Category: Event

  • Mike White Reads From Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection 12/4

    Harangue for Hollywood! From the blighted urban squalor of Detroit—Paris of the Midwest—came enfant terrible Mike White and his mutant publication, Cashiers du Cinemart. For fourteen years and fifteen issues the writers of Cashiers du Cinemart provided a treasure trove of writing on film and popular culture.

    This book collects the best articles from the fifteen year history of Cashiers du Cinemart magazine with sections dedicated to Quentin Tarantino, Star Wars, Black Shampoo, unproduced screenplays, celebrity interviews, and much more. Everything has been refreshed, polished, and improved for this volume of movie mayhem.

    “Obsessive, indulgent, wildly erratic, yet Impossibly Funky still warms my hardened critic’s heart because of the burning passion for movie going of the writer. It’s manifested in the nutty, beyond-left-field takes on popular geeky movies, and, even better, the stretch beyond Lucas and Tarantino to Kenneth Fearing, Travis McGee, and the unheralded comic genius of Canadian cinema, John Paizs. I’ve got to get my butt to Black Shampoo!” – Gerald Peary, critic, The Boston Phoenix

    For more info: http://www.impossiblefunky.com

    Saturday, December 4th at 7PM

  • Josh MacPhee Reads From Celebrate People’s History 11/11

    Since 1998, Josh MacPhee has commissioned and produced over one hundred posters by over eighty artists that pay tribute to revolution, racial justice, women’s rights, queer liberation, labor struggles, and creative activism and organizing. Celebrate People’s History! presents these essential moments—acts of resistance and great events in an often hidden history of human and civil rights struggles—as a visual tour through decades and across continents, from the perspective of some of the most interesting and socially engaged artists working today.

    Josh MacPhee, artist and activist, is the founder of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, an organization that promotes radical art forms. He is the author of Stencil Pirates: A Global Study of the Street Stencil (2004) and co-edited Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority (2007) and Reproduce and Revolt (2008). MacPhee is also the curator of the printmaking exhibition Paper Politics, which has been on tour in the United States since 2004.

    Featured Artists in the book who will be at the event, the list is growing!:

    John Jennings

    Marc Nelson

    Damon Locks is a visual artist and a musician here in Chicago. He performs in both The Eternals and The Exploding Star Orchestra. Always up for a good conversation, he was happy to participate in the Celebrate Peoples History book event at Quimby’s.

    André Pérez, Founder of the Transgender Oral History Project, developer of educational materials about trans issues, and organizer with GenderQueer Chicago.

    For more info: justseeds.org

  • ‘Za the Pizza Zine Release and Pizza Party at Quimby’s 11/10

    As spicy and sassy as a stick of pepperoni, ‘Za the Pizza Zine is a compilation about, what else, the wonders of pizza. Still, it’s about more than simply reveling in pepperoni prose for creator Nicki Yowell and her baker’s dozen of bi-coastal contributors. The Chicagoans are plenty and include Ramsey Everydaypants of List, Eric Bartholomew of Junk Drawer, gore poet Mason Pierce and Dining with Words’ Caroline Liebman. ‘Za combines fiction, essays, comics, illustration and photography to create an all-out snack time explosion. Come for the reading of eloquent odes to ‘za and stay for the pizza party, featuring actual pizza.

    For more info: zathepizzazine.wordpress.com

  • THE EXQUISITE BOOK Authors and Contributors at Quimby's on 11/5!

    EXQUISITE CORPSE [also known as exquisite cadaver or rotating corpse] is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds a composition in sequence…

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    THE EXQUISITE BOOK

    100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game

    By Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski, and Matt Lamothe

    THE EXQUISITE BOOK reinvents the classic surrealist drawing game The Exquisite Corpse for a new artistic generation. In these pages, one-hundred of today’s hottest indie artists each adorn a single page with brand new work, having only seen the page of the artist immediately prior. Each of the book’s ten chapters resides on a ten-page according fold-out that lets you enjoy the artwork in an interconnected stream, as it was originally created by the artists themselves. It includes work from contemporary illustrators, indie artists, and cutting-edge creates such as David Shrigley, Jill Bliss, Jordan Crane and more.

    About the Authors: Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski, and Matt Lamothe are partners in Also Design, a design firm based out of Chicago and New York that has won several awards, including the ADC Young Guns award. Julia is author of the popular blog BookByItsCover.com, which showcases the design and layout of obscure books.

    So far the artists who will be in attendance at this event will be the authors, Anders Nilsen, Lillie Carre, Paul Hornschemeier, Isaac Tobin, Lauren Nassef and Susie Ghahremani.

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  • Charles Burns Discusses X'ed Out At Quimby's on 11/3!

    From Charles Burns, the creator of Black Hole, comes X’ED OUT, the first volume of an epic masterpiece of graphic fiction in brilliant color.

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    Doug is having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky. Who died years ago. But who’s nonetheless slinking out through the hole, beckoning Doug to follow. What’s going on? To say any more would spoil the freaky, Burnsian fun, especially because X’ED OUT, unlike Black Hole, has not been previously serialized, and every unnervingly meticulous panel will be more tantalizing than the last. Drawing inspiration from such diverse influences as Hergé and William Burroughs, Charles Burns has given us a dazzling spectral fever-dream—and a comic-book masterpiece.

    Charles Burns grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman’s Raw magazine in the mid-1980s and took off from there, with an extraordinary range of comics and projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to the latest ad campaign for Altoids. In 1992, he designed the set for Mark Morris’s delightful restaging of The Nutcracker (renamed The Hard Nut) at BAM. He has illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He was also tapped as the official cover artist for The Believer magazine at its inception in 2003.

    “A haunting first chapter in what promises to be a spellbinder…Masterful…it will leave you begging for the rest of the story.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

    “Like an apocalyptic hallucination…the visionary artistry of Burns exists beyond the bounds of time and constraints of conventional narrative.” –Kirkus starred review

    “Long awaited first chapter in what promises to be a trippy, wildly experimental and typically disquieting epic.” –NPR.org

    “Anything by comics master Burns is a big event and this is no exception.”—Comics Beat

    For more info: www.pantheonbooks.com

  • Van Gogh's Ear volume 7 Release Event

    VGE1.7International prose & poetry anthology series VAN GOGH’S EAR will hold an event to celebrate the launch of its SEVENTH volume. Van Gogh’s Ear is a joint publication of French Connection Press (Paris) and Committee On Poetry (New York), a non-profit organization created by Allen Ginsberg.

    Van Gogh’s Ear is among the most popular of international books in the field of creative writing at the moment and is also an affluent resource for teachers and a library basic. Since its début in 2002, Van Gogh’s Ear has gained international acclaim for its original work by more than eighty celebrated and emerging talents per volume including Yoko Ono, James Dean; Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Charles Manson, Xaviera Hollander, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Taslima Nasrin, Carolyn and Neal Cassady.

    The event will be hosted by four local Chicago readers and contributors of Van Gogh’s Ear: Marc Smith, Carlos T. Mock, Larry Sawyer, Joel Craig, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, and Larry Sawyer.

    Volume 7 includes work by Jorge Artajo, Camille Feinberg, Fern C.Z. Carr, Saint James Harris Wood, Imani Tolliver, Reginald T. Jackson, Jayanta Mahapatra and many more!

    For more info: www.frenchcx.com

  • Adam Levin Reads The Instructions

    Instructions

    Local Chicago writer Adam Levin’s The Instructions (McSweeneys) begins with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ends four days later with the Events of November 17. This is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age ten: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Ejected from three Jewish day schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.

    The Instructions is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent who has already been compared to David Foster Wallace by New York Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times.

    Adam Levin’s stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Esquire. Winner of the 2003 Tin House/ Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, Levin holds an MA in Clini-cal Social Work from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches writing at Columbia College and The School of the Art Institute.

  • Sara Marcus Reads GIRLS TO THE FRONT With Jessica Hopper, author of The Girls Guide to Rocking

    GirlsFrontThe last great underground cultural movement of the pre-Internet age, Riot Grrrl revolutionized girlhood itself. In the early 1990s, young women were realizing that the equality they’d been promised was still elusive, and a newly resurgent right wing was turning feminism into the ultimate dirty word.

    Riot Grrrl roared into the spotlight in 1991: an uncompromising movement of pissed-off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet. They published zines, founded local groups, and organized national conventions, while fiercely prophetic punk bands such as Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear, and Bikini Kill helped spread the word across the US and to Canada, Europe, and beyond.

    GIRLS TO THE FRONT (Harper) is the first-ever history of Riot Grrrl—lyrical and infused with punk, it tells the story of a group of extraordinary young women coming of age and coming into their own. Part social history, part cultural criticism, and part collective biography, this passionate narrative takes us from the front row of a punk show to the stage of the Republican Convention; from a seedy strip club to the US Supreme Court. It tells the tale of a time when America thought feminism was dead, but a generation of noisy girls rose up to prove everybody wrong. Deftly weaving together a wide range of political and cultural histories, this is a dynamic chronicle not just of a movement but of an era.

    Also joining Sara is Jessica Hopper, author of The Girls Guide to Rocking (Workman Books).

    For more info: www.girlstothefront.com

  • Larry-bob Roberts Reads From The International Homosexual Conspiracy

    IntlHomoConsLarry-bob Roberts is into sparking culture, politics, and creating fusions between the two. Since 1989, he has been publishing in print (and now online) the queer culture zine, Holy Titclamps. In The International Homosexual Conspiracy, a series of cultural polemics on an unexpected array of contemporary topics — from mistaken first impressions (“Presumed Hetero Unless Proven Gay”) to sustainable yet unaffordable pants (“Socially Responsible Pants”) to critiques of bourgeois mindsets (“Middle Class Writer”) — author Larry-bob Roberts offers hilarious insights into the absurdities of modern life and queer culture. His humorous observations are destined to jostle readers’ complacency and confirm their worst suspicions.

    Straight people need this book to learn what one of those freaky queers thinks. Mainstream gays need this book to see that there are other ways of expressing homosexuality culturally. Non-mainstream queers need this book to read something that reflects their own points of view. Readers with short attention spans need this book because the chapters are in bite-sized pieces. Fans of satire need this book for a good laugh. Fundamentalist Christians need this book as evidence of the decadence of modern society. In a humorously confrontational way, The International Homosexual Conspiracy is not only raging, but also engaging.

    “Astute, as well as relatively ego-free, Roberts is one of the gay anarchist movement’s clearest
    thinkers.” — Dennis Cooper, author of Closer

    For more info: http://www.holytitclamps.com

  • Richard Thomas Reads From Transubstantiate with Otherworld Authors

    TransubstantiateRichard Thomas’s Transubstantiate constructs a collection of voices that reveals a disturbing futuristic vision of terror and beauty. The novel’s island paradise, its imprisoned inhabitants, and the digital presence that works to control them, merge with ancient forces of rite and belief to create a surreal and devastating collage. This is a work that captures a world we almost know, its realities enough to raise an uneasy sense of potentiality. Richard Thomas was the winner of the ChiZine Publications 2009 “Enter the World of Filaria” contest.  His short story “Maker of Flight” was chosen by Filaria author Brent Hayward and Bram Stoker Award-Winning editor Brett Alexander Savory.  Some of his publishing credits include Cemetery Dance (Shivers VI, early 2010), Living Dead Press (Eternal Night: A Vampire Anthology), 3:AM Magazine, Word Riot, Dogmatika, The Oddville Press, Colored Chalk, Cause & Effect, Gold Dust, Vain, Nefarious Muse, Troubadour 21, Cherry Bleeds and Opium. In his spare time he edits and designs for Colored Chalk and Sideshow Fables and is a workshop moderator at The Cult (chuckpalahniuk.net). He is currently writing his second novel, a neo-noir, transgressive thriller entitled Disintegration.  Richard is also a member of the Horror Writers Association.

    “Transubstantiate is, is — it’s a visual: that 2001 baby opening its eyes in the monolith, but the monolith is shrouded in this story of loss and hope and identity, and encoded in the cadence of that story, if you listen close, is the genetic map with which to draw this impossible celestial infant, opening its eyes on the page, looking right into you.”  Stephen Graham Jones, All the Beautiful Sinners, Demon Theory, The Ones That Got Away

    “Transubstantiate is an intricately-woven dystopian thriller, with every thread pulled tight. This is a solid debut from Richard Thomas.”
    —Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria

    Also joining the bill is Chicago author Laura Griffith, who will read from her book Remember, David Rosenstein all the way from Colorado to read from newly released The Silk Worm, and Nik Korpon from his soon to be released Stay God! (Otherworld Publications).

    For more info: http://www.otherworldpublications.com