Tickets, $20. At the Writers Guild Theater, 135 South Doheny Drive, Beverly Hills. Parking available in adjacent lots. For reservations, click here or email us at reservations@writersblocpresents.com.
If you sleep too late on weekend mornings to catch Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, Up With Chris Hayes, then record it and watch it with your morning joe. You’ve seen him on MSNBC a thousand times, sitting in for your other favorite MSNBC anchors. He was so good that they gave him his own weekend show. He’s young, he’s brilliant, and he makes it his business to really explore the news, and those in the news, in depth. Like his colleagues over there at MSNBC, he wants us to understand what’s happened during the week, and what’s coming up in the week ahead. His new book is an extension of his thinking when he’s on the air. In Twilight of the Elite, Chris examines the failure of authority in American political and business structure. Incompetence and malfeasance have eaten away at the core of government and business, and as a result, institutions which we have taken for granted (baseball!) have shredded in front of our eyes.While those at the top are more diverse than ever, those at the bottom are not. Corruption and malfeasance eat away at our trust, at our quality of life, and our very foundation. Chris looks at this crisis of authority in America from the top down– the elites seem to get more and more preferential treatment no matter what the extent of their corruption, and those at the bottom feel the heat in the most punitive ways. In his spare time, Chris is also editor-at-large for The Nation.
Harry Shearer’s day job on The Simpsons can’t begin to describe his professional life. One of the fathers of the mockumentary, Harry stole the show in This Is Spinal Tap, and has appeared in pretty much all of the Christopher Guest mockumentaries. He hosts KCRW’s Le Show on Sunday Mornings. But what really moves Harry is social justice. A longtime resident of New Orleans, the devastation of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina impelled him to find out what really happened in the gulf, and what really caused the catastrophic destruction of thousands of homes, loss of more than a thousand lives, and cataclysmic disruption of hundreds of thousands of more lives. In his documentary (NOT a mockumentary), The Big Uneasy, which is entertaining, shocking and disturbing, Harry addresses the credibility gap between what the government said about the “natural disaster”, and what the experts said. Hint: it was no “natural disaster” that caused the devastation, but was folly and malfeasance instead. And Harry has had a hell of a time trying to get those with influence and power to listen to him.
Tickets, $20. At the Writers Guild Theater, 135 South Doheny Drive, Beverly Hills. Parking available in adjacent lots. For reservations, click here or email us at reservations@writersblocpresents.com.