUP’D, included the hit “Looking Too Closely” which has over 30 licenses to TV and Film, and over 45 million plays on Spotify. 2017 marked the beginning of his collaboration with Flood (Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Warpaint, U2) as a producer and mentor, culminating in the release of both his Blues side project Fink’s Sunday Night Blues Club, Vol.1. Colin Stetson once again collaborated with Fink on “She Was Right”, a stand out track from the collection. Resurgam, the most recent full length album by Fink, was recorded and produced by Flood in his Assault & Battery studios in London.

Fink makes his way back to North America this fall for an intimate & special solo acoustic tour – a highly anticipated coast to coast return.

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Aaron Lee Tasjan at The Wild Detectives
Doors: 7p / Show: 8p

Tickets here.

Most people know Aaron Lee Tasjan as one of the wittiest, most offbeat, brilliant, weed- smokin’ & LSD microdosin’ Americana troubadours writing and singing songs today. And the New York Times, NPR and Rolling Stone will all gladly corroborate. But steel yourselves, folk fans, because he’s about to follow his restless muse straight out from under the weight of everyone’s expectations into the kind of glammy, jingle-jangle power-pop- and- psych-tinged sounds he hasn’t dabbled in since his younger days playing lead guitar for a late-period incarnation of The New York Dolls.

Really, the roots of Tasjan’s new record, Karma for Cheap, stretch even deeper, drinking up the sounds of a Southern California childhood spent listening to The Beatles while riding around with his mom at the wheel of their navy blue Volvo station wagon— back to the very first pre-teen year he picked up a six-string and started figuring out all the pretty little chords in those Lennon-McCartney tunes. Back to the pure, blissful unfiltered innocence of falling in love with music for the first time. But more on that later. First, let’s ponder the brutish realities of the American Swamp.

Aaron Lee Tasjan says he aims to use his music for good, but he’s no protest singer. And Karma for Cheap isn’t some heavy-handed, didactic political record cramming a set of talking points down anyone’s throat. It’s a finely tuned rock & roll seismograph measuring the dark and uncertain vibrations of the time in which it was created. A cracked mirror reflecting back the American zeitgeist in this foul year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Eighteen.

“When you’re a songwriter,” Tasjan says, “you’re dealing in truths and untruths—that’s part of your commerce as a citizen of the world. And anything coming along that’s threatening to blur that line is a threat to your livelihood as a working American.”

Take it from Tasjan and Karma for Cheap, being a songwriter in the post-truth world of Trump’s America ain’t easy. Tasjan valiantly wrestles with this new normal in songs like “Set You Free” (“it’s a smokescreen scene and nobody knows what’s real”—fake news!) and “The Truth Is So Hard to Believe.” What will we do when we can no longer map the line between fact and fiction? When we exist in a world where the truth is unknowable and we’re at the mercy of liars and charlatans? “Hearts in chains and hands are off the wheel,” Tasjan sings in hypnotic staccato, tapping the collective cultural anxiety of all the rattled millions drifting off each night to a new American dream, one in which we’re all in a big red, white and blue camaro fishtailing down some winding tree-lined road in the bible-black dark, white-knuckle-clutching the oh-shit bar, accelerator glued to the floor and not a soul in the driver’s seat.

“The sound of this new record is a little more rough and ready, more raw than anything I’ve done before,” Tasjan says. “Seems like a good time for it. We’re living in a pretty raw feed right now, and a lot of these new songs reflect that. They deal with with being stuck in the deluge of horseshit every day. On social media, you see people suckered into getting all irate over some post that, in the end, turns out to be completely fake. We have to be aware of these mindsets, these traps and emotional pitfalls that send us spinning. Music for me is a comfort thing. And I’m trying to sing about all this to remind myself not to get caught up in the game. There are a lot of people out there carrying the burden of this weird, twisted world we’re living in at the moment on their shoulders. So I tried to write a record that offers some comfort, encouragement and hope to those people, as much as it’s possible to be hopeful right now.”

You can listen to Aaron Lee Tasjan music here.

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Robyn Hitchcock at The Wild Detectives
Doors: 7p / Show: 8p

Tickets here.

Robyn Hitchcock is one of England’s most enduring contemporary singer/songwriters and live performers. A surrealist poet, talented guitarist, cult artist and musician’s musician, Hitchcock is among alternative rock’s father figures and is the closest thing the genre has to a Bob Dylan (not coincidentally his biggest musical inspiration).

Since founding the art-rock band The Soft Boys in 1976, Robyn has recorded more than 20 albums as well as starred in ‘Storefront Hitchcock’ an in concert film recorded in New York and directed by Jonathan Demme.

Blending folk and psychedelia with a wry British nihilism, Robyn describes his songs as “paintings you can listen to.” His most recent album is self-titled and marked his 21st release as a solo artist, produced by Brendan Benson (The Raconteurs). Hitchcock describes it as a “ecstatic work of negativity with nary a dreary groove.”

It has received rave reviews from UNCUT, Rolling Stone, Paste, Tidal and more.

“A gifted melodist, Hitchcock nests engaging lyrics in some of the most bracing, rainbow-hued pop this side of Revolver. He wrests inspiration not from ordinary life but from extraordinary imaginings…” – Rolling Stone

“These 10 gems slither, rock, roll, glide and shapeshift, coalescing around Hitchcock’s typically anxious, strained but striking and immediately identifiable vocals.” – American Songwriter

“Beloved of everyone from Led Zeppelin to REM, Hitchcock has only enhanced his status with this wonderful outing.” – Hot Press

“Witty, moving and seriously catchy, Robyn Hitchcock is a glorious return for a man who wasn’t really gone in the first place.” – Paste Magazine

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