Tag: store event

  • Nadine Nakanishi of Sonnenzimmer Reads From Formal Additive Programs

    This is not another portfolio book by an artist… or at least it’s trying not to be. Formal Additive Programs, Nadine Nakanishi’s first release is an attempt to provide insight into a daily art practice and process, while focusing on the commonalities of figurative and abstract images. Formal Additive Programs offers 18 simple instructions to help the reader expand upon a singular idea, a practice that aids Nakanishi in her art-making everyday.

    This book release party will also feature Dakota Brown and Nick Butcher. Brown, who wrote the poetic preface to the book, will be reading from his work. Butcher (www.nickbutcher.net) is to follow with a musical set, interpreting the 18 steps of instruction that make up the books content. The audience is encouraged to draw along with the instructions and the music.

    Can a set of instructions be so beautifully imbricated as to occlude their own identity as instructions? Can rules for drawing be expressed in a language that eschews the visual, a language more attuned to the patterns of acoustic space and kinesthetics? Nadine Nakanishi’s Formal Additive Programs answers these questions with an enthusiastic, quiet, unpretentious ‘yes’. The title indicates that these are programs for constructing patterns. With these programs, Nakanishi demonstrates how suggestions, rules, axioms, can allow emergent creative processes to thrive. The familiar paradox is that creativity can perhaps best be conceptualized in terms of limits. The particular can find its horizon in the infinite, as long as contingency is allowed to breathe life into the project. Formal Additive Programs builds bit-by-bit, but this is something very different from deductively-arranged building blocks.  These aren’t building blocks at all. To keep things aural: these are more like building tones.— Dave Park, Associate Professor of Communication, Lake Forest College

    Formal Additive Programs
    Format, 7” x 9.75”,
    Cover and Interior, 2-pms colors / Interior, 28 pages
    Hand-printed silk-screen dust jacket – First printing, limited Edition 250

    For more info about the author go to: www.yoneko.net, or www.sonnenzimmer.com

  • Thumbs + Knuckles and The Dreaded Biscuits Zine Launch and Reading

    What do you get when you mix 36 graphic designers, 34 writers, and 3 illustrators? The result is a double Zine featuring emerging writers and designers from Columbia College Chicago. Columbia faculty members Craig Jobson, Patrick Hogan, Jotham Burrello, Rob Duffer, and John Upchurch, the intrepid Production Manager, supervised the production of a 68-pp full color “Zine Columbia — Summer 2009,” aka “The Dreaded Biscuits / Thumbs and Knuckles”.

    The Zine’s on-line presence can be found at:

    http://adweb.colum.edu/~thumbsandknuckles/

    http://adweb.colum.edu/~thedreadedbiscuits/

    Please come celebrate the eighth Zine produced since 2003, and the first one printed offset. Featured readings and merriment will ensue between the book stacks of Quimby’s.

  • John Porcellino reads from Map of My Heart

    Map of My Heart celebrates the twentieth anniversary of John Porcellino’s seminal and influential comics zine, King-Cat Comics, which he began self-publishing in 1989, and which has been his predominant means of expression ever since. In this collection, Porcellino, while living in isolation and experiencing the pain of divorce, crafts a melancholic, tender graphic-ballad of heartbreak and reflection. Known for his sad, quiet honesty, rendered in his signature deceptively minimalist style, Porcellino has a command of graphic storytelling as sophisticated as the medium’s more visually intricate masters. Few other artists are able to so expertly contemplate the sadness, beauty, and wonder of life in so few lines.

    John Porcellino was born in Chicago in 1968, and began drawing and writing at an early age, compiling his work into little hand-made booklets. His acclaimed self-published zine, King-Cat Comics and Stories, begun in 1989, has found a devoted worldwide audience, and is one of the most influential comics series of the past twenty years.

    For more information please visit www.king-cat.net or www.drawnandquarterly.com.

    Also on the bill is musician and poet PATRICK PORTER who will read from his work and perform an acoustic set.

    “Beneath the crude linework and dream-journalism, Porcellino has crafted an affecting scrapbook of a part–time artist’s life. The decade-plus remove from these comics’ initial publication only adds another layer of poignancy, since so many of its concerns are those of a young man, unaccountably adrift in a decade geared towards his generation… A–”
    —THE ONION AV CLUB

    “Porcellino is a master at miniature poignance.” –ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  • Grant Reynolds Signs Comic Diorama

    Grant Reynolds has been making and self-publishing comics for the better part of his life. By the time you see him at this event he will have turned thirty years old only a few weeks prior. You might wanna wish him a happy birthday (belated) when you see him sitting at the table signing copies of his new book published by Top Shelf entitled Comic Diorama, or even ask how his summer was. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Grant Reynolds, where have I heard that name before?” …well, it might have been from The Skeleton News or Trubble Club, or you may have read one of his books, like Smaller Parts or To the Mouth of the Source…or maybe you both just talked about movies in someone’s kitchen at a party. In any case, if he owes you money, never returned that book he borrowed, or you’ve just got some personal score you’ve been waiting to settle, you’ll know where to find him on October 6th at 7pm.

    “Chicagoan mini-comics mastermind.”  — Al Burian, Burn Collector

    For more info: http://www.myspace.com/grantreynolds

  • Hans Rickheit Presents The Squirrel Machine

    WHAT IS THE SQUIRREL MACHINE? A rodent ensnarement device? A mechanism for concealing one’s guarded harvest? An anachronistic fable for the convulsive elite? A nugatory diversion for the subliterate? The answer to that question can be obtained in the form of an unusual new graphic novel in a book-signing tour ploughing its way through the northeast coast this Autumn.

    THE SQUIRREL MACHINE is the brainchild of HANS RICKHEIT, who will be making appearances to autograph books, make sketches and speak personally to curious readers.

    The Plot: Situated in a fictive 19th Century New England town, two brothers, Edmund and William Torpor confront public scorn when they reveal their musical creations built from strange technologies and scavenged animal carcasses. Driven to seek a concealment for their aberrant activities, they make a startling discovery. Will they divine the mystery of THE SQUIRREL MACHINE?

    This book is a meticulously-rendered creation that defies all known genres. It can best be described as “PROTO-SURREALIST” or “RETRO-FUTURIST” Disregarding labels and buzz-phrases, it is ultimately an immutably strange and haunting narrative that transcends known logics and presumptive dream-barriers. A distillation of subconscious beauty and madness. A dangerous object for the incautious. A revelation for the undernourished crypto-seeker .

    HANS RICKHEIT  was born in 1973 and grew up in New England, lived in the basement of an eccentric art gallery/performance space called the Zeitgeist Gallery from 1997-2002, and currently resides in Philadelphia. Aside from his many self-published efforts, he has appeared in many anthologies, including PAPER RODEO, HOAX and KRAMERS ERGOT.

    “Rickheit is a vastly under-seen talent.” – Tom Spurgeon, THE COMICS REPORTER

    www.squirrelmachine.org, www.thesquirrelmachine.blogspot.com www.chromefetuscomics.com

  • The Week Behind Celebrates 17 Years on the Internet

    On October 7, The Week Behind will celebrate its 17th anniversary as the oldest online magazine in America. Before Slate, before Salon, and almost 10 years before the invention of blogs, The Week Behind was entertaining Chicago audiences with its lively coverage of the arts, culture, politics and technology.

    Join original founders Scott Jacobs, Marilyn Wulff and Bob Brink discuss how The Week Behind evolved from the in-house newsletter of IPA, The Editing House into an Internet sensation (Cool Site of The Day on December 31, 1992.) Meet current contributors and find out how you can write for today’s magazine.

    On hand for this special celebration will be Stump Connolly, chief political correspondent of The Week Behind, reading and signing his recently released book about the 2008 Campaign The Long Slog: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The White House.

    The Long Slog is Connolly’s irreverent account of his 20 months following the presidential campaign. Read his first hand reports from New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio, see how he sneaks into the Republican and Democratic conventions, and join him for Barack Obama’s triumphant Election Night rally in Chicago.

    Rick Kogan calls Stump “as clear-eyed and sharp-eared a reporter as there is in the land.” Tom Geoghagen says he is “a modern day Poor Richard, a witness of uncommon good sense to the nonsense of our presidential elections . . . an American Original.”

    “I don’t think anyone had more fun covering the campaign than Stump, or reading him than me,” adds Bill Kurtis. “You laugh and learn at the same time.”

    For a lively evening of fun, politics and surprise guests, don’t miss The Week Behind Birthday Bash at Quimby’s. The first 20 people in the door are eligible to purchase the last 20 original copies of the 1992 classic “The Week Behind: A Year in the Life of Small Business.”

    For more info: www.theweekbehind.com

  • Jeff Phillips Reads From Whiskey Pike: A Bedtime Story for the Drinking Mankind

    Much as a child draws a picture of a favorite animal, Jeff Phillips has attempted to do something similar with a favorite beverage. It is illustrated in the fashion of a child’s bedtime story book. Only this story book delves into adult themes of corruption and takes us into the land of the source of an intoxicating ingredient, offering a bedtime story not for the dozing child but the soul of a somewhat hardened drinking type. Shane Bowermaster reaps the land and sells his crop of barley to sustain the family pastime and habit; whiskey. Inspired to try his hand at brewing the beverage of choice, a new trade consumes the Bowermaster family, leading them down a path toward one wild and wicked toast.

    “Through the construction of what may be called a bedtime story, Phillips extends a hand to the drunkard and by extension, to the modern reader who looks to fiction to fill up the emotional gaps left barren by historical platitude. So Phillips imbues his text with details from an alternate history, leaping ideas of the type told by a drunken dreamer who truly believes he is awake—“I can drive! I can drive!”—; so he does drive, forward and quick, passing through a national landscape so defined and attentive that the reader instantly recognizes the semi-soft surprise of an erection unexpectedly pushing against the base of a wooden dinner table in full use and spread. However, this same reader cannot identify the story’s setting or time period—1890s? 1970s?—unless hard pressed and squeezed. This is an unusual thing. Let it be known: “Whiskey Pike” is the intoxicating mixture of a young man under many influences.” – James N. Kienitz Wilkins, director of Nature Mature and Public Hearing.

    For more info: http://www.whiskeypike.com

  • Scott Inguito and Sandra Lim Read

    Visiting from San Francisco, poet and artist Scott Inguito will read from two poetry chapbooks along with Sandra Lim, who will read from her first book, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press).

    Scott Inguito is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His chapbook, Dear Jack, is out from Momotombo Press, and his latest chapbook, The Vernacular Sounds of Dog Noise, a collection of woofs, barks and yelps written in Mexico in January 2008, is something he is working on. His poems have appeared in Shampoo, Fence, and 1913: a journal of forms. His collage-play “Trying to Create Intimacy with a Narcissist” was performed at California College of Art, San Francisco, for Small Press Traffic, in December 2008. Scott lives in San Francisco. His paintings and pictures from his play can be seen at scottinguito.com.

    Sandra Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals including Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her book of poems, Loveliest Grotesque (2006), won the Kore Press First Book Award. She lives in San Francisco. She is currently the Elma Stuckey Emerging Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College in Chicago.

  • teddy merino reads *the city the earth the heart a happening*

    teddy marino (yes, all lowercase, he tells us) got his start as a poet while studying History at UW, Madison, and working at a daycare. He wrote about politics, the apocalypse, and sex. After graduating, he lived a year in Puebla, Mexico, where he taught English, volunteered for a labor rights organization, and lived in a Franciscan orphanage.

    In August of 2007 he moved to his native city of four generations. He found an Americorps job, working at an elementary school on the border of Garfield and Humboldt Park. He continues to work there as a teaching assistant and bicycle program manager. He writes about his (and the schools) neighborhood, about the city, people, and children.

    His first book, *the city the earth the heart a happening* is mostly about Chicago, with a little bit of Puebla, a couple poems from the East Coast, and a handful of love poems.  And this is what he tells us about it:

    “I want to celebrate before suffering the interminable winters of publishing companies whose bodily gases smell too much like roses for me. Broiler Plate: Italian sausage, Polish sausage, matzah balls, beef tacos, fried plantain, collared greens, and a barbecue seitan sandwich.  Broiler Plate: Looking for cultural nourishment of an unsung Chicago poet? Welcome to the party.”

  • SEAN FELIX READS FROM NAMELESS FACES

    Various works meant to warp your world view. Wither its laughing at the bizarre, reaching for the steak knife under the weight of melodic verses, or simply trying to contain a shiver, you will find yourself left slightly askew. Fresh from his stay at the psych ward SEAN FELIX exposes fragments of his mind without requiring the tokens usually necessary for a peepshow of this caliber. Subjects ranging from battles against a twisted god to the murder of a girlfriends mother will leave you wanting to reread the fluid narratives. Little girls with knife fixations, critiques toward the art world, man’s murderous narcissism, and the slow death that encompasses so many relationships are just pieces of a whole. Come hear a verbal menagerie of morbid curiosity, YOU ARE INVITED.

    NAMELESS FACES is a collection of short stories, excerpts, poetry, and rants. Inspired in part by actual events and also by events only taking place inside the authors head, distinguishing the two is a constant challenge. Sean Felix reflects on the abstractly complex as well as the absurdly apparent which binds us all. You will be only spectators awaiting the ambulance to arrive at the scene of the collision.

    SEAN FELIX is a resident of Chicago, is fascinated by pork products, hates electrical engineers, and is plotting to destroy straight leg pants (ladies, your feet look like elephant ears because of them, get a clue). This is the first of his viral distributions.