Friendswood Library flicks

Friendswood Library flicks is an ongoing movie series held every other Thursday evening in the Friendswood Public Library Activity Room.  Films are shown on an 8 X 10 ft. screen.  Movies are free and begin at 6:20pm.  Refreshments provided.

Not Rated: 113 minutes: 1963

Often described as “the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made,” Charade stars Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in a sparkling thriller with overtones of screwball romantic comedy — or is it the other way around? ---Decent Films Guide

Stanley Donen's stylishly elegant, largely entertaining romance-thriller teams Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn (then at the height of their careers) for the first and only time. ---Emanuel Levy

Thursday, February 19 at 6:20pm

Now, Voyager remains a highly narcotic, swoon inducing romance in the Bette Davis canon.  ---Slant Magazine

Selected for Preservation in the National Film Registry in 2007

Not Rated: 117 minutes: 1942

Thursday, March 5 at 6:20pm

Each of Bob Hope's "My Favorite" films (My Favorite Blonde, My Favorite Brunette, My Favorite Spy) was, by accident or design, a parody of a dead-serious movie genre. 1942's My Favorite Blonde, for example, was a takeoff of Alfred Hitchcock in general and Hitchcock's 39 Steps in particular. Two-bit vaudeville entertainer Hope gets mixed up with gorgeous blonde British-spy Madeline Carroll. Highlights include Hope eluding capture by impersonating a famed psychologist (watch for Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer as Hope's most contentious "patient"). Madeline Carroll also got several opportunities to shine comedically, especially when she lapsed into cloying baby talk while posing as Hope's wife. (Rotten Tomatoes: Movie INFO)

1942: 78 minutes

Thursday, March 19 at 6:20pm

Based upon a Jane Austen novel, this period romantic comedy depicts the chaos unintentionally caused by young Emma's attempts to play matchmaker for her immediate circle. Unfortunately, her plan ends up causing more confusion than happiness, and Emma herself soon becomes caught in the web of romantic entanglements. (Rotten Tomatoes: Movie INFO)

2002: Rated PG: 2 hrs.

Thursday, April 2 at 6:20pm

Author and Historian Andrew Hall at FPL

Dr. John Gorman reads his poem Out West at FPL

Civil War Monitors by Donald LeBlanc

Reference Librarian Donald LeBlanc created this short video to compliment Andrew Hall’s program Blockade-running on the Texas Coast during the Civil War at Friendswood Library on Thursday, January 29 at 7pm.

 

Dr. Gorman presented with Cultural Programming Award from FPL

left to right: Featured Poets David E. Cowen, Sybil Pittman Estess, and Dr. John Gorman

The Humans in Space Youth Art Competition exhibit at FPL

The Humans in Space Youth Art Competition exhibit on display now through the end of February at Friendswood Public Library

The international Humans in Space Youth Art Competition calls for youth 10-18 years old to “be inspired, creative and heard;” we invite them to  learn about space and communicate their visions of the future of space travel and exploration through visual, literary, video, and musical artwork.  The winning entries are then displayed and performed in locations worldwide and online, allowing the creativity and ideas of the young artists to inspire others and promote public dialogue about the future of space…

The Humans in Space Youth Art Competition brings together youth and adults, artists and scientists, space industries and educators, and international and local communities. It inspires people around the globe to creatively communicate their thoughts about the future, while also educating them and using their artwork to engage the broader public, fostering interest in and support for space exploration and travel.

For more information, please visit www.humansinspaceart.org 

Industrializing Space

Jessica  Sun, 15 years old, USA

Time begins to Show

Savannah Cudzilo, 18, USA

Adam 2030 & I

Kerolein Bergen, 12 years old, Germany

Found Life

Himaprabal Goud, 15 years old, India

off the page poetry: featured poet: David E. Cowen

On Wednesday, January 14 at 7pm, Friendswood Public Library off the page poetry series presents a reading with David E. Cowen, president of Gulf Coast Poets; Sybil Pittman Estess, 2009 & 2015 Texas Poet Laureate nominee; and UHCL professor Dr. John Gorman. Featured readings will conclude with an open mic session. Dr. John Gorman will receive the first annual Friendswood Public Library Award for Outstanding Cultural Programming at the conclusion of this poetry event.

Excerpt from the FOREWORD of David E. Cowen’s The Madness of Empty Rooms (Weasel Press 2014)

Danel Olson, Professor of English, Lone Star College

If you step quietly for long enough into the coolness of a certain Texas graveyard at night by the sea, you may hear meditations and narratives just such as these. You pass by particular half-opened sarcophagi, then around an unmarked grave of a Civil War veteran, and then over a sheaf of salt-grass growing at the furthest edge where the mower finally gave up.

But you may never find that cemetery, so here is the book.

Incidents of families at war, of dreams slowly achieved and fortunes quickly squandered, of decadence and vendettas and eternal returns, with a few cases of tombstones repurposed, are all shared by this deliberative voice of Texas. 

Growing up close to the sun-blanched, salt-encrusted Gulf of Mexico in Brownsville, and relocating further north to Galveston to practice law, David Cowen has internalized the central narrative of that hurricane shore: nature is always indifferent, and life is as merciless as death. If his characters should face the rubble with courage to begin again, another storm only swells in the Gulf to take them all down.

If the keenest instinct of the Gothic impulse is to record decay, that is what these poems do--with uncommon directness.  Abandonment, fragmentation, ruin, trammelled innocence, and someone's unsentimentalized demise are always in the middle or at least on the edges of his verse. 

Being a lawyer, and the son of a lawyer, this poet defers to facts over lore, and remembers them well, recounting and fusing them into poetic cases melancholy, strong or shocking, yet never in doubt. The effects of evil linger long after a crime is done. In David Cowen's poetry, they linger twice as long…

…I certainly am grateful for these poems, their vitality, their atmosphere, and all their haunting voices. The secrets of an island are in this poet, and when I read him aloud again, I vow that even the ghosts of this coast stop to listen.

~Danel Olson

From the book The Madness of Empty Spaces by David E. Cown:

The Traveling Salesman Finishes His Run

anomalies are so cliché --

the soft hum of the Class III Alcubierre

spitting us

from the lips of the traversable horizon

always has its side effects

I become a primordial slug

inching on an evolutionary plane

of parallel strings

my antennae probing lost patches

of fractured reality

at least the colors are amusing

but they fade

as I find myself

slithering unexotically

over a half eaten package of peanuts

and an empty can of soda

just hazards of the trade

the movie was boring anyway

I am content

I met my quota

we decelerate through the other door

my arms reform

my legs reshape

I become who I am

I finish the last of the honey roasteds

the garbled recording reminds us

to return our tray tables to an upright position--

presuming up and down in zero G--

thanking us for taking the “company plane”

I reach down to secure

my suitcase of samples under the seat in front

as instructed

looking out

at the cerulean pearl

imbedded with swirls of red storms

circling a familiar bloated star

I sigh

happy

I will again be sleeping in my own bed

my only apprehension

being whether I remembered

to let the cat out

before I left

~David E. Cowen

Watch David Cowen read:
Jack Rabbit Chicken 
David Cowen reads from his Seven Yards of Sorrow

off the page poetry in January: Gorman to receive award for Cultural Programming

Jingle Bells with Hope Handbell Quartet at FPL