Summary: February 27, 2013 1:30 p.m. David Wondrich reads two pieces from The New York Sun, "Seen on a Bridge Train: Seven Little Girls and a Man with a Very Large Jag" (1896) and "Louis’s Loaded Billy Goat: Togo Torpedoes Hobos who Libeled the Lunch" (1905) in front of Paul Strand’s Manahatta in the Shaping of New Visions exhibition, third-floor Photography Galleries. After a brief career as a Shakespeare professor and a briefer one as a jazz critic for The Village Voice and The New York Times, David Wondrich fell into a job writing about drinks for Esquire magazine, an occupation he has happily persevered in ever since. Widely acknowledged as the world’s top authority on the history of the cocktail and one of the founders of the modern craft-cocktail movement, Dr. Wondrich (he has a PhD in comparative literature) is the author of countless newspaper and magazine articles and five books, including Imbibe! (2007), the first cocktail book to win a James Beard award, and Punch, released in 2010 to wide acclaim. As part of Kenneth Goldsmith's Poet Laureate program, he invites renowned writers to choose works in MoMA's collection, develop a response, and then select a space in the Museum galleries where they will perform the resulting readings and texts on Wednesdays. On selected Fridays, Goldsmith himself will contribute readings in the galleries. Visitors can meet the writers directly in their selected gallery. This program is a part of MoMA's Artists Experiment initiative.
