Blog

  • Good Advice for Young Trendy People of All Ages Event

    Jennifer Blowdryer andMoonshine Shorey read fromGood Advice for Young Trendy People of All AgesTuesday, September 20th7PMFREE
     
    Good Advice for Young Trendy People of All Ages Edited by Jennifer Blowdryer is a countercultural self-help book compiled by a veteran of the underground who has spent 30 years in the alt-art trenches, these experiential, very real commentaries from todays underground luminaries offer honest and humorous advice on everything from Door Etiquette for the Nightlife-Challenged by Clint Catalyst to How to be an Art Star by downtown NYC scenester , Reverend Jen. Without a hint of irony, Good Advice shows would-be bohemians how things really are (How to Live in Debt by Mykel Board), instead of selling far-fetched dreams of writing the great novel or producing the top gallery show.
     
    Jennifer Blowdryer?s writing has appeared in Punk Globe, Maximum RocknRoll, Chic, Penthouse Forum, and Downtown. She has also written Modern English: A Trendy Slang Dictionary, The Laziest Secretary In The World, and White Trash Debutante. A writer for the NY Press, she lives in New York City.
     
    Moonshine Shorey a contributor to the book will also be on hand to read.

  • PAPER RAD Book Release Event

    PAPER RAD Book Release EventSaturday October 22nd 5PM
     
    How do you explain the new book by Paper Rad, Paper Rad, B.J. and da Dogs? Half Art Book, half graphic novel, this tome intersperses photographs, drawings, prints, and junk by Paper Rad with two graphic novellas (Spaceballz and Alfe) by Ben Jones. Paper Rad’s work synthesizes popular material from television, comics, video games, and advertising, and explodes with color, feeling, and good humor. This book, created and designed by the group, will explore the worlds of one of the most vibrant constellations of artists working today. Their website, paperrad.org, is one free Mega-Mall information overload for your soul. A mind-blower, for sure
     
    Paper Rad is Jessica Ciocci, her brother Jacob, and their friend Ben Jones. Since the year 2000 they have created a massive catalogue of self-published and self-distributed comics and magazines, videos, audio cassette tapes, hand-painted t-shirts, stuffed sewn dolls, audio cd-rs, and records. They have exhibited or performed at numerous galleries and museums around the world, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial, The 2004 Liverpool Biennial, Deitch Projects, The Institute of Contemporary Art, London, and The Tate Britain. Most recently, they completed two music videos for Beck and created a massive cardboard castle for Philadelphia?s Space 1026. Earlier this year, Paper Rad was named one of ArtReview?s 25 emerging artists. They are represented by Foxy Production.
     
    Paper Rad will sign their new book, show some of their video work, and maybe have some mini comics for sale.
     
    Check out their website: www.paperrad.org

  • McSweeney's Event with: Paul Collins, Nathan Rabin, Claire Zulkey, Elizabeth Crane

    Paul Collins, Nathan RabinClaire Zulkey, Elizabeth Crane Tuesday November 1st 7PM
     
    The Collins Library is proud to present the triumphant return of Harry Stephen Keeler?to some, an overlooked genius; to others, the Ed Wood of detective fiction. The Riddle of the Traveling Skull is perhaps his best-loved work. The adventure begins when a poem and a mysterious handbag lead a man to the grave of Legga, the Human Spider?and things just get stranger from there.
     
    The event will feature readings from:
     
    Paul Collins edits the Collins Library series for McSweeney’s Book, including their latest volume THE RIDDLE OF THE TRAVELING SKULL. His own most recent book is THE TROUBLE WITH TOM.
     
    Nathan Rabin is the head writer for The Onion AV Club, and featured in their interview collection THE TENACITY OF THE COCKROACH. He is a regular contributor to Air America and NPR’s Day to Day.
     
    Claire Zulkey is the author of GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, NPR and Second City, and she writes daily at zulkey.com .
     
    Elizabeth Crane is the author of two collections of short stories from Little, Brown, WHEN THE MESSENGER IS HOT and ALL THIS HEAVENLY GLORY, and writes frequently at elizabethcrane.com/blog/ .

  • Sander Hicks author The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistle-Blowers, and the Cover-Up

    Author Sander Hicks and Folk-Singer Holley Anderson Livein Support of Hicks?The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistle-Blowers, and the Cover-Up
    Monday Oct. 31st 7PM
     
    Sander Hicks is the investigative journalist and independent publisher who started Soft Skull Press and Vox Pop/DKMC. He has appeared on 60 Minutes, on HBO/Cinemax in the documentary, Horns and Halos, and has been featured in magazines Punk Planet and Silicon Alley Reporter. Hicks has done innovative reporting on 9/11 for the New York Press, Long Island Press, INN World Report Television, and the Guerrilla News Network (gnn.tv). Hicks claims to be the only reporter verbally abused by a member of the 9/11 Commission. Sander and Holley Anderson, his wife, run the Vox Pop coffeehouse, bookstore and media company in Brooklyn, NY. His live ?performance politics? on 10/31 at Quimby’s will have a special emphasis on the darkest secrets of the GOP, commenting on the little-known 1989 Bush White House call boys scandal and the possible Bush ties to Satanism and ritual murder.
     
    As publisher of the critical Bush biography Fortunate Son in 2001, Sander Hicks had a unique position from which to cast a hard look at the official story around the 9/11 attacks. The Big Wedding examines the CIA?s controlling, client relationship with Pakistani intelligence, which had close, documented, under-reported links to the 9/11 terrorists. Hicks acquired startling revelations from government whistleblowers, including lauded FBI Whistleblower Coleen Rowley, ATF Agent Steve Barborini, CIA asset Brad Ayers, and US Navy veteran/con-man Delmart Vreeland.
     
    Holley Anderson is a radical, smart, folky singer-songwriter and a partner at Vox Pop. Her music is both spiritual and political, the perspective of a young mother outraged at the current state of the world but empowered by a vision for social change.

  • GONE TOMORROW, the Hidden Life of Garbage with Heather Rodgers

    Heather Rodgers author of GONE TOMORROW, the Hidden Life of GarbageWednesday Nov. 9th 7PM
     
    The United States is the world capital of garbage; with just 5% of the planet?s population America generates 30% of the its trash. The average American creates a staggering 4.5 pounds of rubbish daily, but garbage is a global problem. Consider that the Pacific Ocean is now six times more abundant with plastic waste than zooplankton.
     
    Everyone makes garbage. It?s there all the time, in the corner of our kitchens, in the bins next to our desks. But trash is also always in the process of disappearing?getting quickly, almost imperceptibly whisked out of sight. But where does it all go? And what is the impact of garbage on the planet?
     
    In GONE TOMORROW journalist Heather Rogers addresses these questions by guiding us through the grisly, oddly fascinating underworld of trash. Excavating the history of rubbish handling from the 1800s?an era of garbage-grazing urban hogs and dump-dwelling rag pickers?to the present, with its brutally violent mob-controlled cartels and high-tech ?mega-fills? operated by multi-billion-dollar garbage corporations, Rogers investigates the roots of today?s waste-addicted culture.
     
    Over the past 30 years, garbage output in the US has doubled. GONE TOMORROW explains that, despite popular wisdom, this explosion of rubbish is not the sole responsibility of the consumer. In fact, shoppers often have little choice in the wastes they generate. Consider packaging: tossed cans, bottles, boxes and wrappers now take up more than a third of all landfill space. More prolific today than ever before, packaging is garbage waiting to happen.
     
    Once buried or burned, trash is hardly benign. Landfills, even the most state-of-the-art, are environmental time bombs. They spew greenhouse gases, and leach hazardous chemicals and heavy metals into groundwater and soil. Waste incinerators are no less disastrous. They emit 70% of the world?s dioxin, and pollute the air with toxic particulate matter and a host of gases that cause acid rain.
     
    GONE TOMORROW also explores the politics of recycling, which is widely embraced?more Americans recycle than vote?but has serious limitations, and, as Rogers points out, should only be seen as a first step toward more fundamental solutions.
     
    Part expos?, part social commentary, GONE TOMORROW traces the connection between modern industrial production, consumer culture, and our disposable lifestyle. Read it and you?ll never think of garbage the same way again.
     
    Heather Rogers is a writer, journalist, and filmmaker. Her documentary film Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (2002) screened in festivals around the globe. Her articles have appeared in Utne Reader, Z Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Third Text, and Art and Design. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  • Stencil Workshop @ Quimby's Bridgeport

    Quimby’s Bridgeport is at 3201 S. Morgan, which is south of W. 31st street and west of Halsted, between and S. Aberdeen and S. Lituanica Ave.
     
    Sunday Oct 23rd 6PM
    Stencil Workshop:
    Free
    We will have some cardboard and cutting utensils you just need to bring
    images to work with and learn the basics of stencil making, Marty Garcia
    from the Southside artist collective “House of Payne” will be your will be
    leading the workshop. Check out www.casadepayne.org
     
    This event is part of Select Media Festival, full line up and info can be found atwww.selectmediafestival.org

  • Randall Bailey @ Quimby's Bridgeport

    Quimby’s Bridgeport is at 3201 S. Morgan, which is south of W. 31st street and west of Halsted, between and S. Aberdeen and S. Lituanica Ave.
     
    Sunday Oct 30th 5PM
    Free
    Randall Bailey local artist behind “Slitte” & “The Christopher Worm”
    presents an interactive presentation with a sort of artificial intelligence
    – in that a sort of communication is established between the viewer and
    what is being viewed. Using original drawings, sound and collage Randall will do something strange to your mind.
     
    This event is part of Select Media Festival, full line up and info can be found atwww.selectmediafestival.org

  • Exquisite Corpse making with Grant Reynolds

    Exquisite Corpse making with local comics artist Grant Reynolds Wednesday, September 7th, 7PM
    FREE
     
    Grant Reynolds is twenty-six (26) and has lived in more apartments than years he\’s been alive. He\’s been drawings comics since at least fourth grade, mostly in the form of newspaper comic strips and short-run minis. His first professionally printed book Smaller Parts is totally available like, right now. As for street-cred, Grant has boatloads, and he owns almost two pairs of sturdy pants, though he has almost no money of which to speak.
     
    For this event Grant will be hosting a night of exquisite corpse making. It\’ll go down something like this: a space will be cleared for folding chairs and a table. On the table the following will be placed: clipboards (near twenty), a stack of blank paper (folded into thirds), some Bic-type pens, and two baskets. The event will be contained to the back half of the store and will carry a very chill vibe of good, clean fun (although Grant is sure almost nobody will be able to resist the impulse to draw giant excruciating looking genitals on the corpses at least once during the event). The rules of exquisite corpse making will be briefly explained at the beginning of the event (and throughout as needed). They are these: take a sheet of folded paper from the Unfinished Corpse basket and do a drawing on the top third of the sheet (also write your name in the corner), then fold appropriately so that the drawing is all hidden from view and place the sheet back into the Unfinished Corpse basket. Everyone keeps doing this on different sheets of paper until all three panels are finished by three different people. Then the finished drawings are placed in the Completed Corpse basket, where they will be revealed at the end of the event. Everyone gets to take home their respectively named drawing to put on their refrigerators at home. Grant?s books will be signed and sold throughout the evening. Also, during the event the band The Ink Spots will be piped in through the overhead, and some sort of complementary warm cheap beverage in cans will be served.
     
    Additional information on Grant and his comics can be accessed at www.grantreynolds.net

  • Adrian Tomine & Seth!

    Mon, Nov 7th, 7PM
    Join Seth (Palooka-Ville, Clyde Fans, Wembelton Green) and
    Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve, Summer Blond, Sleepwalk)
    as they sign books and comics at Quimby?s
     
    While still in high school, Adrian Tomine started writing and drawing his mini-comic Optic Nerve. After some success Adrian began producing Optic Nerve as a regular comic book series for Drawn & Quarterly. D&Q also published Sleepwalk and Other Stories collecting the first four issues of Optic Nerve it remains a best-seller for the company Adrian?s work has graced numerous CD and album covers as well as magazines like The New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Time.
     
    Aside from the forthcoming issue of Optic Nerve, Adrian has recently edited The Push Man and Other Stories the debut volume in a groundbreaking new series that collects Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s short stories about Japanese urban life.
     
    Seth was a childhood fan of “Peanuts” and Jack Kirby?s “Eternals,” Seth was also influenced by the work of R. Crumb, Edward Gorey, the Hernandez Bros., Herge, Yves Chaland, John Stanley, and the cool, wry wit of mid-century “New Yorker” cartoonists. Drawing from this disparate group of inspirations Seth has distilled one of the most distinctive and recognizable cartooning styles of the past decade and has his illustrations in The Washington Post, Details, Spin, The New York Times, and the New Yorker. He is the author of Palooka-Ville and its two collections Clyde Fans and It’s A Good Life. He the lead designer on the 27 vol. project The Complete Peanuts, Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario with five cats, a huge collection of vintage records, comic books.
     
    With his new Graphic Novel Wimbledon Green, Seth creates a farcical world of the people whose passion lies in the need to own comic books and only in pristine, mint condition. A charming and amusing caper where comic-book collecting is a world of intrigue and high finance. Part riotous chase, part whimsical character sketch, Wimbledon Green looks at the need to collect and the need to reinvent oneself.

  • 33 1/3 EVENT

    Saturday Nov. 19th 7PMan event for two of our 33 1/3 series authors: J. Niimi, who wrote a title in the series on Murmur and Franklin Bruno, the author of a book about Elvis Costello\’s Armed Forces.
     
    More Info TBA