Gotham Center Archive

Wednesday, April 3, 2013, 6:30-8 PM
Martin E. Segal Theater 
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street

L is for Lion (SUNY Albany Press) is an achingly true story of a Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her WWII veteran father’s lullabies laced with dissociative visions of trench warfare. At eighteen, on the edge of freedom, Annie Rachel Lanzillotto’s studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. She walked out of Sloan-Kettering just as A.I.D.S. was named, and made a wild, truth-seeking ride out of survival, going into the fray of gay clubs and cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt. This poignant and authentic story could only happen in New York, with this quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide into the world of Italian-American characters, immigration, gay sub-culture, cancer, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, domestic violence, the childhood wonder of Spaldeens – all climaxing in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of her peasant grandmother. For more information on this and other upcoming forums, click here.

More Powerful than Dynamite:

Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives and New York’s Year of Anarchy

Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 6:30-8 PM
Martin E. Segal Theater

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street

In the year that saw the start of World War I, the United States was itself on the verge of revolution: industrial depression in the east, striking coal miners in Colorado, and increasingly tense relations with Mexico. On July 4, 1914, a detonation destroyed a seven-story Harlem tenement. It was the largest explosion the city had ever known. Among the dead were three bomb makers; incited by anarchist Alexander Berkman, they had been preparing to dynamite the estate of John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of a plutocratic dynasty and widely vilified for a massacre of his company’s striking workers in Colorado earlier that spring.More Powerful than Dynamite (Walker and Co.) charts how anarchist anger, progressive idealism, and plutocratic paternalism converged in that July explosion. Its cast ranges from celebrated figures such as Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair, and Andrew Carnegie to the fascinating and heretofore little known: Frank Tannenbaum, a homeless teenager who dared to lead his followers into the city’s churches; police inspector Max Schmittberger, too honest for his department and too crooked for everyone else; and Becky Edelsohn, a young anarchist known for her red tights and for spitting in millionaires’ faces. Historian and journalist Thai Jones creates a fascinating portrait of a city on the edge of chaos coming to terms with modernity.

This Forum is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. No reservations required. A live stream of the event will be available at the Graduate Center’s Video Commons.

www.gothamcenter.org