Black Friday is turning blue this year. When you shop at Village Well Books and Coffee Nov. 27-29, mention the Democratic Club when you pay at the register or at the cafe counter and 20% of your bill will be donated to the club. This is also good for gift cards and online shopping, but only for items in stock, not special orders.
Village Well does a great job supporting local authors, highlighting everything from homemade zines to major academic and trade publications. Three friends of this club have new books which I hope you will consider buying for yourself and as gifts.
Miram Posner is a Fox Hills resident and a faculty member at UCLA’s Department of Information Studies, where she taught several of my former library colleagues. Yale University Press has just published her first book: Seeing Like a Supply Chain: The Hidden Life of Logistics. As Democrats, liberals, and progressives, we think about globalization in terms of labor and capital. We are familiar with issues such as the race to the bottom on labor and environmental standards and the difficulties of taxing and regulating companies that are everywhere and nowhere. However, as an information scientist, Posner focuses on how the constant massive global movement of resources and commodities has been managed and how the technologies and processes developed for this have influenced information management and decision-making across society. This book also shows Posner’s experience and talent as a teacher; she gradually leads the reader into this complex material, explaining why it matters and slowly introducing new terms and concepts as a historian or novelist would introduce characters and locations. If you open the book near the end, it may seem dense and technical, but if you start from the beginning it will not.
Dr. Posner will give a book talk and signing at Village Well at 6:30PM on Saturday Nov. 28 as part of our special weekend. I will moderate. We look forward to seeing you there!
Thomas Small is, of course, a former and (we hope) future Culver City Council Member and Mayor. His own first book: Music and Architecture in Harmony: Opera Houses and Concert Halls of Europe, 1672-2022, has just appeared from Oro Editions. It combines his interests in music and architecture. He and his co-author Michael Webb discuss ninety notable venues in Europe from historical, design, and sonic perspectives, accompanied by multiple beautiful photos of each one. The book also features short introductions by Renzo Piano and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who represent the highest levels of contemporary architecture and composing/conducting, as well as contributions by Yasuhisa Toyota, an acoustician who designed the inner performance space of Disney Hall and worked on eight of the buildings included. This is a gorgeous book recommended for fans of music, architecture, European travel, or Mayor Small, and will make a luxurious gift.
The third local author is me. The World of Cecil Taylor is the first book in the Contemporary Writing on Jazz series I am co-editing for State University of New York Press. Taylor (1929-2018) was a pianist associated with the jazz avant-garde, and his work has been controversial. He was one of the first Black musicians to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, but in Ken Burns’ 2000 PBS series Jazz Branford Marsalis accused him of promoting “total self-indulgent bullshit.” The World of Cecil Taylor is an anthology with contributions from musicians who collaborated with Taylor, some who were inspired by him, scholars, poets, photographers, etc, including yours truly. If you are not familiar with Taylor’s work, this French documentary filmed in 1966 mixes interview and rehearsal footage:
I humbly suggest that this collection will be an essential resource on this great American artist.
Whatever you decide to read or to buy for your friends and family, I hope you will get it at Village Well on Blue Friday weekend, and remember to mention the club when you pay!