Found Magazine Live Presentation

Sun., Sept. 23, 7 p.m., $5, Board Room of the First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St., www.r5productions.com.

by John Vettese

reading/performance art

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

You won't find much gimmickry in the discarded, uncouth photographs and embarrassing notes reprinted in the pages of Found. There's no flash, no labored analyses or paragraph-long dissective explanations. The finds are just presented plainly on the page, scrapbook-style, humanity in all its awkward, often-hysterical glory ... and it's great.

But while the journal and Web site (www.foundmagazine.com) can engross readers by relying solely on this unfettered, stand-alone material, it's a different story presenting that material to a roomful of fans. In this setting, Found founder Davy Rothbart and his brother Peter do have to rely on a gimmick, but a good one: dramatic readings. "I'll read aloud some of the funnier notes, do the voices," Davy says from his cell phone, "and Peter will play songs he's written based on the finds." Songs? Really? Chuckles Davy, "Yeah, sometimes we get kinda carried away."

The brothers were driving through Erie to Buffalo when we caught up with them, beginning their 65-city fall tour, Found's biggest outing yet. And while they've got new music from Peter's anti-folk act The Poem Adept to hawk, along with Issue No. 5 of their magazine — "The Crime Issue," featuring an archive of files from an FBI gumshoe cast off in an Indiana Dumpster — in a lot of ways, Davy says, a Found Live Presentation is more just a show-and-tell for grown-ups. Whatever Davy reads gets handed around the room, so everybody gets a tactile sense of the find, and the audience is asked — nay, encouraged — to bring in their own finds, a means through which the Rothbarts have gotten some of their best material in the past. "As a collaborative art project, this requires people working on it," says Davy. "Doing these presentations is a way to personally bully and harangue them into participating."

Sun., Sept. 23, 7 p.m., $5, Board Room of the First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St., www.r5productions.com.