Results tagged “celestebartosforum”

A week's vacation at the beach is the perfect time to catch up on your summer reading list. At the top of ours was Heat : An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford. We had read an excerpt from a recent New Yorker in which the author recounted some time with a master Tuscan butcher, then came back to New York, acquired a whole pig (which he lugged home from the greenmarket strapped to his Vespa), and butchered it in his apartment, and knew that the book would be an ideal vacation read. In the book Buford, a staff writer for the New Yorker, describes with great detail his time in the kitchen at Mario Batali's Babbo from his first days, spent dicing carrots into perfect cubes, to the nights he is allowed to work the pasta station, one of the restaurant's most difficult. His stint at Babbo was part of an ongoing quest to learn about Italian cooking to a degree of depth that could only come with years of work, travel, sweat, and time learning from masters around the world.

Spalding Gray, who committed suicide in 2004, was a beloved fixture of the downtown theatre scene. He cofounded the Wooster Group in 1977 and turned extraordinarily personal monologue performances into a hypnotizing experience for audiences. One of these, Swimming to Cambodia, became a movie filmed by Jonathan Demme and released in 1987, and it propelled his fame beyond the experimental off-Broadway scene (it’s also just been reissued as a book). But it was his friends and fans from that world who have missed him most, and they’re giving a tribute to him tonight at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, at 7pm. Eric Bogosian, Bob Holman, Reno, Roger Rosenblatt and Kate Valk will read from Gray’s work in this free event. If you ever saw Gray perform, or if you just have enjoyed the innovative avant-garde theatre that he nurtured and refined, you should definitely catch what will undoubtedly be both a sad and loving appreciation.