This video will pull at your DIY heartstrings: a 9-year-old boy in East LA built his own arcade out of cardboard from his dad’s auto-parts store. Except, have you been to East LA? Not a lot of foot traffic and the arcade rarely got a visitor until an indie filmmaker wandered in in search of a door handle for his car. He loved the idea, created a Facebook flash mob event, got it posted to Reddit and the rest is heart-warming history.
The Brooklyn College Zine Library’s blog does a great round-up of zines about immigration and nationality here. There are dozens already and the list is growing.
This is perhaps more an event than a reading, but the Robert Street Social Centre has a great three-week event going on that makes us wish we were in Halifax. Two of the atists-in-residence there Daina Tavenier and Sam Kinsley are hosting a “General Cafe” from Wednesdays to Friday for the first few weeks of April. The mobile café has specialty coffees, wild harvested teas, and snacks, but the project is really about the romantic notion of café as a place for social interaction, contemplation of ideas, art, music, and political dialogue.
And, last but not least, the BP blog had some great content this week with all the upcoming indie readings going. Broken Pencil’s fiction editor Richard Rosenbaum speaks with author Tamara Faith Berger about the themes of sexual identity in her writing and her dedication to small presses: https://brokenpencil.com/
And Broken Pencil’s new associate fiction editor Colin Brush speaks with Daniel Allen Cox about his new book Basement of Wolves.