Beth Dunlop
Sideshow Media 2006

Christopher Janney is a musician who designs buildings, an architect who makes music, an artist whose works invite interaction and engagement as opposed to passive appreciation. His big idea is, in essence, absurdly simple, yet if taken up and widely applied could have profound and far-reaching effects on the environments where we live, work and play. As documented in this fascinating new book, his "Urban Musical Instruments" are public installations or constructions that double as instruments that can be "played" by people in the vicinity. In "Touch My Building" (1998) a giant bank garage in North Carolina gains colored glass panels and neon fins that trigger sound and light. "Sonic Forest" is an array of 25 aluminum columns fitted with speakers, lights and sensors that are triggered by human interaction, the music continually changing and evolving in response. It can be set up differently as the site demands. These works are what public art should be - intriguing, colorful, exciting and sensitive and responsive to the environment they are located in.

The book documents these and other similar projects, as well as houses designed by Janney, including his own, that make good use of colored glass to give the properties ever-shifting light and shade. Each project is well-illustrated with detailed plans and photographs, not just of the buildings but of design details like the 'Sun-Moon Clock' which tells the time for the rising and setting of sun and moon. As with the 'Urban Musical Instruments', this illustrates that one of the most interesting aspects of Janney's work is the attempt to connect high technology with nature, to overcome the anomie too often induced by the digital. He demands a hearing.'

Annaliese Soros with Abigail Stokes
Illustrations by Roderick Mills
Sideshow Media 2006

What do you do when the lobsters in your lobster bake pull a crustacean Houdini and escape into the ocean? When your attempt at cantina cuisine ends with the arrival of the fire department at your door? When one of your guests drops dead in the doorway?

In Dinner Party Disasters, Annaliese Soros (the ex-wife of financier George Soros and a highly regarded hostess in her own right) collects the funniest, most horrific disaster stories ever to befall people gathered for the seemingly simple purpose of breaking bread together. In some cases, crisis is converted into triumph; in others, disaster prevails. In all cases, however, guests and hosts experience an evening they will never forget.

Sidebars offer exceedingly practical solutions to the problems, ranging from the ordinaryÐhow to create the right ambiance using light and candles, or how to manage a drunken guestÐto the somewhat unusual: how to clean and gut a game bird should you have to shoot your own.

The perfect gift book for a host or hostess of any age or expertise, Dinner Party Disasters will break the ice and remind guests and hosts alike that the best party experience is a good, shared laugh.

Edited by Nola Tully
Foreword by Frank McCourt
Introduction by Isaiah Sheffer
Vintage Books 2004

From the varied appraisals of such Joyce contemporaries as William Butler Yeats ("It is an entirely new thing... He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time") and Virginia Woolf ("Never did I read such tosh"), to excerpts from Tennessee Williams' college term paper on Ulysses("A great deal of dullness. Then some dirt. Then some dullness. Then a great deal more dirt and a great deal more dullness. That is my impression of Ulysses"), and assorted wit, praise, parody, caricature, photographs, anecdotes, bon mots, and reminiscence, this treasury of Bloomsiana is a lively and winning tribute to the most famous day in literature.

The Monacelli Press 2004

As a boy of twelve, Jan Yoors fulfilled many an adventurous youth's fantasy when he left his comfortable Belgian home to live and travel with a tribe, or kumpania, of Gypsies. As the years passed, he continued to divide his life between the world of his birth, where he became a noted tapestry artist, filmmaker, and war hero, and the world of the Romani, where he returned regularly for more than five decades.

The Heroic Present: Life Among the Gypsies brings together Yoors' photographs and excerpts from his memoir. This nuanced portrait details the rhythms of life among the Romani; the exceptional occurrences of birth, marriage, and death; and the highly codified system of conduct of the Gypsies, all powerfully evoked in both word and image.

This volume features plays produced between 1996 and 2006 in Los Angeles and New York. Includes recent work from Sarah Koskoff, Murray Mednick, John O'Keefe, John Steppling, Wesley Walker, and Guy Zimmerman.

"Mednick's characters lean fully into their own confusion, in search of transformation, and these plays, from the middle of his career, embrace the idea that theater, like poetry or music, is meant to inspire those it engages." ÐGuy Zimmerman, Artistic Director, Padua Playwrights

Includes plays from the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival by: Neena Beber, Maria Irene Fornes, Joseph Goodrich, Murray Mednick, Marlane Meyer, Susan Mosakowski, John O'Keefe, John Steppling, Kelly Stuart

16 Routines, Joe and Betty, and Mrs. Feuerstein Murray Mednick at his darkly comic best. "A playwright's playwright...Mednick has spent his career at the forefront of avant-garde theater." -Sandra Ross, LA Weekly