Monday, April 25, 2011

Bartending robot to visit Pacific Standard on May 3!

You will not want to miss this event on Tuesday, May 3, starting around 7 pm. A famous bartending robot, created by NYC Resistor, will be installed for a night at Pacific Standard. Essentially, it's a repurposed slot machine that serves you drinks, but it's hard to explain without seeing it in action:

http://www.vimby.com/home/take_on_the_machine_nyc_resistor_2/14/629/

Here's a blurb about it: "Barbot aka Bat Country was created for the Take On The Machine hackerspaces challenge. We appropriated an old Japanese slot machine, replaced all the graphics with references to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, added 12 drink reservoirs and a big handful of electrical components, didn't sleep much for the next 21 days, and ended up with an automatic drink mixing robot. Spin the wheels and take your chances."

The barbot serves a pretty large array of basic mixed drinks, determined by the spin of the slot machine's wheels. You can purchase tokens for the barbot from your bartender (still tip as usual!) for $4, $1 of which will go to NYC Resistor and their ongoing gloriously nerdy projects. Then watch the magic happen.

Chin Music poetry May 5 at 7 pm.

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring James Richardson, Will Hubbard, & Sally Wen Mao

Thursday, 5 May 2011 @ 7:00 PM

RSVP on Facebook.

Please join us for our upcoming Chin Music reading featuring three fine poets: James Richardson, Will Hubbard, & Sally Wen Mao. Series curated by Bryan Patrick Miller.

FEATURED POETS

James Richardson is the recipient of the 2011 Jackson Poetry Prize.  His most recent books are By the Numbers:  Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Interglacial:  New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Vectors:  Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays.  His work appears in The New Yorker, Slate, Paris Review, Yale ReviewGreat American Prose Poems, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, The Pushcart Prize anthology and several recent volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Will Hubbard grew up in North Carolina and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. His first book, Cursivism, will be released in May 2011 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Sally Wen Mao is an 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar and a Kundiman fellow. Her work can be found published or forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sycamore Review, and West Branch, among others. Born in Wuhan, China, she has lived in Boston, the Bay Area, Pittsburgh, Amsterdam, and most recently Ithaca, where she is an MFA candidate at Cornell University.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Standard Issues storytelling April 26 at 8 pm.

Yes folks, this month The Standard Issues takes on the only true friend most of us ever really had. The TV.

Our guests will be:

Becky (The A-Team) Flaum
Erin (Days Of Our Lives) Barker
Steven (The Facts Of Life) Berkowitz
Joanne (The Partridge Family) Solomon
and
Brad (Red Shoe Diaries) Lawrence

with your host Cyndi (Electric Company) Freeman

and the Mystery Guest pulled from the hat. And be sure and check out the Standard Issues podcast too. - http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-standard-issues/id418142815

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Chin Music poetry April 21 at 7 pm.

Chin Music
The Poetry Reading Series at Pacific Standard Bar
Featuring Edward Hirsch, Matthew Zapruder, & Piotr Florczyk

RSVP on Facebook.

Please join us for a special Chin Music celebration to launch the second title from Calypso Editions, Building the Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir, with a reading featuring three fine poets: Edward Hirsch, Matthew Zapruder, & Piotr Florczyk. Series curated by Bryan Patrick Miller.

Calypso Editions is an artist-run, cooperative press dedicated to publishing quality literary books of poetry and fiction with a global perspective. Our only criteria is excellence.

FEATURED POETS

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has recently published The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, which brings together thirty-five years of poetry from seven previous collections, including For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), and Special Orders (2008).  He has also written four prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller, and Poet’s Choice (2006).  He edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).  He has edited Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-edited The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008).  He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.  He taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for seventeen years and now serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon). Currently he works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches as a member of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. He lives in San Francisco. 

Piotr Florczyk is an American poet and a translator from his native Polish. With Been and Gone (Marick Press, 2009), he introduced the English-speaking audience to Julian Kornhauser (1946-), one of the foremost Polish poets of the Generation of '68. He is also the translator of a collection of poems by Anna Swir (1909-84), Building the Barricade and Other Poems (Calypso Editions, 2011). He is the recipient of the 2007 Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators, holds an MFA from San Diego State University, and has taught at the University of Delaware. Florczyk's work has appeared in Slate, Boston Review, America Magazine, Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, The Southern Review, West Branch, World Literature Today, and a variety of other journals.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Pacific Standard Mix CD Contest deadline extended to May 1.

We've decided to give you all a little more time to assemble your mix CDs for Pacific Standard's playlist, and possible prizes and accolades. Our weary ears just can't get enough new music from our tasteful customers. The details are repeated below:

Make a mix CD, or several, and bring them in to the Standard. In return, we'll do the following:

--Do our best to work your CD or CDs into our playlist (with some limitations, of course: stuff that is too grating or weird to play at a bar won't make the cut).
--Give you $2 off a beer (this applies just for the first CD you bring).

Also, the top three submissions, as judged by our magnificently sensitive ears, will win prizes. Like bar tabs, t-shirts, pint glasses, and various other merch, depending on what you want.

So drop off your CD or CDs with a bartender, making sure to put your contact info on the CDs. Gentlemen (and ladies), start your burning!

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Story Collider April 20 at 8 pm.

Feynman to Starbuck to quantum mechanics to warp drive -- it can be tough to tell science from science fiction, scientists from characters. At its best, science fiction opens a window onto realities that would be otherwise impossible, while often real science can sound more fanciful than any imagining. (Of course, sometimes people are simply lying.)

Join The Story Collider for six stories of science fiction brought to reality and... science so extraordinary, it feels like fiction. April 20th, 8 p.m., at Pacific Standard.

Stories by:

Ryan Britt, Writer and Science Fiction Blogger
Michele Carlo, Writer/Performer/Native New Yorker.
Colin Dempsey, Singer/Songwriter
David Morgan: Professor of Physics
April Salazar, Writer
Aaron Wolfe, Film Editor, Writer, and Musician

Ryan Britt works for the science fiction and fantasy website Tor.com, where he blogs about all aspects of the genre. His commentary on SF&F has also appeared with the Hugo Award-winning web magazine Clarkesworld. Ryan's other writing has been published with Opium Magazine, Nerve.com,The New Inquiry, Soon Quarterly and elsewhere. He has performed on stage with The Liar Show, The Moth, Stripped Stories, and many others. He has recently returned from the Sirenland Writing Workshop in Positano, Italy.

Michele Carlo is a writer/performer who has lived in four of the five boroughs of NYC and remembers when a slice of pizza cost fifty cents. She has been published in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood’s Lost & Found: Stories From New York, Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul, and SMITH magazine, and told her stories everywhere a person can tell stories in NYC--including The Moth Mainstage. Her memoir, Fish Out Of Agua: My life on neither side of the (subway) tracks, was published by Citadel Press in August 2010. www.michelecarlo.com

Colin Dempsey is an Irish singer/songwriter, storyteller and writer based in New York. He has performed his unique blend of folk and blues music in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and most recently the US. When not strumming, Colin is cheering audiences with personal tales of growing up in Dublin; he is the former producer and co-host of Comedyland at Astoria’s Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden, and still continues to gab throughout venues in Manhattan. When not telling stories (yes, he does shut up...) he is writing them--you can catch him doing so at Kettle of Fish in the West Village every Wednesday... at the bar. www.colindempsey.com

David Morgan holds a PhD in theoretical high-energy physics from The College of William and Mary. He currently teaches physics and astronomy at Eugene Lang College, a division of The New School. He has been interviewed for several science stories on National Public Radio, and in 2005 he received a commission from the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Sloan Foundation to write a play called The Osiander Preface. He still can't believe he got away with that one.

April Salazar lives and works in New York City. She has told stories at Moth StorySLAMs, Kevin Geeks Out, and Risk!, and she was one of the 100 guitarists who participated in the world premiere of Glenn Branca's Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City). She knows several computer languages, but only the dirty words.

Aaron Wolfe lives in Brooklyn and is a film and TV editor, musician, writer, and general trivia whiz. He is a Moth StorySLAM winner and writes a blog at autonomika.tumblr.com where he creates an annotated mixtape about his life. Special skills: accidentally adopting other people's accents, worrying about conversations with barbers, and ordering dim sum.