The Happy Ending Music and Reading Series |
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The Happy Ending Music and Reading Series is a semimonthly performing arts series which was hosted by Amanda Stern at Joe's Pub in New York, on the first Wednesday of every month - but ended in May 2016. [1] [2]
The event was chosen by New York Magazine, The Village Voice, and NY Press as the best reading series in NYC, [3] [4] and was singled out by the New York Times Magazine for helping to "Keep downtown, NY alive." [5]
Founded by Stern on September 3, 2003, and originally held at the Happy Ending Bar in Chinatown, New York City. Since its inception, the Happy Ending Music and Reading brought together literary and musical talents to share the stage. The success of the series was based largely on Amanda Stern's no-nonsense and oftentimes awkward sense of humor. Of the musicians appearing in the series, Stern required at least one cover song with which the musician must attempt to get the audience to sing along. Of the readers, Stern required "one public risk". Past risks have included karate-chopping wooden boards, freak-dancing with a random member of the audience, spinning a basketball, etc... [6] [7]
John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". Zorn's avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. In 2013, Down Beat described Zorn as "one of our most important composers" and in 2020 Rolling Stone noted "Though Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
Howard Allan Stern is an American radio and television personality, comedian, and author. He is best known for his radio show, The Howard Stern Show, which gained popularity when it was nationally syndicated on terrestrial radio from 1986 to 2005. He has broadcast on Sirius XM Satellite Radio since 2006.
The Village Voice is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the Voice began as a platform for the creative community of New York City. It ceased publication in 2017, although its online archives remained accessible. After an ownership change, the Voice reappeared in print as a quarterly in April 2021.
Amanda Laura Bynes is an American actress. She is best known for her work in television and film throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Bynes began her career as a child actress, working on the Nickelodeon sketch comedy series All That (1996–2000), and had her breakthrough starring in its spin-off series The Amanda Show (1999–2002), for which she received several accolades.
Happy Rhodes is an American singer, songwriter, instrumentalist and electronic musician with a four-octave vocal range, releasing 11 albums between 1986 and 2007. In 2016, she came out of retirement and started singing with Security Project, a Peter Gabriel appreciation band, singing lead for 11 live shows in 2016, 19 shows in 2017, and 8 more shows in Spring 2018.
Pinchas Zukerman is an Israeli-American violinist, violist and conductor.
Robert Thomas Christgau is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most well-known, revered, and influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became an early proponent of musical movements such as hip hop, riot grrrl, and the import of African popular music in the West. Christgau spent 37 years as the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice, during which time he created and oversaw the annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. He has also covered popular music for Esquire, Creem, Newsday, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Billboard, NPR, Blender, and MSN Music, and was a visiting arts teacher at New York University. CNN senior writer Jamie Allen has called Christgau "the E. F. Hutton of the music world – when he talks, people listen."
Daryl Franklin Hohl, known professionally as Daryl Hall, is an American rock, R&B and soul singer and musician, best known as the co-founder and principal lead vocalist of Hall & Oates. Outside of his work in Hall & Oates, he has also released five solo albums, including the 1980 progressive rock collaboration with guitarist Robert Fripp titled Sacred Songs and the 1986 album Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine, which provided his best selling single, "Dreamtime", that peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100. He has also collaborated on numerous works by other artists, such as Fripp's 1979 release Exposure, and Dusty Springfield's 1995 album A Very Fine Love, which produced a UK Top 40 hit with "Wherever Would I Be". Since late 2007, he has hosted the streaming television series Live from Daryl's House, in which he performs alongside other artists, doing a mix of songs from each's catalog. The show has been rebroadcast on a number of cable and satellite channels as well.
Amanda MacKinnon Gaiman Palmer is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and performance artist who is the lead vocalist, pianist, and lyricist of the duo The Dresden Dolls. She performs as a solo artist, and was also one-half of the duo Evelyn Evelyn, and the lead singer and songwriter of Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra.
Brian Viglione is an American drummer best known for his work with The Dresden Dolls and Violent Femmes. He was also a prominent member of New York City's cabaret punk orchestra, The World/Inferno Friendship Society.
The Bowery Ballroom is a New York City live-music venue located at 6 Delancey Street in the neighborhood of Bowery in Manhattan. The Bowery Ballroom holds something of a cult status among musicians as well as audiences. Rolling Stone magazine has awarded it #1 Best Club in America. "It's both intimate and grand, with consistently great sound and sightlines, and touches of old-school class, like 84-year-old bronze rails." It has a capacity of 575 people. A detailed scholarly account of the venue and its place in the wider music and cultural history of New York City was published in 2020.
Jessica Delfino is a controversial singer, songwriter, and comedian based in New York City. Her songs tend to ridicule taboos and typically include jokes about vaginas and other sexual or dark topics. In her act, she plays an assortment of instruments including guitar, flying V ukulele and a rape whistle. She is also an illustrator and attended Philadelphia's Art Institute, as well as the University of Maine. She has won numerous awards, including beating out Flight of the Conchords to win the Best Musical Act at the 2005 ECNY awards, and a 2005 Village Voice "Best of" Award, in which the Village Voice declared her to be "fall-off-your-chair hilarious." She has appeared on Good Morning America as a finalist in a national comedy competition. She has also won many other competitions, some of them unusual, such as The Stoned Spelling Bee in Brooklyn, the Madagascar Institute's Catholic high school talent competition and the Arlene's Grocery "Gong Show," which later became The Gong Show with Dave Attell on Comedy Central.
"If You Leave" is a 1986 song by English electronic band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD). It was recorded for the soundtrack to the film Pretty in Pink (1986), in which it is played prominently during the final scene. Along with 1980's "Enola Gay", the track has been described as OMD's signature song.
Francis "Faceboy" Hall is an actor, producer, and activist working in the New York City arts community. Hall, the younger brother of poet and King Missile frontman, John S. Hall, is one of the founding members of the Art Stars. Hall has appeared in numerous stage productions and several films, including Robert Downey Sr.'s Too Much Sun and the television series 'Electra Elf'. In addition, Hall was a founding member of the Dance Liberation Front where he has worked to overturn New York City's "no dancing" cabaret laws. A poet and performer himself, Faceboy is best known as the host of the weekly Faceboyz Open Mic, which is now considered to be the longest continually running open mic in New York. He hosted 'Faceboyz Folliez', a monthly show that took place at the Bowery Poetry Club.
Michael Jason Isbell is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He is known for his solo career, his work with the band The 400 Unit, and as a member of Drive-By Truckers for six years, from 2001 to 2007. Isbell has won four Grammy Awards.
The Dresden Dolls are an American musical duo from Boston, Massachusetts. Formed in 2000, the group consists of Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione. The two describe their style as "Brechtian punk cabaret", a phrase invented by Palmer because she was "terrified" that the press would invent a name that "would involve the word gothic". The Dresden Dolls are part of an underground dark cabaret movement that started gaining momentum in the early 2000s.
Amanda Stern, is an American writer and literary event organiser. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in, among other places, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Filmmaker, The Believer, Post Road, St. Ann's Review, Salt Hill, Hayden's Ferry Review, Five Chapters and Spinning Jenny - and her debut novel, The Long Haul ISBN 1932360069, was well-received
A Steady Rain is a play by Keith Huff. With a plot similar to a real-life event involving Jeffrey Dahmer, it focuses on two Chicago policemen who inadvertently return a Vietnamese boy to a cannibalistic serial killer who claims to be the child's uncle. When he later becomes the man's latest victim, the lifelong friendship of the two men is threatened when it becomes clear someone must bear responsibility for their egregious failure to assess the situation accurately. The play alternates between two separate monologues and present-moment dialogue scenes.
Amanda Leah Brown is an American singer and dancer from New York City. She was a contestant on the third season of NBC’s The Voice and finished in fifth place.
City Pages was an alternative newspaper serving the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area. It featured news, film, theatre and restaurant reviews and music criticism, available free every Wednesday. It ceased publication in 2020 due to a decline in ads and revenue related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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