You missed `Explained' for a movie?
Last Saturday, while you were busy doing something stupid, maybe knocking back that beer that put you over the edge -- or was that you skulking guiltily into "Da Vinci Code" at the ArcLight, refusing to yell "thank you!" at that nice usher? -- some of your fellow Angelenos were having a much smarter evening at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater in Hollywood. The theater is in the Barnsdall Art Park, atop a hill overlooking East Hollywood and Los Feliz, next to the Barnsdall House, a dilapidated pile from Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan phase. There, a crowd of smart-looking adults, peppered with art kids and hipsters, watched a grab-bag show of readings and multimedia presentations by a group of very brainy and clever, but warm, people.
The show was the latest in "The World Explained," a series being put on by the L.A. contingent of the magazine and publishing mini-empire McSweeney's, to benefit their after-school tutoring facility, called 826. Bob Odenkirk was in the audience. So were Carrie Fisher and, to everyone's great pleasure, Emo Phillips. Andy Richter, Conan O'Brien's old sidekick, hosted. Though smart, like pretty much everyone else there, Richter pretended to be dumb. He claimed that even though he was hosting a literary event, he preferred television over books. "Here's why TV kicks books' butt," Richter said, launching into a lengthy exegesis of an episode of "CSI: Miami" in which David Caruso saves a man from an exploding building and foils a bank robbery, all while a tsunami is overtaking Miami.
The trademark McSweeney's tweeness and curio fetish were on full display. Following Richter, Evany Thomas, a contributor to McSweeney's and author of a new, mostly tongue-in-cheek book called "The Secret Language of Sleep," dissected couples' sleeping positions -- Classic Spoons, the Seatbelt -- to lots of amusement. Then Starlee Kine, a regular on the public radio show "This American Life," talked about her relationship with her therapist. She was upstaged by Joshua Davis, a small, scrawny editor from Wired magazine, who showed footage of himself taking on a 400-pound man in a sumo wrestling competition. Finally, Davy Rothbart, editor of Found magazine and a frequent guest on "Life," read excerpts from discarded notes sent to him from all over the world. Zooey Deschanel, the thinking man's starlet, sang interstitial music with Grant Lee Phillips.
