Henry Miller Memorial Library

Slowly but surely, the Henry Miller Library’s empire-tentacles are slowly spreading out across the …state of California.

Exhibit A: our benefit concert, June 25th, with Philip Glass, Joanna Newsom, and Tim Fain – all performing together onstage at the Warfield in SF. Tickets here.

Exhibit B: Our Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series will be coming to Carmel and Monterey every Wednesday this summer! Check the calendar here.

A piece from Tim's installation

Exhibit C: Henry Miller Reading & Ping Pong Tournament to commemorate the close of artist Tim Youd’s “Coney Island Of The Mind” Solo Show at Coagula Curatorial (977 Chung King Road) in Los Angeles on June 2nd!  (Check out the YouTube below.)

The event includes:

Ping Pong Tournament | 4pm-6pm
Henry Miller Readings | 6pm-8pm

Speakers include:

Shana Nys Dambrot – celebrated journalist/art critic and curator. Shana will be reading from “Quiet Days in Clichy”.

Oriana Small – retired porn star a/k/a Ashley Blue.  Miller’s writing played a role in her first porn experience.

Jessica Hundley – prolific filmmaker and journalist.  Author and editor of the best selling survey of Dennis Hopper’s photography.  Jessica will be reading from “Sexus”".

Maria Garcia Teutsch – poet, editor of the Henry Miller journal “Ping Pong” and chair of the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur.  In addition to reading a page 5 of “Tropic of Cancer” of Miller’s Maria will be reading a couple of her own poems about him.

Diana Wagman – author of three novels, including “Spontaneous”, winner of the 2001 USA Pen West Award for fiction, and a produced screenwriter. Diana will read from Anais Nin.

Mat Gleason – gallery owner and host of the event.  Will read poet Gerald Locklin on Henry Miller.

About Tim Youd’s “Coney Island of the Mind”:

CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND is a solo show of the work of artist Tim Youd. This exhibit combines the artist’s love of literature with his lust for the flesh, wistfully merging sculpted assemblages of cerebral observations of great writers on the subject of the female anatomy with large expressionist drawings of the same subject.

You can imagine how bummed I was when, at a Y2K party on Dec. 31, 1999, nothing really happened (beyond finishing off a bottle of ‘schlager.)

Here we were, expecting satellites to come plummeting down from orbit, cars to drive in reverse unprovoked, and ATMs to be self-aware and hectoring, all HAL 900-like.

Alas it was not to be.

The morning after, Earth was still in tact, the living room was trashed, and some of us had a cinnamon-infused hangovers.

But that didn’t stop a handful of adventurous bands from examining the acute existential angst bubbling under the surface as technology slowly and irrevocably took over our lives.

One band was Radiohead and their illustrative record was “OK Computer.”  Another was Granddaddy.  Their record, released in 2000, was called “The Sophtware Slump.”

“The Sophtware Slump” is better.

One reason why it’s better is there’s a frisky absurdist undercurrent which prevents the record from devolving into a grim, hopeless funeral procession (Radiohead is guilty of that, but can you blame them?  To quote Roger Waters, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”)

I mean, if the world’s gonna end, let’s leap into our e-graves laughing, no?

And guess what?  Grandaddy is playing the Henry Miller Library, August 8th.  Get your tickets HERE!

Which brings us back to the present: 2012.   Fortunately, twelve years later, Radiohead and Grandaddy’s dire warnings about the encroaching, hope-crushing march of technology into our lives never came to pass.  It was all a false alarm.