Open City Dialogue  (OCD) is a bi-monthly lecture series unraveling on alternating Mondays in the backroom of Pete’s.  Short (35-40 minute) lectures are woven together from the common thread of people’s obsessions, with guests coming from all over Greater New York.  Whether academic or crackpot; celebrated or unsung, our lecturers all have something to tell you…

OCD is held on alternate Mondays at 7:30pm.

January 11: BLACKJACK RACKETEERING: Winning at a Loser’s Game
w/Josh Axelrad
Casino blackjack is not only beatable, it’s beatable using arithmetic most of us learned before puberty. Casinos, of course, are aware of this. Former professional card counter Josh Axelrad will teach you the basic techniques with a caveat: Las Vegas wants you to try it. He’ll also probe the question of whether you should. A perfect lecture to launch your new years' resolutions with! Resolve to be a Winner!!!

Josh Axelrad played blackjack for a living for five years. He was 86’d, 172’d (86’d twice, from the same place), 258’d, or otherwise discouraged from enjoying gambling opportunities at all the finest toilets in Las Vegas. His memoir, Repeat Until Rich: A Professional Card Counter’s Chronicle of the Blackjack Wars, will be published by Penguin this March.

January 25: THE GREAT WILLIAMASBURG BIKE WARS: A PUBLIC DEBATE
w/Caroline Samponaro, Heather Loop, Isaac Abraham.
Just before Christmas, 2009, a war broke out on the bike lanes of Williamburg. On one side: the Hassidic Jewish community of the Southside, who had advocated--successfully--for Mayor Bloomberg to remove the Bedford Ave Bike lane. Their ostensible reason: Too much rolling flesh on display from the biker community. On the other side: A coalition of bikesters, whose defiance led them to re-paint the bike lanes, and threaten a topless ride in protest (it was snowed out in the blizzard of '09). Moderating: Hassidic bike enthusiast Baruch Herzfeld. Come hear all sides have it out in the civilized verbal sparring ring of Pete's Candy Store.

February 8: OCCULT NY: Or, Why I used my bar mitzvah money to buy a Ouija board..."
w/Mitch Horowitz
Long before the “Aquarian Age” hit California, America’s laboratories of spiritual experiment were in the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen, the “Burned-Over District” of central New York State, and the ghostly hills of the Hudson River Valley. Mitch Horowitz, author of the acclaimed new history Occult America, will explore his encounters with New York’s astonishing – and frequently overlooked – role in spreading esoteric spirituality throughout America and the modern world. We’ll meet occult New Yorkers ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Madame H.P. Blavatsky to lesser known but hugely influential personas such as the 19th century “Poughkeepsie seer” Andrew Jackson Davis and the colonial-era medium called the “Publick Universal Friend.” (And along the way discover why a nice Jewish kid from Queens came to embrace “the other side.”)

Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and the author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (Bantam), called “a fascinating book” by Ken Burns and “extraordinary” by Deepak Chopra. Horowitz has written for U.S. News and World Report, Parabola, and BoingBoing, and has recently appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, and All Things Considered. He and his wife raise two boys (who believe in ghosts) in New York City.

February 22: FIRE IT UP: The Secrets of Backyard Jet Propulsion
w/Hackett
It is safe to say that most people dream of creating a homemade rocket. But few of us have the gumption to actually do it. Enter Hackett, champion of the Pulse Jet, a loud, filthy, unsafe jet contraption that can be built with scrap metal, and needs a leaf blower and a blowtorch to ignite. As a member of the Madagascar Institute, Hackett has built a jet-powered bike, a jet-powered merry-go-round, and is working on the holy-grail of a Jet Pack. His loud and polluting inventions have been seen coast to coast and internationally in such fairs as the Glastonbury Festival and Gadgetoff "09.

Hackett is the founder of the Madagascar Institute, a reckless art combine that builds rockets, carnival rides, and art that can kill you. They believe that more people making stuff is a good idea, so they teach classes so that you too can make well-constructed mayhem and someday blow your own face off.. He is a leading expert on valveless pulse-jet engines--the very engines that the V-1 rocket used to describe Gravity's Rainbow over London. Additionally, he is a minor television celebrity in odd countries, the star of the occasional basic cable television show, including Junkyard Wars and the upcoming Breaking Point (http://www.discoverychannel.ca/articleList.aspx?sid=23327).

March 8: PIGEON LIFE: An Investigation Into A Filthy Bird Slum
w/Jamie Hook
Lorimer Street between Messerole and Calyer is home to a bona-fide pigeon slum. Filthy birds congregate there in curious density, forsaking adjacent inviting areas to crowd in a building-side favela of avian vice and depravity. Most mysteriously, they are supported in their wayward lifestyle by some unseen neighborhood abettor, who reliably find the most fetid offal form the local garbage bins to sustain (or poison?) these flying rodents: rotten vegetables, maggoty meat, and moldy bread are just a few of the regular leavings that join the lice-encrusted feathers and fecal whitewash littering the sidewalk. Who is the filthy enabler, and why do they do it? Why does the Rite Aid not stop them? What is the neighborhood consensus on this menace? Join Jamie Hook for a hard-hitting power-point investigation.
NOTE: As March 8 is the presenter’s birthday, refreshments will be served!!
JAMIE HOOK is the curator of Open City Dialogue. He has previously lectured on Barry White and Santa Claus--both of whom really get him going. His theatre work includes the coast-to-coast fringe smash Point Break Live! His film work includes August Wilson’s only screen role in The Naked Proof. His writing has appeared in Vogue, Harpers and The Village Voice.

March 22: EXPLORING THE MULTIVERSE: Life Beyond our Pitiful 3 Dimensions
w/Dr. Schuler
What happens beyond the dull confines of our own three dimensions? Can you hold Time in a Bottle? Tesser-actor Dr. Schüler discusses physics, the possibility of parallel realities, and our place in the multiverse, in a lively exposition that links together disparate physical phenomena. Join us and share this experience as we attempt to peek under the fabric of reality in a paradoxical attempt to discuss the absurd.

Jason Schuler entertains audiences with unusual, innovative, provocative performance, creating art that can only be fully experienced in a live forum. He experiments with perception and explores the visceral subjectivity of the human experience. His performance event, The Garden of Forked Tongues was listed in “The Year According to PaperMag: The Best of the Best of 2009” as a top ten Downtown Performance Favorite.

April 5: BARGAIN ‘HO: A Personal Account of Bargain Hunting and Pathological Hoarding
W/Dina Seiden
While the term “bargain-hunter” implies that the empowered consumer serves as the predator, and the retail system, the putative pray, Dina Seiden will explore, through a close reading of her own pathetic and miserly field work, the means by which the bargain hunter’s shopping behavior is prescribed, wholesale, by the retail institution in order to bolster normative cultural values and sanctions. Embracing her enslavement, Dina will then give the audience a primer on being the best, most interpolated NY bargain ho-bag one could possibly be. From the car auctions and Staten Island thrift stores to the Whole Foods dumpsters, she’ll reveal all of her dirty, implicated cheap tricks.

DINA SEIDEN had some promise once, until she became a consumed consume, being eaten alive by her pre-occupation with bargain-hunting. Now Dina Seiden is a whore. She sniffs coupons. She hoards. She is miserly. She performs a one-woman show in NY and abroad. She has many used and nonworking (read as foreign) parts that she nabbed on special (including a restylane-enhanced cervix and denuded cheekbones resurfaced with melamine resin for structural integrity).

April 19: MOBY DICK ILLUSTRATED: An Epic Slideshow
w/Matt Kish
Melville's great novel seems to have a magnetic pull on Obessives. Not surprising, given it's OCD hero. But self-trained artist Matt Kish has set out to up the ante on Moby Dick mania once more with his SUPER INSANELY AMBITIOUS project to illustrate every page of the Signet classic edition (522 pages!) of this great book. He's a couple hundred pages in, and friend: his stuff is lovely! Come see a slideshow of his sure-to-be legendary work and find out what it takes to match creative wits with the greatest literary obsessive of all time.

MATT KISH is a self-trained artist who does what he wants on paper. Moby Dick is his favorite book ever. He was encouraged to undertake this project by a combination of boredom and in inspiration, the former being the unavoidable lull of the summer doldrums in his home-state of Ohio, the latter being a diverse array of sources including Zak Smith's great project illustrating every page of Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. Matt enjoys oppressively hot weather and is slightly nearsighted.

May 3:JUNGIAN META-FREAK OUT

May 17: TBA

ABOUT THE CURATOR:

Jamie Hook is a socially omnivorous urban dandy who makes his home in Greenpoint. A filmmaker, theatre director, and sometimes journalist, Mr. Hook lives by his wits and his keen eye for the odd and interesting. After a dozen years in Seattle, where, among other things, he was the founding director of the Northwest Film Forum, he has settled in New York and is now preparing to open The Cassandra, a triplex art house cinema in Williamsburg. The OCD Lecture Series offers him a venue to display all of his marvelous urban finds. You should also know that he likes pickles, hot sauce, and red wine in that order.