Book debut event for Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds, published by Heyday, and 16mm screening of oceanic shorts from Smokehouse films featuring author Charles Hood. Charles Hood will be in in conversation with Dr. Rachel Jennings (actor, professor, and expert in literature of travel and Santi Tafarella (Professor Emeritus and steward of the former blog “Prometheus Unbound”) with the theme: “Water as Other, Water as Self.”

1122 West 24th Street, Los Angeles, CA. Tickets $15, (Free for VPES Members – active members may email vpes@panoramaonview.org for a complimentary registration code)

Poet and essayist Charles Hood has been a factory worker, a ski instructor, and a birding guide in Africa. His recent books published by Heyday include Nocturnalia, an appreciation of nature after dark, and the essay collection A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature. His wildlife studies have taken him around the world, from the high Arctic to the South Pole, and from Tibet to West Africa to the Amazon. Mammal no. 1,000 seen and recorded on his world animal list was a Crossley’s dwarf lemur in Madagascar. (Mammal no. 999 was a Malagasy white-bellied free-tailed bat.) Recently retired and now professor emeritus, Hood lives in the Mojave Desert with two kayaks, two mountain bikes, two dogs, and five thousand books.

The Smokehouse Films archive (founded by John Cannizzaro in 1996) consists of approximately 4000 prints – mostly in the areas of Ethnographic films, stop motion animated films (both foreign and American), and experimental or Avant Garde works. Many of these films never made the transition to video or DVD, and so constitute a vast area of knowledge and history that needs to be “preserved” for future studies and enjoyment. To that end, Smokehouse Films has opened its archives over the last few years to multiple screenings and workshops. Although most of them have been in Los Angeles, they have also branched out to screenings as far as San Francisco, Texas, Vermont, and New York.