Last night I hung out at KGB Bar with fellow communists and communist sympathizers. Well, not exactly. It used to be a communist hangout, back in the day when it was cool to be a communist. You know - before they were the "bad guys." Now its a bar and host venue of a reading series with lots of cool hammers & sicles and pictures of Lenin on the walls. And the walls are painted red with red curtains. Come to think of it, I should have ordered something with vodka in it.
Anyway, the reason I was there was to see my friend Jess do a live reading! She was fantastic as she introduced the overflowing crowd to her very own nicemodernist movement. Her reading was part of a program organized by author Ned Vizzini. There was one other reader on the bill who I was particularly interested in seeing : Christopher X. Brodeur.
Who is Christopher Brodeur and what happened during his 'reading' last night? I could explain but Jeremy did a fine job summarizing it on his own blog. So I've taken the liberty of pasting Jeremy's summary below for all to enjoy.
The event at KGB Bar tonight was a reading hosted by YA author and general man-about-town Ned Vizzini. Jess expounded upon her nascent theory of nicemodernism, and a few other writers read, including one Nick Antosca and Ned himself. But winner of the One of These Things Is Not Like The Other Award of the evening was rebellious but honest-to-goodness New York City mayoral candidate Christopher X. Brodeur.
He didn’t so much read as spout and spew. He seemed to be going for the anything-for-a-laugh approach of highlighting his disgust with the current political system, lambasting Giuliani, the cops, Rikers Island, and "Lord Bloomberg," then mixing it up with some silly "political" song titles and song lyrics – without the music. I wish I could remember half of what he said, but he was more about the delivery than the content.
Eventually, though, he devolved into a dubious comparison of how Rosa Parks was the ONLY black person who didn’t sit in the back of the bus and how NO Jews spoke out when they were being lined up to die in Nazi Germany… And before he could even get to his point (something about fighting for your rights), which turned out to be pretty paltry in comparison to things like the civil rights movement and the Holocaust, audience members started challenging him, yelling out to him that Rosa Parks was hardly alone in standing up to segregation and that no, there were many Jews who resisted during WWII and that whatever he was about to say couldn’t possibly be as important as those two historical moments.
And they were basically right, because he finally launched into how the MTA is maintaining a dangerous subway system because of all the dead ends and locked doors in the underground stations, and … and … aren’t all those stations going to be a death trap in the event of a dirty bomb attack, and … and … But someone suggested that the bomb would likely kill before anyone could find any exit, blocked or otherwise, and CXB and some buddy of his in the audience begged to differ.
Ned finally realized it was time to say goodbye to His Honor, Mayor Brodeur, to save him from himself and the audience’s wrath, and later, summed it up by saying something to the effect of: "Did you feel that tension in the room a moment ago? There are people who pay good money to feel the way you just did."
A closely placed source – at least two degrees of separation from the horse’s mouth – had told me that Brodeur was planning on moving to L.A., which would probably put a crimp on his plans to be a mayor on this coast. I didn’t stick around to ask him if it was true.
