{"id":6732,"date":"2017-07-19T06:29:23","date_gmt":"2017-07-19T10:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6732"},"modified":"2017-07-19T06:31:57","modified_gmt":"2017-07-19T10:31:57","slug":"noir-at-the-bar-manhattan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6732","title":{"rendered":"Noir at the Bar: Manhattan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"microphone\"

photo: Adam Fredie, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

I had to see for myself. Noir at the Bar (N@B) is a thing, a cultural phenomenon I\u2019d never heard of until Canadian writer-friend June Lorraine Roberts<\/a> told me about it. It\u2019s simple in concept: crime writers occasionally get together at a local watering hole and read about ten minutes\u2019 worth of their work to each other. I suspect the interpersonal dynamics can be more complicated.<\/p>\n

Last Sunday, my friend Nancy K. and I met up at Shade Bar in Greenwich Village for the Manhattan N@B and found a noisy group laughing and talking. I yelled in Nancy\u2019s ear, \u201cWell, they are<\/em> word people.\u201d Mostly under 40, mostly male, and a notable prevalence of tattoo sleeves. We heard nine of the 11 scheduled presenters, ducking out early so I could catch the train back to Princeton.<\/p>\n

What an entertaining evening! The quality of the presentations never let up. The authors read from printouts, books in hand, cell phones, tablets. E.A. Aymer included music (a first, we were told); Nik Korpon<\/a> had memorized a piece in the style of a tent-revival preacher.<\/p>\n

Although I had a friend in the audience (short story writer Al Tucher), the readers were all new to me, and they weren\u2019t all from New York, coming from Washington, Baltimore, and California too. For the flavor of these events, here\u2019s E.A. Aymer<\/a> reading one of his stories at the Washington, D.C., N@B\u2014he was the lead-off reader Sunday.<\/p>\n

While each reader was entertaining in his own way, the most compelling for me was Danny Gardner<\/a>\u2019s gritty story about how black people in Chicago get guns. Maybe that\u2019s because my family lives in Chicago, and I care about that city. Maybe it\u2019s because I was in Chicago for the four-day July 4 holiday when 101 people were shot. Or maybe it\u2019s because the story\u2019s characters were just damn good. All three, I think.<\/p>\n

Other readers we heard were Joe Clifford<\/a>, Angel Luis Colon<\/a> (Nancy won one of his books!), Rory Costello, Lee Matthew Goldberg<\/a>, Nick Kolakowski<\/a>, and one of the organizers of Sunday\u2019s event, Scott Adlerberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Peter Rozovsky started the N@B thing about a decade ago in Philadelphia, and it has spread across this country and internationally, including to Canada and the U.K. Over the next few months June and I are going to report on conversations with some of these N@B organizers and participants about the enduring appeal of crime fiction, story trends, and the local crime writing scene.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, if you discover a Noir at the Bar near you, go, enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had to see for myself. Noir at the Bar (N@B) is a thing, a cultural phenomenon I\u2019d never heard of until Canadian writer-friend June Lorraine Roberts told me about it. It\u2019s simple in concept: crime writers occasionally get together … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Noir at the Bar: Manhattan - an evening of crime-writers and tattoo sleeves","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,52,40,174],"tags":[91,1098,416,98,28],"class_list":["post-6732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-crime","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","tag-new-york","tag-noir-at-the-bar","tag-real-life","tag-story","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1KA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6732"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6736,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6732\/revisions\/6736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}