Cooler Hats Prevail In Bushwick

A gaggle of media personalities, writers — and even a few timid, lost-looking, seemingly anonymous audience members — came together in Bushwick Thursday night for the inaugural edition of The Cool Hat Reading Series. Home schooling and god, the New England Patriots and god, jokes about weather metaphors in poetry: It was all there. Let’s talk about the venue — my god, the venue.

Molasses Books

Molasses Books featured classic literature, philosophical inquiries, and such essential texts as Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia (only $8.50!), all enclosed in a room the size of a shoebox. The doorway’s dripping overhead air conditioner, by turns refreshing and frightening to patrons who entered, seemed to do little except wet people’s shirt collars and heads as the room became ever stuffier and more sweat-inducing, until–finally–the non-true believers fled, as they always do. In other words, it made for a perfect artistic-leaning venue.

Plus, they sold alcohol.

And while, yes, some people might think of a quaint, pretentious bookstore tucked near the L train’s DeKalb Avenue stop as being a bit too on-the-nose, even for Bushwick, just think about its existence in America, overall, and how beautiful it is to have a well-curated, precious place for people to stop by and sweat in, experiencing “art and culture” together.

If Molasses Books existed in the town of your origin, you’d be thrilled. But it doesn’t. So go to Bushwick some Saturday and support this one.

The hook of The Cool Hat Reading Series, as you might have guessed, centered on people putting stuff on their heads. Co-hosts Marian Bull, Jamie Keiles and Alana Levinson each dressed the part, to varying degrees of ambition. Levinson wore a fashionable baseball cap with the word “Paris” across the front, Kelies sported an after-shower towel hat, and Bull balanced a crown/wedding cake/soft chandelier hybrid, a structure at once benign and possessed, seeming to encroach further into the parts of Bull’s face still exposed to light as the night proceeded.

In lieu of proper introductions, the three hosts each read the description of a hat (example: “Shark Hat from BlockbusterCostumes.com – Just when you thought it was safe to go shopping. De-de…De-de…De-de-De-de-De-de! [sic] … Welcome to the stage, Sandy Honig!”). Somewhat amazingly, this trope did not get old and was always good and funny.

Josh Gondelman

Josh Gondelman, perhaps the most prolific older young man in New York City, is (deep breath) a staff writer on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, co-author of the wildly popular Modern Seinfeld Twitter account, sole author of his own wildly popular, generous Twitter account (3:1 fav to tweet ratio with 45,000 tweets, 148,000 favs) and recent co-author of a book, “You Blew It!,” in stores October 6, 2015. Oh yeah, he’s also one of the best comics in New York, recently headlining Caroline’s on Broadway, etc., etc.

The essay that Gondelman read Thursday night (previously published on BuzzFeed) was funny in spots, but mostly quite moving and sincere, recounting the way that his grandmother, sick with cancer, remained a dedicated New England Patriots fan up until her death last year.

While pointing out the NFL’s flaws, Gondelman noted the ways in which the organization has given him a way to feel connected to his grandmother now that she’s gone. Gondelman’s ability to find humor throughout somber recollections made for a fitting tribute to his grandmother’s enthusiastic life:

She died the following Monday. My mom called to tell me, and I stoically made plans to return for the funeral. An hour later, I got a text saying that my grandmother was going to be cremated with the Tom Brady jersey. Then I cried, thinking that if she hadn’t just died, my grandmother could be elected mayor of Boston on that platform alone.

Caitlin White

Caitlin White, best known as a music writer for Stereogum and elsewhere, read a personal essay titled “The Myth of the Homeschooler.” At turns thoughtful and inciting, White’s piece explored the boundaries between religion and economics, expectations and reality, the myth and what is real. The essay’s key incident involved a pre-teen White pestering her mother for an expensive lunch box, the stakes of a seemingly innocuous request raised high:

This is when I realize not just that we are Poor, but that being poor is pain. Being poor hurts. It’s not about being a little hungry still after dinner, or wearing clothes other kids snicker at. It’s about my mom, crying in her room over a lunch box. My new myth is that I will get very rich after I triumph over school. I will make some of the costs not count.

Vinson Cunningham

Vinson Cunningham, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The Awl, read an essay that was the 2014 winner of McSweeney’s “Field Notes From Gentrified Places” column contest. “The Old Melodies” focused on the friendship between the composer Antonin Dvorak and his student Henry Thacker Burleigh before shifting to Cunningham’s own relationship with his teacher, the trained Opera singer John Mack.

One of the pitfalls of the live reading experience is that it can often get quite boring to listen to anyone speak for more than a few minutes. Cunningham’s writing beautifully addressed this challenge with breathtaking, potent scene setting, such as the introduction of John Mack:

John Mack Ousley, dead for years now, had a fist as big and as heavy, and roughly as round, as a shot put. The fist, like the man, was a tanned white, liver-spotted, tufted with individual-minded brownish-blonde hairs, and often the fist found itself lodged in the space between my navel and my sternum, in search of a diaphragm offering equal and opposite force.

Claire Carusillo

Following a 10-minute break that allowed audience members to drink, smoke and stand outside in rain, dimly double-checking Twitter statistics, the strongly curated event’s final act contained a near-master class in crowd pleasing. Claire Carusillo and Sandy Honig read a short story and humor pieces, respectively, each of which had the congregation eating out of their likely diaphoretic hands.

Carusillo’s short story documented her childhood history with alleged illness, filling the piece with joke after joke, using the form to paint a picture of school life we all recognize. A particularly memorable passage outlined Carusillo’s systematic takeover of the cots in the nurse’s office, including asides about another classmate’s feeble attempts to hide away with her.

Sandy Honig

The two humor pieces that Sandy Honig read Thursday night felt like whispering echos of one another, offering crushing insights into the absurd ambitions of language. The first piece, an offer of acerbic advice to a hopelessly unambitious poet, dug deeper with each line, pulling off a wire act in which Honig reached for more potent laughs and got them each time.

Her second treatise riffed on the obsessive culture around wine and cheese pairings (is this a thing?), devolving into a perfectly outdated takedown of home shopping networks. Honig pushed the joke further than one would think possible­–and then just a bit further still–the crowd doubling over in time to each extension of the conceit. To boot, Honig’s YouTube page is a must-see of incongruous foolishness.

All photos courtesy of Jamie Lauren Keiles. Follow The Cool Hat Reading Series on Medium for info about upcoming readings.