Recap: Happy Endings at Joe's Pub
Amanda Stern's literary salon takes over Noho
Gillian Crosson
John Wray displays his dare: a tattoo of Michiko Kakutani
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Amanda Stern deserves your copious applause. Even on a rainy Wednesday night, she can bring a crowd. More surprisingly, she can bring a crowd to hear people read. From books. Fiction books. If that’s not impressive enough, she sometimes assembles the literati at Joe’s Pub, a decidedly un-literary establishment with a schmoozy, corporate ambiance and immoderately priced cuisine.
Stern is the charmingly neurotic curator of the Happy Ending Reading Series, and on Tuesday she convened a veritable who’s who of voguish litterateurs to regale a sold-out crowd. Wells Tower, John Wray, and Arthur Phillips presented animated selections from their latest works. Book-ending the readings were two brief sets by Vampire Weekend and its self-proclaimed “Upper West Side Soweto” sound.
Fifteen minutes before the evening was underway, a standing-room-only set of chatty young publishing assistants was already impeding the service staff’s passage. A sharp woman who may or may not have been Zadie Smith nursed a drink at the bar. The iPhone-to-human ratio veered alarmingly close to 1:1, and, for a moment, the only entertainment was an incongruous YouTube upload of the trailer for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up projected repeatedly on the main screen.
Vampire WeekendGillian Crosson
Soon enough, Vampire Weekend took to the stage with abbreviated, semi-acoustic instrumentation and launched into rousing renditions of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” and “I Stand Corrected.” Part of the Happy Ending Series’ shtick requires that its participants take at least one risk during their performances. Vampire Weekend opted, rather safely, to take many small ones; its first set closed with guitarist Ezra Koenig joining keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij for some four-hand piano antics on “M79,” which came off better than any version of “Chopsticks” could.
Dressed inconspicuously in dark jeans, sneakers, and a striped button-up, Wells Tower read wonderfully from his short story “Down Through The Valley,” in which a man is cajoled into a car ride with his ex-wife’s boyfriend. The writer's 2009 debut, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, collects nine searing stories about masculinity and the American family, and Tower's passage showcased his gifted syntax and manic comic timing (think Will Ferrell in his glory days). Tower switched deftly between wit and poignancy: “You can’t sit in a little Datsun car with your wife’s new lover,” he read, "without recollecting all the nice old junk about her that you’d do better not to haul up. … The slippery marvel of her soaped up in the shower. A night long ago when you moved on each other so sincerely that you sheared off two quarter-inch lag bolts that held your bed together."
For his risk, Tower ate—and distributed among the crowd—some chocolate-chip-and-bacon cookies he baked for the occasion. Then it was onto the sailor-mouthed Wray, who dropped five f-bombs in as many minutes before reading a harrowing, humorless letter from his novel Lowboy, an unsparing exploration of schizophrenia. To lighten the mood, he peeled off his red Polo, revealing his risk: the likeness of notorious Times book critic Michiko Kakutani tattooed across his back with the slogan “MICHIKO 4-EVAH.”
Arthur PhillipsGillian Crosson
Phillips won the award for Skinniest Jeans Of The Night. His latest novel, The Song Is You, is a mash note to music. He may also be the only writer ever to tackle Jeopardy! in print without mentioning Alex Trebek. After delivering an evocative, well-received character sketch involving that game show, Phillips stripped his pants and pulled up his socks, donning a gold-trimmed matador’s uniform to vanquish a radio-controlled mechanical bull. It was the riskiest risk of the night, and the most cunningly delivered.
Vampire Weekend returned with stripped-down takes on “Oxford Comma” and “Walcott.” They closed with an infectious cover of Tom Petty’s “Walls” that had everyone singing along. It helped, granted, that Joe’s Pub had distributed lyrics sheets in anticipation of a sing-along grand finale. Even if they hadn’t, though, spirits were by that point so high that a good portion of the crowd would’ve learned the words on the fly.
