Category: readings

  • The Beat Cop's Guide to Chicago Eats Release Event 6/14

    Join Sgt. David J. Haynes of the Chicago Police Department, and his partner-in-crime, blogger Christopher Garlington on Tues, June 14th at 7pm as they talk about the places where they take a bite out of crime and also bites out of donuts, polish sausage, fried chicken, enchiladas, and omelettes. Peppered with outrageous stories from working cops, Chicago cop lore, and even a few recipes, The Beat Cop’s Guide To Chicago Eats takes you on a gustatory journey through all five Chicago areas, including some of the toughest neighborhoods in the nation.

    Sgt. David J. Biscuit Haynes has spent the past 15 years dodging bullets and chasing down gang bangers on the city’s West Side, running Chicago’s first ever Homeland Security Task Force, and supervising squads in the 19th District at Belmont and Western.  Christopher “The Bull” Garlington is a blogger and author, known for his stories of raising highly intelligent (devious) children published on the blog Death by Children. His writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Another Realm, Bathhouse, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and more. Together Haynes and Garlington have hosted the radio program The Dave & Chris Show! since 2007, during which they cultivate and maintain a long-standing argument about…everything. From politics and video games to the importance of cool nicknames and secret societies, they cover it on their live weekly broadcast from cigar stores, bars, and other manly locales around Chicago. Their show first aired on WJJG and is now broadcast online on blogtalk radio.

    The book retails at $15.95 and includes $34 in coupons. It’s like being buddies with your alderman. For more info: lakeclaremont.com

  • Margaret Hicks Reads From Chicago Comedy: A Fairly Serious History 5/28

    Famous for being a city of broad shoulders, Chicago has also developed an international reputation for split sides and slapped knees. Watch the “Chicago Style of Comedy” evolve from nineteenth-century vaudeville, through the rebellious comics of the 50’s, and into the improvisation and sketch that ushered in a new millennium. Drawing on material both hilarious and profound, Chicago Comedy: A Fairly Serious History touches on what makes Chicago different from other cities and how that difference produced some of the greatest minds comedy will ever know: Amos and Andy, Jack Benny, Lenny Bruce, Del Close, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert and so many, many more.

    Margaret Hicks is a professional tour guide in Chicago, who has been giving walking tours in the loop (like her tour of Old Town offered through the famous Second City Comedy Club) since she completed the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s docent program in 2004.  She maintains her own website at chicagoelevated.com and has had years of experience in the Chicago comedy scene working at improv theaters and stand-up clubs.

    Sat, May 28th, 7pm

  • Marie Kanger-Born Reads From Confessions Of A Chicago Punk Bystander 5/27

    Confessions Of A Chicago Punk Bystander is a gritty insight into the city, clubs and lifestyle of the early Chicago Punk scene of the late 1970s and ’80s. This narrative follows the author’s introduction to punk rock via the notorious Chicago night clubs– O’Banion’s and OZ. The hedonism of the lifestyle and her harrowing exploits stand in stunning contrast to her accidental role as the primary caregiver for her mother, who was disabled by Multiple Sclerosis.

    This poignant memoir traces the transformation of punk to hardcore, along with the author’s personal evolution as a photographer and zine producer. Story recounts the rise of the teenage hardcore scene over the bar based punk scene, to the later decline that began with the emergence of a skinhead jock era. Battles between the racist and anti-racist factions sealed the author’s belief that punk had lost it’s way. In disillusionment, she quit the scene in 1986, never to return until 2006. It was then that she found a web site which facilitated her discovery of a thriving underground scene in the Pilsen/La Villita neighborhoods. Today she is happy to declare that punk is not dead, and neither is she.

    Includes the author’s photographs of the 1980s and 2006 bands, the crowds, her BS Detector fanzine, and other memorabilia. A visual delight, this book truly paints a picture of the era.

    Marie Kanger-Born is a photographer and a participant of both the early and current Chicago punk music scenes. Her photos have appeared in various punk publications.

    For more info: chicagopunkpix.com

    Friday, May 27, 7:00 pm

  • ‘Dear Sweetness’ Book Release Event With Dan Gleason and Friends 5/21

    We’re going to scintillate your titillations!  This reading will celebrate the global/interplanetary release of ‘Dear Sweetness- Dan Gleason’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 3’ and will feature the Great Mike McPadden (aka El McBeardo), noted diarist Grace LaPeruto, Gabriel Wallace, author of the Great Sheboygan Panty Raid of 18977, Gregory Jacobsen – he of the long flowing locks- and the late Marc Arcuri! Be there!

    This event will mark the release of Dan Gleason’s third compilation of short stories. Mr. Gleason has sold his weirdo zines at Quimby’s for well over a decade now.  Marc Arcuri, of Safety Pin and English Softhearts fame, will sing his songs of whoa.  Grace LaPeruto will recite excerpts from her diaries, and Gregory Jacobsen- former front man of Lovely Little Girls and painter extraordinaire- will punish the audience with a barrage of high-pitched screams.  Gabriel Wallace shall read his odd poetry, and Mike McPadden, Head Writer for Mr. Skin, will deliver the follow-up to his epic tale d’amor (and the torture that that amor can bring) ‘Madonna Boots.’

    Saturday, May 21st, 7:00 pm

  • Weekly Top 10 and an Attempt to Play A Portion of All Four Discs of The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka at Once

    A children’s book made #1 this week?! That’s crazy. But true.

    Also! Here’s footage from an event here at Quimby’s for the Continuum’s 33 1/3 series about albums of the past 40 years. This event on 9/17/11 featured NIU prof Joe Bonomo who did a book about AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, Editor-in-Chief of Pitchfork Media Scott Plagenhoef who did a book about Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister, and managing editor of Pitchfork Mark Richardson who did a book about the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka. The footage below is of Mark Richardson reading from his book and then attempt to sequence the four CDs of the album to play simultaneously. Click on the image below and go watch it on YouTube.

    Mark Richardson reads from his book The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka
    Click on the picture to watch Mark Richardson discuss and play part of The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka

     

    1. Counting In The Studio by Cecilia Pinto and Megan Williamson  $10.00 – This attempt to show the process of creative expression to young readers. A dog lives with an artist who has also depicted her own studio in the book. Inside the studio it is possible to stare out windows just like those in the book. The studio, at the back of the artist’s home, is nestled on a side street in a Chicago neighborhood. The artist and the writer met at the studio to talk about the project before and after making their own separate work. The dog was always present and lent his inestimable support even when napping on the comfy, pillow-strewn chaise lounge which is up against a wall with drawings on it, just like in the book.

    2. Spoken Nerd Revolution by Shappy Seasholtz (Penmanship) $15.00

    3. Mister Wonderful: A Love Story by Daniel Clowes (Pantheon) $19.95

    4. Gentlewoman #3 Spr Sum 11 $10.95

    5. Burn Collector #15 by Al Burian (Microcosm) $3.00 – Al Burian takes on his new home town, Berlin with a little help from a Chicago All-Star team of Anne Elizabeth “Unmarketable” Moore and Liam “Secret Beach” Warfield.

    6. Archiving the Underground #1 by Jenna Brager and Jami Sailor $2.00

    7. OP Original Plumbing #6 Trans Male Quarterly $8.00 – The theme this round is “Schooled”, highlighting a twin commitment to both the “It Gets Better” and the “Make It Better” campaigns targeted at queer youth.

    8. Cartooning Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti (Yale) $13.00 – This is about as close you are going to get to having Ivan Brunetti come to your house and teach you how to make great comics. Turns out, it’s pretty damn close – Philosophy and Practice serves up a concise and well-honed crash course on finding and fine tuning your comics voice. -EF

    9. Hi Fructose #19 $6.95

    10. Hot Teen Slut by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (Write Bloody) $15.00

  • Weekly Top 10 and Video Footage of Deb Olin Unferth

    Here’s your Top 10 for the last week. No real surprises in what made the list of bestsellers, since most of it is stuff that’s made it on there before. However, COG Magazine is a title we just started carrying, a nice biking mag, about city biking, bike messengering and the like, from all around the world.

    Also! Footage from the Deb Olin Unferth event is up. She was here at Quimby’s on 3/7/11 reading from her memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. The piece we put up is a super funny bit about how religion got worked into her expereince, and how her Jewish family reacted to her short bout with Christianity. No matter how you feel about religion, this bit will crack you up. Click on the picture of Deb below, and it will take you to where you can watch it at You Tube.

    1.    OK OK You Smote Me Stories by Al Burian (Quimby’s Exclusive) $3.00 – Al takes us around the corner to his mayhem-prone stint on Wicker Park’s Dean Street, unhexing his way-too-hexed apartment and watching the tumult as Old Chicago takes a scraggly, low-level “stand” against encroaching yuppie “neighborhood improvement.”

    2.    Laphams Quarterly vol 4 #2 Spr 11 $15.00

    3.    Cartooning Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti (Yale) $13.00 – This is about as close you are going to get to having Ivan Brunetti come to your house and teach you how to make great comics. Turns out, it’s pretty damn close – Philosophy and Practice serves up a concise and well-honed crash course on finding and fine tuning your comics voice. -EF

    4. Proximity #8 Education As Art $12.00 – Writing the book on learning as art and the art of learning: Proximity #8 comes from all angles, focuses, builds, supports. Weighing in at 232 pages, this volume does an exceptional job with a wide variety of profiles, interviews and portfolios and essays, staying both solidly local and vitally connected, you’d be hard pressed to find a smarter art magazine.

    5. Monocle vol 5 #42 Apr 11
    6. Brilliant Mistake #1 by Carrie $1.00 – What a gem of a debut zine! Beautifully quilted together from bits of a questioning heart, Brilliant Mistake #1 pares down the aches of the social games we play. -EF

    7.  Acme Novelty Library #20: Lint by Chris Ware (D&Q) $23.95

    8. Cometbus #54 In China With Green Day by Aaron Cometbus $4.00

    9. N Plus 1 #11 Spr 11 $13.95

    10. COG Magazine #10 $6.00

  • Monstrous Achievement : Jack Grisham Reads From His New Memoir An American Demon 5/14

    An American Demon is Jack Grisham’s story of depravity and redemption, terror and spiritual deliverance. While Grisham is best known as the raucous and provocative front man of the pioneer hardcore punk band TSOL (True Sounds of Liberty), his writing and true life experiences are physically and psychologically more complex and unsettling than those of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk.

    Eloquently disregarding the prefabricated formulas of the drunk–to–sober, bad–to–good tale, this is an entirely new kind of life lesson: summoned through both God and demons, while settling within eighties hardcore punk culture and its radical–to–the–core (and most assuredly non–evangelical) parables, Grisham leads us, cleverly, gorgeously, between temporal violence and bigger-picture spirituality toward something better. An American Demon flourishes on both extremes, as a scary hardcore punk memoir and as a valuable message to souls navigating through an overly materialistic and woefully self–absorbed “me first” modern society.

    An American Dem    on conveys anger and truth within the perfect setting, using a youth rebellion that changed the world to open doors for this level of brash destruction. Told from the point of view of a seminal member of the American Punk movement — doused in violence, rebellion, alcoholism, drug abuse, and ending with beautiful lessons of sobriety and absolution — this book is as harrowing and life–affirming as anything you’re ever going to read.

    Now in heavy demand as a public speaker, Jack Grisham currently receives thousands of monthly phone calls from individuals and organizations seeking his advice, expertise, wit, mentorship, and support, especially on drug and alcohol–related issues. Grisham is a master hypnotherapist and resides in Huntington Beach, California. He spends his time with his family, surfs, and voluntarily offers his services to his community. An American Demon is Grisham’s first book.

    “If you’ve ever found yourself unable to turn away from witnessing an accident, crash or natural disaster, you’ll read An American Demon straight through, like I did.  Jack Grisham’s memoir is as original as it is horrifying.  I couldn’t put it down.”    — James Frey, bestselling author of A Million Little Pieces

    “What isn’t shocking is that Jack wrote a fantastically depraved, heart wrenching, thoroughly engaging book that you’ll want to read in one sitting. What is shocking is that it wasn’t written from inside a jail cell at a maximum security prison.”     — Jim Lindberg, former lead singer of Pennywise, and author of Punk Rock Dad

    “…the book is unnervingly brilliant, compulsive reading for those of us that are glad it’s all over.”
    — Rat Scabies, musician.  Scabies played drums for the punk band The Damned.

    “Jack Grisham is a legend to those in the know.  Much of the success of punk rock was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of this surf punk, Southern California mad man. After such a compelling read, it’s so nice to see him break on through to the other side…some weren’t so lucky…” — Mark McGrath, singer

    “Jack Grisham finally, irrevocably, puts to death the slander that the early Los Angeles punk scene was ‘plastic.’ The first true literature to come out of our pathetic little punk lives, American Demon is haunting and awakens monsters. But it should come with a warning label: it’s a dangerous book. Read Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Then read this. But only if you have the courage to follow poetry as far as it can go.”— Paul Roessler, producer, composer, musician

    For more info: jackgrisham.com and  ecwpress.com

    Saturday, May 14th, 7pm

  • Chester Brown Stops at Quimby’s on the Paying For It Tour 5/11

    It’s tempting to call Chester Brown a recluse, but if you live in Toronto, he’s not. But it is rare for him to hit the road, and he will be on tour in 2011 for PAYING FOR IT.

    Chester Brown has never shied away from tackling controversial subjects in his work. As the cartoonist of the autobiographical The Playboy and the biography Louis Riel, Paying For It is a natural progression for Brown as it combines the personal and sexual aspects of his autobiographical work with the polemical drive of Louis Riel. Brown calmly lays out the facts of how he became not only a willing participant in but also a vocal proponent of one of the world’s most hot-button topics–prostitution. Paying For It offers an entirely contemporary exploration of sex work–from the timid john who rides his bike to meet his escorts, wonders how to tip so as not to offend, and reads Dan Savage for advice, to the modern-day transactions complete with online reviews, seemingly willing participants, and clean apartments devoid of cliches street corners, drugs, or primps.

    Paying For It is a book that stands for itself and will be the most talked about graphic novel of 2011. In stores this May.

    Hardcover, 5.5 x 7.5, Black & White, 272 pages, ISBN: 9781770460485, $24.95 US / $25.95 CDN

    “PAYING FOR IT is a very enlightening book, as well as being entertaining…{Chester Brown} is a very skillfull artist in that way.”–R. CRUMB, from his introduction to PAYING FOR IT

    Wed, May 11th, 7pm

    Refreshments Provided by Piece Pizzeria & Brewery!

  • Flint Expat Poets Larry O. Dean and Sarah Carson Read 4/29

    Larry O. Dean reads from his just-released chapbooks, About the Author (Mindmade Books) and abbrev (Beard of Bees), as well as new and collected works. He was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, where he worked with Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Michael Moore. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won three Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing, and Murray State University’s low-residency MFA program. He teaches literature and composition, and is a Poet-in-Residence in the Chicago Public Schools through the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Hands on Stanzas program. Dean was a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for teaching excellence in 2004. Selected magazine publications include Berkeley Poetry Review, Passages North, Big Bridge, Keyhole, OCHO, Dinosaur Bees, and Used Furniture Review. His work has been widely anthologized, and translated into Chinese, Italian, and Spanish.
    “In About the Author, Larry O. Dean’s anti-author’s note poems do what the author’s note never sets out to do, that is tell us what really makes the most sense. These funny and elegant poems about assertion and negation, give us a poet pushing the edges of his own new genre. The reader is in for an enjoyable and revelatory ride.” –Mark Statman, Tourist at a Miracle (poems) and co-translator, Poet in New York (Federico Garcia Lorca)

    “When the author is Larry O. Dean, the odds are the book is very, very good indeed. Like his books that preceded it, About the Author is funny and insightful and has a sneaky way of making serious sense through all the cleverness. Reading this book is smiling with the author while he gives you something new to think about. And, serious though he may be, he never lets you lose the grin. Outstanding!” –Charlie Newman, author of deadmachinecity

    In addition, Dean is a singer-songwriter, working both solo as well as with several ‘hard pop’ bands. His numerous critically-acclaimed albums include Throw the Lions to the Christians (1997) and Sir Slob (2001); Public Displays of Affection (1998) and Fables in Slang (2001), with Post Office; Gentrification Is Theft (2002), with The Me Decade; and Fun with a Purpose (2009), with The Injured Parties. He is currently working with producer, Chris Stamey (of The dB’s) on his third solo album, titled Good Grief. Since 2001 he has hosted and performed at the monthly songwriter showcase he created, Folk You!

    Dean will be joined by fellow Flint expat, Sarah Carson, associate editor at RHINO and the Communications Specialist at Switchback Books. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Diagram, Epiphany, Limestone, Poet Lore, Strange Machine, and Slipstream, among others. She is the author of two chapbooks: Before Onstar (Etched Press, 2010) and Twenty-Two (Finishing Line Press, 2011).
    Copies of the poets’ most recent works will be available for purchase and for signing at this event.

    For more info: contact larry@larryodean.com or info@mindmadebooks.com

    Fri, Apr 29th, 7PM

  • Fame and Disgrace: Christopher Smit Reads From The Exile of Britney Spears 4/23

    Over the course of her decade-long career in the music industry, Britney Spears has both fascinated and repelled the American public, first as an international pop icon, then as a media spectacle gleefully criticized for her rocky marriage and bizarre actions, including shaving her head. The Exile of Britney Spears A Tale of 21st Century Consumption charts the pop star’s rise and fall (and rise again?), illustrating American popular culture’s thirst for—and complicity in—celebrity disgrace. While there have been many takes on Britney, Chris Smit uncovers the psychological and social aspects of the uniquely American spectacle of fame and disgrace.

    Just in time for her new album.

    Christopher Smit, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His newest book is The Exile of Britney Spears: A Tale of 21st Century Consumption (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2011). His work on disability, aesthetics, culture, and popular music can be found in a variety of texts and journals. He is also an award-winning singer-songwriter and musician who currently fronts the band The New Midwest. For more on his work, to read his blog, and hear/download his music, please visit smitwork.com.

    For more info: University of Chicago Press Books

    Saturday, April 23, 7:00 PM