An Evening with Thurston Moore in conversation with Mitchell Kaplan
About this Event
🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Can't make the event?
About The Book
SINCE THE EARLY 1980S, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE) have shared a wild ride through the lightning fields of American underground rock. Moore, a founder of New York City art-rock trailblazers Sonic Youth, was a fierce enthusiast of Watt’s politically astute postpunk trio, the Minutemen, leading to a decades-long kinship across coasts. The two quickly became brothers-in-arms, with Watt’s post-Minutemen band, fIREHOSE, touring extensively with Sonic Youth.
More than forty years later, Moore—who now teaches at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics—approached Watt with a new idea: a poetic collaboration. Recognizing the idiosyncrasy and artful wordplay throughout the history of Watt’s lyric writing—as well as the bassist’s distinct take on linguistics both rustic and surreal—Moore realized such a collaboration could potentially exact a curious mixture of dialogue and magic.
Watt requested titling the tome Tuff Gnarl, Part 2, as the Sonic Youth song "Tuff Gnarl" encapsulated the economy and evocation Watt admired and sought in inventive rock lyricism. The "Part 2" aspect was in reference to the Minutemen's usage of said quantifier (even when there would never be any apparent "Part 1").
The resulting collection is a testament to trust and the unspoken bond of respect. Across eighty-eight pieces, Moore and Watt engage in a creative jousting that ranges from the contemplative to the absurd, from inside intimacies and humorous nudges to the confessional and the experimental. Tuff Gnarl, Part 2 is a raw, invigorating dialogue between two legends, bridging the fertile ground between inventive rock lyricism and the avant-garde of modern poetry.
About The Author
THURSTON MOORE cofounded the band Sonic Youth in 1980. Moore has worked collaboratively with Glenn Branca, Yoko Ono, Merce Cunningham, Cecil Taylor, Rhys Chatham, Anne Waldman, John Zorn, Takehisa Kosugi, John Paul Jones; and in film, with Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, and Allison Anders. He presently records and tours as a solo artist, as well as with various ensembles and his own group; Flow Critical Lucidity is his most recent solo album. Moore is coeditor with Eva Moore of Ecstatic Peace Library. His writings have been published through various imprints, and his memoir, Sonic Life, was published in 2023. He has been on the faculty at the Naropa University summer writing program since 2011.
About The Moderator
Mitchell Kaplan, a native of Miami Beach, opened the first Books & Books in 1982 in Coral Gables, Florida. Now with three South Florida locations, Books & Books hosts over 600 events per year and was selected as Publishers Weekly’s bookstore of the year. In 1985, Kaplan co-founded the Miami Book Fair, which takes place on the campus of Miami Dade College in the heart of downtown Miami. Each year the Fair presents close to 500 authors over one week in November, along with a street festival, where bookstalls line the streets adjacent to the campus. Kaplan, with his partner Paula Mazur, established the Mazur Kaplan Company to bring books to the screen, both film and television. Kaplan received the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation in 2011, served as president of the American Booksellers Association, and now serves on the Board of the National Coalition Against Censorship. He is the founder of the Books & Books Literary Foundation, whose mission it is to use the power of literary culture to cultivate and nurture new readers, build a thriving and diverse community, and advocate for writers, books and the freedom to read.
Where is it happening?
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