It Calls You Back: An Odyssey thru Love, Addiction, Revolutions & Healing
Luis Rodriguez
  - Sunday, October 30
  - 5 PM

Modern Times is thrilled and honored to welcome back Luis Rodriguez, an award-winning, celebrated author of 14 books in memoir, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, and poetry. Best known for his memoir of gang life, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., Rodriguez continues his story with It Calls You Back: An Odyssey thru Love, Addiction, Revolutions & Healing.

It Calls You Back opens with Rodriguez's final stint in jail as a teenager and follows his struggle to kick heroin, renounce his former life, and search for meaningful work. He describes with heartbreaking honesty his challenges as a father and his difficulty leaving his rages and addictions completely behind. Even as he breaks with "la vida loca" and begins to discover success as a writer and an activist, Rodriguez finds that his past--the crimes, the drugs, the things he'd seen and done--has a way of calling him back.

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One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road
Gerald Nicosia
  - Friday, November 4
  - 7 PM

Lu Anne was a beautiful 15-year-old girl in Denver in 1945 when she met Neal, a fast-talking hurricane of male sexuality and vast promises. The two married, and soon they were hanging out with a group of would-be writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But Neal and Jack initially didnt like each other very much. Lu Anne taught them how to love each other — in effect, making the Beat Generation possible, as well as giving Kerouac material for one of the seminal novels of the 20th century, On the Road. One and Only traces the immense struggles of Lu Annes own life, which ranged from the split-up of her family to the ravages of abusive men, lingering illness, and the grief of losing the two most important men in her life.

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Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life
Samhita Mukhopadhyay, executive editor of feministing.com
  - Sunday, November 6
  - 5 PM

Romance and love are in a state of crisis: Statistically speaking, young women today are living romantic lives of all kinds—but theyre still feeling bogged down by social, cultural, economic, and familial pressures to love in a certain way. Young women in the modern world have greater flexibility than ever when it comes to who we choose to love and how we choose to love them; but while social circumstances may have changed since our parents generation, certain life expectations remain. In Outdated, Samhita Mukhopadhyay addresses the difficulty of negotiating loving relationships within the borderlands of race, culture, class, and sexuality—and of holding true to our convictions and maintaining our independence while we do it. Outdated analyzes how different forms of media, cultural norms, family pressure, and even laws, are produced to scare women into believing that if they dont devote themselves to finding a man, theyll be doomed to a life of loneliness and shame.

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Love Cake
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
  - Thursday, November 10
  - 7 PM

In these poems, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of color resist and transform violence through love and desire. Remembering and testifying about the damage caused by the racial profiling of South Asian and Arab people post 9/11, border crossings and internal and external wars in Sri Lanka and the diaspora, Love Cake also documents the persistence of survival and beautyespecially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of color loving and desiring. Love Cake maps the joys and challenges of reclaiming the body and sexuality after violence, examining a family history of violence with compassion and celebrating the resilient, specific ways we create new families, take our bodies back, love, fight, and transform violence.

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RADAR presents Ali Liebegott and Sarah Schulman
Hosted by Michelle Tea
  - Saturday, November 12
  - 7:30 PM doors, 8 PM show
  - OFF-SITE: Viracocha, 998 Valencia St.

Ali Liebegott is the author of two books, The Beautifully Worthless and The IHOP Papers and is a contributor to a long list of anthologies and journals. Sarah Schulman is the author of 14 books, including Ties That Bind, Rat Bohemia, and The Mere Future and is currently coordinating the ACTUP Oral History Project.

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Drunken Angel
Alan Kaufman
  - Sunday, November 13
  - 7 PM

Alan Kaufman, author of Matches and Jew Boy, recounts with unvarnished honesty the story of the alcoholism that took him to the brink of death, the PTSD that drove him to the edge of madness, and the love that brought him back. Son of a French Holocaust survivor, Kaufman was a drinker so mauled by his indulgences that it is a marvel that he hung on long enough to get into recovery. With his estranged daughter as inspiration, Kaufman cleaned himself up at age 40, taking full responsibility for nearly destroying himself, his work, and so many loved ones along the way. Kaufman minces no words as he looks back on a life pickled in self-pity, self-loathing, and guilt. Reading Drunken Angel is like watching an accident to see if any of the victims crawl away barely alive. Kaufman did, and here he delivers a lacerating, cautionary tale of a life wasted and reclaimed.

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Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero
Sean Burns
  - Tuesday, November 15
  - 7 PM

Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero celebrates one of the most revered folklorists and labor historians of the twentieth century - and a beloved cultural icon of San Francisco Bay Area. Devoted to understanding the diverse cultural customs of working people, Archie Green (1917–2009) tirelessly documented these traditions and educated the public about the place of workers' culture and music in American life. Capturing the many dimensions of Green's remarkably influential life and work, Sean Burns draws on extensive interviews with Green and his many collaborators to examine the intersections of radicalism, folklore, labor history, and worker culture with Green’s work. Burns closely analyzes Green's political genealogy and activist trajectory while illustrating how he worked to open up an independent political space on the American Left that was defined by an unwavering commitment to cultural pluralism.

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The Queer Art of Failure
Judith Halberstam
  - Thursday, November 17
  - 7 PM

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

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The Speed Chronicles & The Cocaine Chronicles
  - Thursday, November 30
  - 7 PM

An evening of tough tales by a cross-section of today's most thought-provoking writers, featuring The Speed Chronicles with editor Joseph Mattson with contributors James Greer and Beth Lisick and The Cocaine Chronicles’ editor Jervey Tervalon with contributor Bill Moody. These new collections of literary short fiction feature that are funny and harrowing, sad and scary, but at all times riveting.

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