Thursday, December 22, 7pm – Non-Fiction

Patricia Tashiro author of An Angel Whispered

As the season of giving approaches, often the joy of giving is lost as the pressure of doing for others takes precedence over looking after the self. But if we truly looked after the self, and found happiness within, this would be the best gift we could give to those around us, not to mention the self! The question is how to give ourselves this gift of happiness? Come and hear Patricia Tashiro, who will be visiting from London, share heavenly wisdom and down-to-earth advice from An Angel Whispered, her inspiring new book that shows how to find happiness – the essential ingredient for human life that we all long for, particularly during the holidays.

Patricia Tashiro has a Master’s Degree in International Relations and has come to believe that peace, love and happiness will only come in the world when we find it within. In light of this, she wrote An Angel Whispered, which highlights some of the key points of wisdom shared by her teacher, Gizi Pruthi, “the angel who whispered”.

Saturday, December 17, 2pm – Non-Fiction

Anni Daulter author of The Organic Family Cookbook: Growing, Greening and Cooking Together ($21.95 Sellers Pub.)

This inspiring cookbook answers the call for healthy recipes for family-friendly organic meals – snacks, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, desserts, and extras. Sidebars and tips throughout promote green living – organic child – and family-specific gardening ideas and inspiration for community building and sustainable living. Recipes markets, or small family gardens plot. Recipes are both wholesome and kid and family-tested approved!  Bonus recipes for anecdotes throughout the book offer simple gardening, green living, and community-building ideas.

Anni is an eco-mama, professional cook, advocate of sustainable living and author. Anni was the founder of a fresh organic baby food company, Bohemian Baby. Recently, Anni was the founder of a fresh organic baby food company, Bohemian Baby. Recently, Anni, along with Ashley Ess, launched a new site and magazine called Bamboo – conscious family living. With her knowledge and passion about child well-being, combined with her love of healthy – but tasty – cooking, Anni is also the author of Organically Raised: Conscious Cooking for Babies & Toddlers and Ice Pop Joy.

Anni has been a guest speaker in the kitchen at Baby Celebration, The Pump Station, Whole Children Whole Planet, Holistic Moms Network and has written for Momfilter, LA Parents and Orange County Parents and is the resident baby/toddler food expert for Hot Moms Club, City Mommy, Citibabies NY, Mindful Mama, Green Moms, Greentopia, and Macaroni Kid.

Anni Daulter lives in the country-side in Pennsylvania with her family. She has one son, Zoe (14) and Tim & Anni have one daughter together Lotus Sunshine (7) Bodhi Ocean (4), and River Love (age 1).

Monday, December 19, 7pm – Non-Fiction

A Brief History of Porn: A Multimedia Lecture by Sam Benjamin author of American Gangbang: A Love Story ($25.00 Simon & Schuster) – a true memoir of Benjamin’s five-year stint as director and performer in Los Angeles’s adult film industry. Pornography has always been the impoverished cousin of Hollywood; as such, it has great potential to shed light on both the art of film and issues of viewership, if one chooses to look slightly below its abject surface. “A Brief History of Porn” is designed to outline the roots and evolution of contemporary pornography, finding as its origin the Roadshow films of the 1940′s, the nudist films of the 1950′s, and the shock-oriented “exploitation” films of the ’60′s. As we progress through 1970’s “Porno Chic” to the sleeker, more video-dominated 1980′s, short non-explicit clips, accompanied by lecture, will illustrate the texture and import of this oddest of genres. Particular attention will be paid to production value, geographical locus, technology, and narrative. As a participant in the genre, Benjamin’s cache of personal experiences will assist him in explicating the more recent decades – including the bleak 1990′s, which saw the rise of a degraded yet pervasive “star system,” and the 2000′s, during which conditions of reception changed drastically, as Internet entered the picture. Defined principally by the obviousness of its commerce-driven motive, pornography is transparent – but delightfully so. The cheapness of its production achieves, on occasion, a kind of backwards perfection, and the accidental beauty of its dolt-as-auteur soundtracks fairly demands close inspection. All adult film is “outsider art,” but it takes the right set of eyes – and the right historical context – to put it into useful perspective. “A Brief History of Porn” is a fun, thought-provoking, non-X-rated lecture for inquisitive students seeking to expand their historical knowledge base of contemporary American film.

Sam Benjamin was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. From 1995 to 1999, he attended Brown University. Upon graduating, he received the annual William J. Weston Award for achievement in Film and Video. Post-school life led Sam to Santa Cruz, California, where he first conceived of his pornographic destiny. He would create “feel-good” erotic films – adult movies that actually had some sort of plot – and sell them on eBay, garnering a modest fame for his efforts, revolutionizing a dying genre, and making a small killing in the process. Benjamin worked in porn for three years; became rich; found porno love; broke his heart; burnt out; quit the biz; cleared his head; atoned for his sins; returned home; applied to graduate school. Sam Benjamin graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2005, with a joint degree in Critical Studies and Integrated Media. He has been a guest lecturer at NYU and will speak extensively this fall at universities across the United States.

American Gangbang heralds the arrival of a profound and gifted new voice in narrative nonfiction. In 1999, after four years of studying at Brown University, Sam Benjamin heads to California in a twenty-year-old Volvo, dead set on turning himself into an artist, despite his complete lack of talent. There, stoned, he has an epiphany—he will make progressive porn. And so begins his turbulent journey. . . . In whip-smart, lyrical prose, Benjamin traces his three-year immersion into the world of Hollywood’s bleak, screen glow–lit doppelganger: the southern California sex industry. His rapid ascent from the dingy storefront rental of a starving artist to the multimillion-dollar Malibu villa of a full-fledged porn producer confronts him with the uncomfortably alluring realities of America’s strangest industry: gun-toting actors, high on terrible, drug-induced potency; giggling actresses battling internal demons in wobbly heels and pink fishnets; the insatiable consumer demands to sink ever lower, more exploitative, nastier. The result is the titillating, dramatic chronicle of a young man who invites the deepest, most troubling parts of himself to rise to the surface in order to get a good look at them—only to find that what he sees makes his world seem suddenly very small.