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THE2NDHAND presents an evening of readings!
Saturday, July 9th, 7:30 PM
FREE
 
THE2NDHAND broadsheet, that 11″x17″ slap of glossy paper you’ve come to know and love over the years, is undergoing something of a metamorphosis. This reading celebrates the last “issue as you know it,” #17, and even now it’s a little fucked-up: I mean, what’s with the color? THE2NDHAND #17 features fiction by American expatriated to Egypt M. Lynx Qualey and Chicagoans Joe Meno and, for the first time in THE2NDHAND, C.T. Ballentine, making this the issue of initials, maybe, to end all issues of initials. OK, seriously, this one is damned good, and it’s the last with more than one writer (THE2NDHAND’s 11″x17″ slap of paper will herewith feature a single, long story), so get out here and pick it up, damnit. We’ll tell you stories while you’re here.
 
With readings from:
 
C.T. Ballentine lives and writes in Chicago. His “Never Die During Winter” is featured in THE2NDHAND #17. He also publishes the zine Aftercrossward Special.
 
Jeb Gleason-Allured is THE2NDHAND’s web submissions editor in addition to being a sort-of genius.
 
Joe Meno is author most recently of the novel Hairstyles of the Damned and a contributor to a host of magazines and journals, including Punk Planet. A story collection, Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, is due out this fall, and Meno’s “Animals in the Zoo” short story is featured in THE2NDHAND #17
 
Jonathan Messinger is proprietor at thisisgrand.org, where he catalogs stories of Chicago’s rapid transit. He’s also a fine writer.
 
Todd Dills, THE2NDHAND’s editor emeritus, or something, will host.

Book Event forWOMEN AND SOCIALISMEssays on Women’s LiberationBy Sharon SmithSaturday June 25th 4PM
 
Join Sharon Smith as she discusses WOMEN AND SOCIALISM (Haymarket Books 2005). Three decades have passed since the heyday of the women’s liberation movement, yet women remain oppressed the world over. Mainstream feminism has shifted steadily rightward since the 1970s–embracing Bush’s war on Afghanistan in 2001, and even endorsing Democratic Party efforts to seek “common ground” with abortion opponents after John Kerry’s defeat in 2004. This approach has proven disastrous for women, from the US to Afghanistan.
 
This collection of essays examines these issues from a Marxist perspective–addressing the reasons why women are oppressed, the different nature of oppression between women of different social classes, and the basis for building a movement that can end women’s oppression, along with all other forms of inequality.
 
“Sharon Smith’s work, spanning three decades of events affecting women, provides a valuable and uncommon perspective on the oppression and liberation of women. Her understanding of the grounding of women’s oppression in class society, her vision of solidarity among women and men, and her critique of ideologies of seism and the rollback of the women’s movement are tremendously important contributions to women’s studies. More than that, the accessible writing and incisive assessment of the movement’s gains and losses are indispensible for activists for women’s liberation today.”–Dana Cloud, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, University of Texas, Austin
 
Sharon Smith is the author of numerous articles on women’s liberation and the US working class. Her writings appear regularly in Socialist Worker newspaper, Counterpunch website, and the International Socialist Review.
 
Haymarket Books is a non-profit, progressive book distributor and publisher based in Chicago; that has relationships with various social justice and activist campus-based groups in the city.
 

SLEAZOID EXPRESS 25TH ANNIVERSARYFriday, June 24th, 8:00 PMFREE
 
This June, the groundbreaking cinema publication Sleazoid Express celebrates its twenty fifth anniversary. Sleazoid Express was originally founded by Bill Landis. In June 1980, living in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street with only a manual typewriter at his disposal, Landis created the first issue of Sleazoid Express.
 
The periodical became a one-sheet bi-weekly giveaway at bookstores, record stores and any sort of venue where people displayed a strong interest in film One theory driving Sleazoid Express was that there were no distinctions between art, underground and exploitation movies. Sleazoid Express also featured tie-in screenings at hipster venues such as the Club 57, the Mudd Club, and Danceteria. Classic exploitation and underground movies including Mondo Cane, Toys Are Not For Children and The Chelsea Girls were shown to overcapacity crowds. It held the first major festival of exploitation movies at New York?s culty Rocky Horror showcase at the 8the
 
By the end of 1981 Sleazoid developed into less of a periodical specifically about motion pictures than a document of Landis? participational experiences in Times Square. These included stints as adult theater manager, projectionist, ticket taker, and involvement in a host of vice related activity that fell between these cracks.
 
By this time in the mid-1980s, Sleazoid Express became portrayed by such periodicals as Rolling Stone and Film Comment. Sleazoid Express became recognized as the original movie ?zine,? as well as a living, breathing document of the red lit Times Square lifestyle.
 
These articles about Landis?s work in Sleazoid Express attracted the attention of burgeoning film writer and sexual documentarian Michelle Clifford. They collaborated on pieces for publications including Film Comment, The Village Voice, Hustler, Carbon 14, the book on the HIV situation Beyond Crisis and an ACLU handbook on the same, and Screw on the heyday of Times Square. Together the two collaborated on the biography of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, Anger: the Unauthorized Biography (HarperCollins, 1995).
 
Clifford took the Sleazoid aesthetic one step further by declaring no difference between pornographic, art, exploitation and underground films. In 1997, she founded her ?journal of sexual curiousity,? Metasex. Metasex concentrated on the illusion created by adult movies as compared to the real lives of their performers and makers and the entire vice lifestyle of the old Times Square.
 
In 1999, Clifford partnered with Landis to revamp Sleazoid Express and authored Sleazoid Express: A Mind Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouses of Times Square (Simon and Schuster, 2002), a look at the aesthetics of key exploitation films and genres seen within the theatrical settings of the old Times Square. The book reached a whole new young audience of film fans who had become familiar with the movies through the advent of home video and DVD.
 
Landis and Clifford continue to collaborate on Sleazoid Express and Metasex in monograph form, and have published eleven issues of their publications.
Sleazoid Express is on the web at www.sleazoidexpress.com and Metasex?s website appears at www.metasex.org. Both have recently relocated to Chicago and will be on hand with a new issue of Sleazoid Express to discuss and sign.
 

Nostalgia Digest MagazineSaturday, June 18th, 4:00 PM
 
Steve Darnall is the editor and publisher of Nostalgia Digest Magazine, a publication devoted to chronicling life and popular culture during the first half of the 20th century. Every issue of Nostalgia Digest Magazine features original articles covering all aspects of life during the “Golden Age” of entertainment (radio, movies, music, television), written by those who lived it and those who love it.
 
The new Summer issue of Nostalgia Digest Magazine features articles by Radio Hall of Fame member Norman Corwin and Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Kevin Murphy, in addition to articles about Mel Blanc, The Lost Weekend, singer Wanda Jackson, tempestuous musician Artie Shaw, artist J.C. Leyendecker, the gone-but-not-forgotten Olson Rug Waterfall, science fiction on radio and much more!
 
In lieu of doing a ‘reading” Steve Darnell will spend a little time discussing the modern-day relevance of the Golden Age of Radio, with sound samples and perhaps a surprise or two.

Dive Friday withJonathan Stockton and Kirby GannFriday, June 17th, 7:00 PMFREE
 
Ig Publishing presents Dive Friday, featuring Jonathan Stockton, reading from his seminal study of Chicago’s seedy underworld, Chicago’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Windy City, and Kirby Gann, reading from his newly released novel, Our Napoleon in Rags, most of which is set in a dive bar.
 
Our Napoleon in Rags centers around Haycraft Keebler, bipolar son of a famous politician, who thinks he canchange the world. And he will do anything, legal or otherwise, to inspire the people of Montreux, a decaying city in the heartland of America, to rise up against the powers that be and restore the city to its former glory. Haycraft’s home away from home is the Don Quixote, a dive bar in the heart of the heart of the city, and the regulars, long used to Haycraft’s schemes, keep watch over their bipolar “Napoleon in Rags.” However, the bonds that hold this “family” together are forever changed when Haycraft falls in love with a fifteen-year old male hustler. Weaving the contemporary hot button issues of mental illness, homophobia, racism and police brutality through a novel that is Victorian in its graceful storytelling,
 
Chicago?s Best Dive Bars features opinionated reviews of over 90 of the grungiest and grittiest drinking establishments in the Windy City. If you want to avoid the tourist traps listed in those ?other? bar guides and find out where the ?real? people do their drinking, then Chicago?s Best Dive Bars, is the drinking person?s guide to the delightfully filthy underside of Chicago bar life.
 
Kirby Gann’s short fiction has appeared in Witness, The Crescent Review, American Writing, The Louisville Review, The Southeast Review, and The Southern Indiana Review. He is also Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the MFA Program at Spalding University. And, he went to college in Chicago.
 
Jonathan Stockton is freelance writer, proofreader and Leap Year Baby. He lives, works and recovers the next day in Chicago.
 

April 20 2005, 7:30 PM
Also not at Quimby’s but we’ll be selling books there:
Nextbook sponsors Esther Freud
PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT IS NOT AT QUIMBYS!!!!!!!!!!
You must go to:
Beat Kitchen, 2100 W Belmont
Don’t miss Esther Freud, daughter of the artist Lucian Freud and
great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. Her first book, Hideous
Kinky, about two small girls and their bohemian mother in Morocco, was based
on her own nomadic childhood (and made into an amazing film with Kate
Winslet). Her latest book, The Sea House, darts between past
and present: an architect, his wife, and a German refugee in 1953, and a
young woman 50 years later, piecing their letters and lives back together.
Freud’s other novels include Peerless Flats, Summer at Gaglow, and The Wild.
In 1993, she was selected by Granta as one of the 20 Best Young British
Novelists.
For more info about Nextbook events, see
http://www.nextbook.org/localprograms/chicago_readings.html

“We will Rock you”Saturday, June 18th, 8:00 PMFREE
 
“We will Rock you” will be Chicago’s first ever celebration of the mixtape–audience members will each bring a mix cd to swap with someone at the reading.
 
Featuring readings and music by:
 
Joe Meno, Punk Planet contributing editor and author of Hairstyles of the Damned
 
Sean Carswell, Razorcake editor and author of Barney’s Crew
 
Mickey Hess, 2nd Hand contributor and author of Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory
 
Anne E. Moore, Punk Planet editor and author of Hey Kidz, buy this book!
 
Liz Mason editor Caboose zine
 
plus music from PAL, the greatest band in Chicago
 

Sam Brumbaugh reads from
GOODBYE, GOODNESS
Wednesday, April 27th, 7PM
FREE
 
Hayward Theiss is on the lam, hiding out in a Malibu beach house that is not his, and trying to understand how he got there. A car crash, a bag of dope, a sinister producer, and his best friend?s strange escape from rehab all figure into the story. To further complicate matters, Hayward is the great-grandson of a massively ambitious robber baron named Finn Theiss, who had a long-ago affair with the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Hayward begins to untangle the convoluted estrangement between these two, and confronts the possibility that Annie Oakley is in fact his great-grandmother. The novel includes beautifully interwoven excerpts from Oakley?s autobiography that have never appeared in book form. Goodbye, Goodness is a simultaneously hopeful and bleakly realistic, hilarious, and devastatingly sad book about the American dream coming to the end of the line.
 
Brumbaugh writes with the exquisite, nonchalant precision of a master chef preparing an early dinner for friends. Readers will be thrilled at the arrival of this new voice?and this new take on coming of age while fervently reckoning with the past.
 
Sam Brumbaugh has worked in the music industry for two decades, touring with bands such as Pavement, Cat Power, and Mogwai, producing music specials for PBS, and, most recently, a documentary on the great Texas musician Townes Van Zandt. His fiction has been published in Open City magazine and The Southwest Review. A relative of Annie Oakley himself, he lives in New York City.
 
For the event Sam Brumbaugh will read and sign copies of his book.

DAN GLEASON LIVE or LIVING
MARK THE CALENDARIOS- MAY 28, 2005, IT’S A SATURDAY,
AT 6PM- READING AT QUIMby’S.
 
AND THIS TIME, I’VE GOT DANCERS.-D.G.?
 
In this his third Quimby’s Reading, Dan Gleason will talk of the scintillating lifestyle he leads, discuss his cult usa-esque with an
extra dollop of liberty. He promises to, sport the latest fashions, read pages of smut, whine about the man, and kiss any portly infant placed before him.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal reads & signs
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life Tuesday, February 1st, 7:00 PM
FREE
 
Amy Krouse Rosenthal is, alphabetically, an author of adult and children?s books; contributor to magazines and NPR; host of the literary and music variety show Writers? Block Party on WBEZ radio; and mother of some kids. She lives in Chicago.
 
How do you conjure a life? Give the truest account of what you saw, felt, learned, loved, strived for? For Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the surprising answer came in the form of an encyclopedia. In Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life she has ingeniously adapted this centuries-old format for conveying knowledge into a poignant, wise, often funny, fully realized memoir. Using mostly short entries organized from A to Z, many of which are cross-referenced, Rosenthal captures in wonderful and episodic detail the moments, observations, and emotions that comprise a contemporary life. Start anywhere?preferably at the beginning?and see how one young woman?s alphabetized existence can open up and define the world in new and unexpected ways.
 
Amy Krouse Rosenthal will read from and sign copies of her book
 
Visit www.encyclopediaofanordinarylife.com