Category: Store Events

The Business of Holidays book release event
6PM Friday December 3rd
 
The Business of Holidays, ed. Maud Lavin (New York: Monacelli Press): Holiday celebrations in the United States are a surprisingly strong force behind the country’s $3 trillion retail economy. From New Year’s diets to Festivus-flavored ice cream, Presidents’ Day care sales to Independence Day barbecues, Hanukkah cards to Kwanzaa candles, the social and material culture of holidays has been transformed into a finely tuned marketing extravanganza. Contemporary holiday rites showcase a particularly American obsession with celebration–and the shopping, decorating, card sending, feasting, drinking, and advertising that goes along with it. This witty and satirical look at thirty-three of our most loved (and hated) holidays explores the history and the traditions, the kitsch and the color, of the business of holidays.
 
For the book release event join Maud Lavin, Alyson Beaton, Eliza Rosen, Courtney Perkins and Ben Finch
 
Maud Lavin is an associate professor in visual and critical studies and art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduate director of visual and critical studies. She is the author of a monograph on the Berlin Dada artist Hannah Hoch–Cut with the Kitchen Knife–and a book on design and politics–Clean New World.
 
Alyson Beaton is an instructor in visual communications at the School of the Art Institute. Her recent artists’ books are in the collections pf Printed Matter, Collette, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at SAIC.
 
Eliza Rosen is a freelance graphic designer in Chicago whose clients have included Deborah’s Place and Chicago Magazine.
 
Courtney Perkins is an independent curator who has organized exhibitions in Chicago at venues including 1926 and ThreeWalls and in Austin, Texas.
 
Ben Finch is the owner and creative director of The Killswitch Collective, a Chicago multimedia and design firm. He specializes in web and print design for the creative and music industry.

Friday, October 15th, 7pmat the Pritzker Pavilion:Dave Eggers!!!Presented by Quimby’s and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs
 
A quick note to let you know the Dave Eggers/Haggis-On-Whey event has been moved from the Cultural Center to across the street at the Pritzker Pavilion. It’s only a block away, just a few minutes walk. The address of the Pritzker Pavilion is 205 E. Randolph. You enter it at Washington and Michigan. You can also take a tunnel from underneath Michigan Ave at Randolph across the street too. It’s inside Millennium Park, which is Chicago’s new fancy pansty architectural ado. You know, where the big bean sculpture is.
 
Seating is limited. But the time of the event is still the same: Friday, October 15th at 7PM.
 
Dave Eggers will be on tour for the next volume in the Haggis-on-Whey book series.
 
For many years the scientific and educational community has wondered and worried about the possibility that semi-sane scholar-pretenders would find the means to put out a series of reference books, filled with ludicrous misinformation and aimed at children. These books would inevitably find their way into the hands of households of well-meaning families, who would go to them for facts but instead find bizarre untruths. The books would look normal enough, but would read as if written by people who have eaten too many lead-based paint chips.
 
Well, happily, that day is upon us. We offer you GIRAFFES? GIRAFFES! and YOUR DISGUSTING HEAD, the first two volumes by Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey. A world-renowned and much feared expert on everything, Dr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey has seventeen degrees from eighteen institutions of higher learning. With her husband, Benny, she has traveled the world many times over, has learned about all aspects of life, including outer space and food, first hand.
 
Besides housing the greatest collection of factoids ever assembled, these books display full color photographs, charts and meaningless diagrams; a plethora of connect-the-dots and word find games; and the several pages devoted to cheap shots at Madagascar.
 
This event will feature a presentation from Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-On-Whey

Perpetual Motion Roadshow #17
featuring Todd Taylor, Darren O?Donnell
& Jonathan Messinger
Thursday, October 21st, 8:00 PM
 
Perpetual Motion Roadshow #17 features: Punk Rock\’s Studs Terkel TODD TAYLOR from L.A., end of the world idealist DARREN O\’DONNELL from Toronto, and transit tale-teller JONATHAN MESSINGER from Chicago!
 
Jonathan Messinger has written humor for McSweeney\’s Internet Tendency, Haypenny and Opium Magazine. He also served for two years as the editor of the humor magazine WheatBread Magazine, which won several awards during his tenure, and was involved, in two legal skirmishes. As a reporter with Pioneer Press in Illinois, he served for two years as a transportation writer before parlaying that experience into the online journal This is Grand: Stories of Chicago\’s Rapid Transit. On the Roadshow, he will perform funny and bizarre stories from trains and buses, and soliciting the audience for theirs.
(www.thisisgrand.org, jonathan@thisisgrand.org)
 
Todd Taylor has been called the Studs Terkel of punk rock. He is the co-editor, co-publisher of Razorcake Fanzine (www.razorcake.com) and Gorsky Books. Both enterprises hope to establish that punk can be ethical, vital, and fun without being tamed. For years prior, he helped run Flipside, living the motto, \”Too stupid to quit, too high to care.\” He\’s been published in Suburban Voice, Sassy, Dispatch, Barracuda, punkvoter.com. and is a regular contributor to Thrasher. His first book, Born to Rock, which he will be reading from, is a collection of essays and interviews he\’s conducted over the last eight years.
(www.razorcake.com, retodded@razorcake.com)
 
Darren O\’Donnell is a writer, director, performance artist, designer and artistic director of Mammalian Diving Reflex. His shows include A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, pppeeeaaaccceee, [boxhead], White Mice, Over, Who Shot Jacques Lacan?, Radio Rooster Says That\’s Bad and Mercy!; he has organized The Talking Creature, a continuing experiment in public discourse and published his first novel, Your Secrets Sleep with Me, with Coach House Books. He has also won a few awards for writing, directing and design. He will be doing something interactive and nervewracking.
(www.mammalian.ca, darren@mammalian.ca)
 
WWW.NOMEDIAKINGS.ORG

Art Spiegelman will besigning his new book In the Shadow Of No Towers
Wednesday, October 13th 6:30pm
FREE
 
For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No Towers, his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking Maus, is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day.
 
Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood, but the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda.
 
He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey–with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit–the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.
 
Art Spiegelman is cofounder/editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. From 1992 to 2002, he was a staff artist and writer for The New Yorker. Maus received the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
 
Art Spiegelman will be signing copies of In The Shadow of No Towers

Quimby’s Thirteenth Year Exhibition
At the Old Town School of Folk Music
Saturday, Sept 25th 5-7PM
FREE
 
Old Town School of Folk Music is letting us celebrate thirteen freakass years in the world of independent publishing, with an exhibit opening at their pad on September 25th that will stay up through the end of October. With refreshments, music and dancing. And if you\’re in the mood, stay for the show afterwards at the Old Town School. WLUW welcomes Over the Rhine with Special Guest Thea Gilmore. The Quimby\’s part of the evening is free, but the show is a separate event that you\’ll need to purchase tickets for, which you can do at the OTS at 773-728-6000. The address of the Old Town School of Folk Music is 4544 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625. This Quimby\’s and independent publishing exhibition will stay up until the end of October, so if you can\’t make it to the event, stop by and see it when you get the chance. For more info about the non-Quimby\’s portion of the evening, see http://www.oldtownschool.org

Joe Keithley reads fromI Shithead, a Life in PunkFriday, November 12th, 7:00 PMfree
 
Joe Keithley, aka Joey Shithead, founded legendary punk pioneers D.O.A. in 1978. Punk kings who spread counterculture around the world touring with bands like The Clash, The Ramones, The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Nirvana, PiL, Minor Threat. D.O.A. are also the subject of two tribute albums.
 
But punk is more than a style of music: it?s a political act, and D.O.A. have always had a social conscience, having performed in support of Greenpeace, women?s rape/crisis centers, prisoner rights, and anti-nuke and anti-globalization organizations. Twenty-five years later D.O.A. can claim sales of more than 500,000 copies of their eleven albums and tours in thirty different countries, and they are still going strong.
 
I, Shithead is Joe?s recollections of a life in punk, starting with a bunch of kids in Burnaby transfixed with the burgeoning punk movement, and traversing a generation disillusioned with the status quo: stories of riots, drinking, travelling, playing, and conquering all manner of obstacles through sheer determination. And through it all, Joe reveals that the famous D.O.A. slogan, talk – action = 0 is, for him, more than a soundbyte. The book also has an introduction by music producer Jack Rabid, publisher of seminal New York music magazine Big Takeover.
 
Joe Keithley will sign copies of I Shithead at the event
 
Checkout his website at: www.suddendeath.com

DOs & DON?Ts Book Release Event
With Gavin McInnes co-founder of Vice Magazine
Saturday, September 11th, 8:00 PM
 
Written by Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, Vice Magazine has put out a compilation of every “DO & DON?T” they have ever ran in the pages of their magazine (over ten years worth). There?s also hundreds more never before seen entries making the book weigh in at a grand total of 300+ pages of street fashion critiques, humor and venom. Vice started in Montreal as a small zine but grew into a “multi-channel brand” and moved to New York City.
 
For this event Gavin will present a slideshow of his 20 favorite DOs & DON?Ts from the book and then answer audience questions.
 
More info is at:www.viceland.com/dosanddonts/

Chuck Palahniukbook event sponsored byQuimby’s and the Chicago Public LibraryTuesday, September 28th, 6:00 PMFREEat the Harold Washington Library
 
Join Chuck Palahniuk as he tours in support of the paperback release of Diary. Chuck Palahniuk, the bestselling author of Fight Club, Choke, and Lullaby continues his twenty-first-century reinvention of the horror novel in this scary and profound look at our quest for some sort of immortality.
 
The Event will be at the Harold Washington Library. Located at 400 S. State St. Chicago IL 60605
 
More info is at: http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net

Calling on trans-activists, border crossers,and trespassers of all kinds!
Join PILOT at Quimby?s
Thursday, September 9th, 7:00 PM
FREE
 
SEPT 9TH is a PILOT TV Opening!
Come for the release of the PILOT artist book series, featuring a full-length CD. Also there will be free posters, videos, and down and dirty talking all over, even some street performance and a petting zoo.. Free milk and cookies will be served. This is your chance to meet the PILOT organizers and learn how to participate when PILOT TV happens in Chicago this fall, October 8-11 2004.
 
The Evenings festivities will also feature general foofiness and finesse from: TRI-STATE area (musical boys in docksiders) A COLONIAL ACT (duo ballet performance) and much more…
 
PILOT is Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass (a 4-day autonomous television studio)
 
Confused more info is at www.PilotChicago.org
 

Ladyfriend/Free Advice Zine TourSaturday, August, 21, 7:00pm
 
Don?t miss the Ladyfriend / Free Advice Interactive Zine Tour when it hits
Chicago! Ladyfriend zine is a biannual small-press publication celebrating
female friendship, among other things. Free Advice zine collects audio
advice from strangers on the street and presents their words of wisdom free
of charge in a handy, printed zine format… stick around and give your own
two cents at the end of the show! Artist and Zinester Christa Donner
launches new issues of both publications teams up with Chicago ladyfriends
Jennifer Justice, Steph Levi, Misty Funk, Maria Gigante and Lauren Portada
to read stories out loud, play a human-sized board game with audience
members, and lots of other fun, fun stuff.
 
More info is at:http://www.ladyfriend.homestead.com/events.html
 
As Always this event is FREE