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Perpetual Motion Roadshow
Saturday September 3rd 7pm
 
For this installment of the Perpetual Motion Roadshow we offer readings from:
 
Ryan Robert Mullen from Wisconsin, author of short fiction. Check: www.getunderground.com
 
Tim Hall from New York writes fiction and essays, His novel Half Empty is out now from Undie Press
Check: www.tim-hall.com
 
Jennifer Lovegrove from Toronto who is a poet with books out now from ECW press.
Check: www.jenniferlovegrove.com
 
www.perpetualmotionroadshow.com

Damali Ayo will discuss and sign her new book How to Rent a NegroTuesday August 16th 7PM
 
How to Rent a Negro is framed as a handy guidebook that gives much-needed advice and tips on technique. It is actually a hilarious satirical look at race relations that reframes actual stories, techniques, requests, and responses gathered from the author’s 30-odd years of research and experience. It includes step-by-step outlines for renters to get the most for their money: how to grab black people’s hair, invite them to your party, get them to teach you how to dance; and for rentals, it gives tips on how to become successful and wealthy, including what to wear and topics of conversation to avoid. Punctuated by quotes from former renters, How to Rent a Negro shocks and amuses, presenting a strikingly stark mirror of human relationships.
 
Damali Ayo’s web site, www.rent-a-negro.com, has been featured in media outlets including the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Harpers Magazine, and Salon.com.
 
In her presentation, Ayo will read her favorite sections and tell some of the real-life stories that inspired the scenarios in the book.
 
Bring your camera and take a photo with Ayo in front
of a banner reading “my new black friend” or advertising themselves as “for rent.”

Sam Henderson author ofThe Magic WhistleTuesday, August 9th, 7:00 PM
FREE
 
SAM HENDERSON, 35, is living proof that Emmy nominees have to dive through couches for change. He has been a storyboard director for SpongeBob Squarepants and Camp Lazlo, and recently did a video for They Might Be Giants, but works mostly for print. He can be seen regularly in Nickelodeon magazine but his main vehicle is a comic called The Magic Whistle. Despite his high-profile gigs being for children, this is definitely not (unless you want it to be). Billed as the stuff that can?t go anywhere else, it is what he is most proud of.
 
Sam Henderson will sign his comics.

Ander Monson reads from OTHER ELECTRICITIES and VACATIONLANDSaturday, July 30th, 8:00 PMFREE
 
In Other Electricities we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Upper Michigan\’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. There is Crisco Hatfield, the breaker of arms; Bone, dropper of bowling balls off interstate overpasses; The Oracle of Apollo in Tapiola, who sees all; Christer, a pyromaniac collector of pornography who jumps off cliffs for kicks; and most importantly there is Liz, the book\’s central obsession, an unknowable girl who crashed through the ice on prom night. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices, and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves, and electricity are influential characters in themselves, affecting an entire community held together by the memories of those they have lost.
 
The poems in Vacationland are set in Michigan?s Upper Peninsula, land of weather and long winters. His images: hotel pools full of refuse, wadded ATM receipts, cracked windshields in a land of endless snow, that all, ultimately, add benevolence and poise to life?s darker moments. In Monson?s world, the nearest city is a four-hour car ride and isolation is the backdrop for Monson?s vital yet haunting imaginings. His words stay with you and penetrate the heart like a beam of sunlight breaking across the icy Lake Michigan shore.
 
Ander Monson grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He lived briefly in Saudi Arabia, Iowa, and in the Deep South, where he received his MFA from the University of Alabama. He is the editor of the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including The North American Review, Fence, Field, Gulf Coast, The Bellingham Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and the Mississippi Review, among others
 
Check Out: www.otherelectricities.com
 

The Bird Machine family celebratesPanda MeatSaturday, August 13th, 7PMFREE
 
Panda Meat is a cutting-edge collection of 110 contemporary underground and mainstream artists, illustrators, and graphic designers from a networked community of self-made artisans. In recent years, the world of independent poster artists has created a new revolution, bringing together designers from all around the world. This explosion of creativity has resulted in the equivalent of a new pop art movement that is continuously growing in popularity. Panda Meat is a source book to some of the great talent involved in this new movement. Each artist uses different media, but all of them work independently to manufacture their own products. Contact information for each artist is included in the back of the book. Edited by Frank Kozik, the widely-recognized master of concert poster art and author of Man’s Ruin, Ode to Joy, and Desperate Measures, Empty Pleasures.
 
Appearances from Bird Machine family folks:
Jay Ryan, Dan Grzeca, Nick Butcher
If you?re lucky, they?ll bring original prints to sell!
 
More info is at:
http://www.thebirdmachine.com
http://altpick.com/members.php?id=17507
http://www.foundation-gallery.org

Winners of the 27th AnnualInternational 3-Day Novel Contest,Meghan Austin & Shannon Mullally read from their NovelLove BlockThursday, August 11th, 8:00 PMFREE
 
LOVE BLOCK by Meghan Austin and Shannon Mullally is the Winner of the 27th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest. Love Block is a collaborative novel, written via phone and email by writers living on opposite ends of the United States. Through a series of correspondences, two secret agents debate, bicker and commiserate while they search for a mysterious cure for the lovelorn (possibly in the form of a \”love block\” potion that will foil any and all heartbreak). Love Block explores the question of whether or not humans should surrender to the idea of true love. It\’s funny, furious, sometimes crazy and always fast-moving, just like the 3-Day Novel contest itself.
 
Meghan Austin and Shannon Mullally met while earning their MFAs in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When they agreed to collaborate on this contest, Austin was living in Portland, Oregon and Mullally was living in Chicago. They both now live in Chicago, where they continue to study and write. Love Block is their first published novel.
 
The 3-Day Novel Contest has run every Labour Day Weekend for 28 years and has garnered a reputation as the cheeky and uncompromising rebel of literary forms. It has been called \”a fad,\” \”a threat,\” and a \”trial by deadline\” and it flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce. Although every entrant desires the Grand Prize of publication and instant fame, most enter the contest to shake off writers\’ block and to kick up their creativity. They?ll sweat, they?ll cry, their fingers will cramp?they may go mad?and they might just produce something amazing. And if they win, they?ll be published.
 
Checkout : www.3daynovel.com

Jake Austen celebrates the release of his new bookTV-a-Go-Go – Rock on TV from American Bandstand to American IdolFriday August 26 8PM
 
Jake Austen is the editor of Roctober magazine, produces a cable-access children’s television rock show called Chic-a-Go-Go, and writes for magazines including Playboy. He is the editor of A Friendly Game of Poker.
 
TV-a-Go-Go: Rock on TV from American Bandstand to American Idol
From Elvis and a hound dog wearing matching tuxedos and the comic adventures of artificially produced bands to elaborate music videos and contrived reality-show contests, television ?as this critical look brilliantly shows? has done a superb job of presenting the energy of rock in a fabulously entertaining but patently “fake” manner. The dichotomy of “fake” and “real” music as it is portrayed on television is presented in detail through many generations of rock music: the Monkees shared the charts with the Beatles, Tupac and Slayer fans voted for corny American Idols, and shows like Shindig! and Soul Train somehow captured the unhinged energy of rock far more effectively than most long-haired guitar-smashing acts. Also shown is how TV has often delighted in breaking the rules while still mostly playing by them: Bo Diddley defied Ed Sullivan and sang rock and roll after he had been told not to, the Chipmunks’ subversive antics prepared kids for punk rock, and things got out of hand when Saturday Night Live invited punk kids to attend a taping of the band Fear. Every aspect of the idiosyncratic history of rock and TV and their peculiar relationship is covered, including cartoon rock, music programming for African American audiences, punk on television, Michael Jackson’s life on TV, and the tortured history of MTV and its progeny.
 
This will be a release party, with readings, rare video clip screenings and more.

McSweeney?s presentsSalvador Plascencia and Paul La FargeMonday, August 15th, 7:00 PMFREE
 
THE PEOPLE OF PAPER BY SALVADOR PLASCENCIA After his wife leaves him, Federico de la Fe and his daughter Little Merced depart the town of Las Tortugas, Mexico and head for Los Angeles. There, with the aid of a local street gang and the prophetic powers of a baby Nostradamus, they engage in an epic battle to find a cure for sadness. Mechanical tortoises, disillusioned saints hiding in wrestling rings, a woman made of paper, and Rita Hayworth are a few of the players whose destinies intertwine in this story of war and lost love. The People of Paper is simultaneously a father-daughter immigration story, a wildly inventive reimagining of Southern Californian mythology, and an exploration of the limits of fiction. Part memoir, part lies, this is a book about the wounds inflicted by first love and sharp objects.
 
Salvador Plascencia was born in 1976 in Guadalajara, Mexico. Plascencia?s mother was a seamstress, his father a factory worker who moved frequently between California and their home in Jalisco. Growing up at his grandparents? farm, his extended family passed along a wealth of stories, some of which formed the inspiration for The People of Paper. His family eventually settled east of Los Angeles in the city of El Monte when Plascencia was eight years old. At the time, he spoke no English. Salvador Plascencia holds a BA in English from Whittier College and an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. He received a National Foundation for Advancement of the Arts Award in Fiction in 1996 and the Peter Nagoe Prize for Fiction in 2000. In 2001 he was awarded the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, the first fellow in fiction. The People of Paper is Plascencia?s first novel. His first published fiction appeared in McSweeney?s No. 12.
 
THE FACTS OF WINTER BY PAUL POISSEL TRANSLATED BY PAUL LA FARGE
Paul Poissel was not born in 1848. As a young man, he did not set out to become the greatest Turkish architect in Paris. He did not fail to become the greatest Turkish architect in Paris. He never became a poet, or invented puzzles for an illustrated magazine. In 1904, he did not write this book, The Facts of Winter. Paul La Farge has translated (from the original French) this collection of dreams?funny, haunting, enigmatic?all dreamed by people in and around Paris in 1881. La Farge?s afterword investigates the Facts? creation, uncovering startling revelations, unknown truths, and new falsehoods.
 
La Farge is a frequent contributor to McSweeney?s and is the author of Haussmann, or the Distinction, a New York Times Notable Book, and The Artist of the Missing, winner of the California Book Award. He is also a leading scholar on the work of Paul Poissel, one of the least known of the little-known French ?tiny metaphysician? writers of the late 19th century.

Book Signing with Etienne Le ComteSaturday, July 2nd, 4:00 PMFREE
 
Etienne Le Comte, is the publisher and artist behind Visceral Hump productions who\’s just completed The Stink Like Dog Collected. This collection is 112 pages of crazy drawings, ranging from a simple cartoony style to pictures with a Where\’s Waldo level of visual intensity. Seven years in the making the Stink Like Dog material originally started off as a series of free flyers that were printed together in smaller zines.
 
Etienne Le Comte is a 32 years old UK native & self-taught artist.
 
Check out: www.solo-associates.co.uk

The Secret Lives of Librarians with Jenna Freedman, Travis Fristoe, Jenn Phillips-Bacher, Keith Helt, Celia Perez
 
Monday June 27th 7:00PM
 
25,000 library workers will invade Chicago the last weekend in June to attend the American Library Association Annual Conference. Five librarians will break away from the madness of the McCormick Place on Monday, June 27, 2005 to share their passion for those photocopied, cut and paste productions we all know and love–zines! Join this group of zine-making librarians as they read from their zines and reveal the inner lives of librarians that give lie to the stereotype of the repressed bun-wearing, Dewey Decimal obsessed shusher. Donations to benefit the Alternative Press Center are welcomed!
 
Bios:
Jenna Freedman, the Coordinator of Reference Services at Barnard College Library in NYC, NY, started a zine collection at the college last year. She is also a member of the library worker activist group Radical Reference that supports activists and independent journalists “online and in the street.” Her zine is the Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout-Out.
 
Learning at a tender age that astronauts had to have perfect vision, Travis Fristoe accepted his bespectacled fate and instead devoted himself to libraries, amateur protest music & salvaging discarded bikes. He’s been doing zines for half his life now, which seems a really long time.
 
Riot Librarrrian busted out from the minds of two underwhelmed and underworked library school students, Jenn Phillips-Bacher and Sara Pete. Armed with typewriters, glue sticks, and a novice’s moxie, the girls pounded out Issue #1. Team RL left the publishing world for real jobs in Library Land once the zine hit the stands and degrees were in hand. Jenn Phillip-Bacher currently works as a reference librarian at Skokie Public Library (IL).
 
A librarian-in-training, Keith Helt feels weird about bios in general, but has been making zines since he was a wee lad of 15. When he’s not learning how to archive, he’s fretting about his band, the Rories and the long overdue next issue of his zine, Flotation Device.
 
Inspired by “Sassy” magazine, punk rock, and the the silly notion that other people care to read all about her business, Celia Perez started making zines many years ago. She still can’t figure out layouts to save her life, but she continues to publish zines including I Dreamed I Was Assertive, and most recently, Skate Tough You Little Girls, a zine about women in skateboarding. She is a reference and instruction librarian at Harold Washington College in Chicago where, in addition to helping students find information, she spends much of her time asking them to turn off their cell phones.
 
Links:
Alternative Press Center (http://www.altpress.org/)
Barnard College Library Zine Collection (http://www.barnard.edu/library/zines/)
Radical Reference (http://www.radicalreference.info/ALA)