Choose Your Own Adventure

Comments (0) By Shana Nys Dambrot Thursday, Nov 24 2011

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Los Angeles Public Library

630 W. Fifth St.
Los Angeles, CA 90071

Category: Libraries

Region: Downtown

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Multifaceted artist Miranda July is driven by an elusive but insistent suspicion that everything is connected, and that her job is to map the ties that bind the universe together. The writing of books, essays and, of course, screenplays, the directing of films and the making of visual art is, in her practice, not an unwieldy bag of tricks. She uses all the genres she can get her hands on in the service of her meandering ideas. In films like Me and You and Everyone We Knowand The Future, July operates in subliminal zones, hovering between inner and outer lives, magic and hard fact, awareness and self-sabotage, indecision and consequence. Her new book, It Chooses You, which she discusses with author Joshuah Bearman at the Central Library tonight, is a kind of diary of her struggle to finish the screenplay for The Future. She often goes out into the world to talk to "real people" when she finds her creativity stymied by inauthenticity, inviting the toppling of her preconceptions and disguising procrastination in the garb of research. It Chooses You follows her adventures interviewing people she met in the PennySaver; its first-person narrative presents a series of poignantly candid conversations with them and with herself, illustrated with arresting photographs by her cohort Brigitte Sire. Like her films and sculptures, the memoir shines with a deceptively simple premise, a witty tone of poetic nihilism and a spirit of laid-back urban — and psychological — adventurism. ALOUD at the Central Library, 630 W. Fifth St., dwntwn.; Tues., Nov. 29, 7 p.m.; free. (310) 228-7500, lfla.org. \
Tue., Nov. 29, 7 p.m., 2011