FOUND with Sound!

by Lauren F. Friedman

Davy Rothbart, creator of FOUND magazine, may have personal phone numbers for the likes of Miranda July, Sarah Vowell and Andrew Bird, but when people ask what he does for a living, he's got a humble answer: "I pick up trash and stuff."

From Polaroids lacking all context to urgently worded, handwritten notes, each piece of discarded ephemera that Rothbart collects offers a tiny window into the life of a perfect stranger. Through FOUND and several best-of books, his carefully curated trash has won many devoted fans — more than 100 new found items arrive in the mail each week.

On Tuesday, he'll read from his new book, Requiem for a Paper Bag, and share some recent finds, while his singer-songwriter brother plays songs inspired by discovered items.

Requiem is different from previous FOUND anthologies: It presents famous (and not-so-famous) finders' best discovery stories — even if the found objects themselves are long gone.

Seth Rogen opens the book with a story of finding a discarded hardcore porn magazine when he was 11 ("I saw the insides of body parts I had never even seen the outsides of"). Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds, tells a have-to-read-it-to-believe-it tale of a bloody jockstrap uncovered in a thrift store's dollar bin. "The stories that people had about finding something and what it meant to them was often more powerful or surprising or funny than the find itself," Rothbart says. And, in Kohan's case, too terrible to photograph anyway.

Tue., May 5, 8 p.m., $15-$35, Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St., 267-402-2055, firstpersonarts.org.