Tag: Store Events

Sid Yiddish and Mykel Board at Quimby’s!

Tuesday, October 9th, 7:00 PM
FREE

Join Sid Yiddish and Mykel Board for an evening of reading & performing poetry/essays & some performance pieces in a couple of instances. Sid Yiddish will be reading poems from his upcoming book Our Love for Liverpool, a collaboration written with help from his mother.

Sid Yiddish is an international industrial poet-actor-throat singing-tap-dancing furby spy, made up of refrigerated leftovers. He has performed throughout the United States with and without his nine furbies & has widely published. He worked diligently as the Chicago coordinator for the Bathroom Poetry Installation Project this past summer. In his spare time, he roots out sounds on his 3 Shofars (ram’s horns), bugle and trumpet, to be in harmony with crows and furbies worldwide. He resides in Evanston, Illinois.

Mykel Board is a regularly published journalist, especially well known for his articles in Maximum RocknRoll. When he turned 12 he began to visit New York weekly with his Father, around 14 he began to visit the city by himself, during this time he discovered Greenwich Village. As time passed he began to associate with the yippie movement. He met Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Bob Fass, and Jerry Rubin. Mykel meshed well with the yippie idea of revolution through having a good time. Mykel has worked at England’s famous anarchist newspaper Freedom. In 2005, Garrett County Press published his book Even A Daughter Is Better Than Nothing, Mykel’s memoir about living and working in Mongolia.

websites:
Sid Yiddish: http://themishegasmaster.blogspot.com
Mykel Boards: www.mykelboard.com

Joe Meno, Micky Hess & Gretchen Kalwinski at Quimby’s!

Friday, Sep 14th, 7:00 PM
FREE

Long before he established himself as an indie-publishing sensation with his hit novels Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails, Joe Meno brought out his debut novel, Tender As Hellfire, with St. Martin’s Press. Here, with a re-edited paperback edition, Meno limns a near-fantastical world of trailer park floozies, broken-down ’76 Impalas, lost glass eyes, and the daily experiences of two boys trying to make sense of their random, sharp lives.

Dough and Pill are brothers bound by more than blood. The anguish of their past, the terror of their present, and the uncertainty of their future all underscore the only truth that is within their grasp: each other. For beneath the cruel surface of their trailer park community lies a menagerie of odd characters, each one strange yet somehow beautiful. Surrounded by the strange and displaced, Dough and Pill must navigate through a world of constant pain and confusion. Finding beauty in unexpected places and maintaining a reverence for hard-won scars, these two brothers learn, finally, that even broken things can be perfect.

Joe Meno is the author of the novels Hairstyles of the Damned, The Boy Detective Fails, How the Hula Girl Sings, and Tender As Hellfire. He was the winner of the 2003 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and is a professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Joining Joe Meno in reading for this event will be Micky Hess and Gretchen Kalwinski.

Is Hip Hop Dead? The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Most Wanted Music Description: Proclamations of hip hop’s death have flooded the airwaves. The issue may have reached its boiling point in Nas’s 2006 album Hip Hop is Dead. Nas’s album is driven by nostalgia for a mythically pure moment in hip hop’s history, when the music was motivated by artistic passion, instead of base commercialism. In the course of this same album, however, Nas himself brags about making money for his particular record label. These and similar contradictions are emblematic of the complex forces underlying the dialogue that keeps hip hop a vital element of our culture. Through the lens of hip hop, and the threats to hip hop culture, author Mickey Hess is able to confront a range of important issues, including race, class, criminality, authenticity, the media, and personal identity.

Mickey Hess likes to think about rap music. He is Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, and the author of Is Hip Hop Dead? The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Most Wanted Music (Praeger). His memoir Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory will be reissued by Garrett County Press next summer. His stories have been featured in Ninth Letter, Punk Planet, and The McSweeney’s Humor Anthology.”

Gretchen Kalwinski has freelanced for: Stop Smiling, the Chicago Reader, Venus, UR Chicago, and Punk Planet about topics as varied as books, restaurants, theater, a lion and tiger den, and audio art. Kalwinski holds an English degree from Indiana University and has worked as an independent bookseller in San Francisco and Chicago, an editorial assistant for the University of Chicago Press, and the permissions coordinator for the Poetry Foundation. She has read her short fiction for the Guild Complex and Dollar Store reading series, and studied privately with poet Diane Di Prima. Her poems and short stories have been published in THE2NDHAND literary broadsheet and Paterson Literary Review, and she is cofounder and coeditor of Literago.org, a literary website. She currently works as the Associate Features Editor at Time Out Chicago magazine.

A Stoopid Pigeon Treasury signing at Quimby’s!
Saturday, Sep 1st, 7:00 PM
FREE

This will be a book signing for the comic book A Stoopid Pigeon Treasury. Stoopid Pigeon has been an on going web comic for over six years now. A Stoopid Pigeon Treasury is the first print collection of strips from the series.

For this signing Both of the creators of this comic book Brett Neveu (writer) and Richard Sparks (artist) will be present to sign books and discuss their work. Both men are from Chicago

Check it out on-line!

Loaded Blanks presents a Comic Art Battle at Quimby’s!

Thursday, Aug 30th, 7:00 PM
FREE

To celebrate the release of Loaded Blanks Greetings series two Loaded blanks and Quimby’s will host a “Comic Art Battle,” featuring several of the artists and creators behind the new line of cards. A cross between “Win, Lose or Draw”, “Whose Line is it, Anyway?”, and Professional Wrestling, the “COMIC ART BATTLE” pits the comic book world’s most talented creators, writers and artists against each other in a clash of lightning-quick wits and superior spontaneous draftsmanship!

A successful team of battlers will have to deploy charisma and strategy as well as talent in order to win over the audience during a series of timed matches, all of which are heavy on audience participation and ultimately judged by audience applause. The menagerie of challenges ranges from one-on-one cage matches where two artists must sketch a volunteer from the audience in an audience-suggested setting, to an all-out brawl where every team member must get up on stage at once and put their heads together to create a six-panel comic book page based on an audience-suggested theme in under five minutes.

Audience members will have the chance to win free cards, hot of the press and a chance to embarrass themselves on stage in front of their peers.

With Featured Performers/ Combatants:
Lilli Carre (Tales of Woodsman Pete, Deep Sea Diving)
Grant Reynolds (To The Mouth Of The Source, Tales of Achilles, Loaded Blanks illustrator)
Laura Park (Loaded Blanks illustrator)
Ezra Claytan Daniels (The Changers, Loaded Blanks illustrator and co-owner)

More info about Loaded Blanks:

Sure, You Could Let A Corporate Greeting Card Company Do Your Thinking For You. Or You Could Get “Loaded”.

Greeting Cards Just Got Fun.

Chicago, IL, August 24, 2007 – Buying a greeting card is something almost everyone does at least once in their lives. The problem with mainstream greeting cards is they can’t always capture a person’s unique flavor of humor or sentiment, leaving a glaring void on the shelves for those who want to say “I love you” minus the hearts and flowers.

The search for that perfect greeting card has become twice as easy with the release of the second series of Loaded Blanks Greetings. This time, we’ve assembled an all-female roster of the indie comics and illustration world’s most dynamic voices to create 12 original works of full-color comic art. As always, the hook is that the consumers fill in the blank text bubbles themselves.

Series Two feature a variety of artists from all over the country including indie comics wunderkind and filmmaker Lilli Carre (Tales of Woodsman Pete, Top Shelf Comics), performance artist and graphic novelist Dame Darcy (Meat Cake, Fantagraphics), poster and clothing designer Eleanor Grosch (Pushmepullyou Design) and recording artist Shelley Short (Hush Records). While some the artists have been featured in publications running the gamut from National Geographic and Nickelodeon Magazine to Magnet and Venus Zine, the appeal to put their other projects on hold to create a greeting card was more than just for the fun of it. “The great thing about starting an endeavor like this is that you can do things the way you wish every company would. For us, that means being very environmentally responsible and community-minded,” says Daniels. “As always, all our cards are printed on 100% recycled paper. Series Two also features a Breast Cancer Awareness card, and every penny we earn from it will be donated to breast cancer research.”

Loaded Blanks Greetings is nationally distributed through Diamond Comics, buyolympia.com, thedramastore.org and can currently be found in Chicago Comics, Quimby’s, Women and Children First and Wolfbait, with more Chicagoland locations added every day.

Lawrence Santoro at Quimby’s!
Thursday Aug 16th 7PM
FREE

This will be a reading/signing of the book, “Just North of Nowhere.” Set in Bluffton, a small town in the drift less area of the upper Midwest the book deals with the idea that land and its history can mark and alter the people who live on it. Readers familiar with Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine” or Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John tales will recognize Bluffton and “Just North…” as a spiritual descendant.

A two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award of the Horror Writers Association, Lawrence Santoro has been writing creepy tales since he was five years old. As associate producer of the syndicated television series, “Hyde & Seeke,” Larry wrote, directed and supervised production during the comedy/mystery show’s first season. In 2001 his novella “God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him” was Stoker nominated.  His audio adaptation and production of Gene Wolfe’s “The Tree Is My Hat,” featuring best-selling author Neil Gaiman, was presented live at the WORLD HORROR CONVENTION in 2002 and garnered him his second nomination. In 2003 Larry’s Stoker-recommended “Catching” received Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s 17th Annual “Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror” anthology.  His “So Many Tiny Mouths” was cited in the anthology’s 18th edition.

Larry’s first novel, “Just North of Nowhere,” was published by Annihilation Press in 2007. Also in 2007: “At Angels 16,” in A DARK AND DEADLY VALLEY from Silverthought Press, and “Cordwell’s Book” in TALES FROM THE RED LION.  Annihilation Press will publish “Little Girl Down the Way,” in HELL IN THE HEARTLAND in late 2007.  His novella, “Wind Shadows,” will see print in the Canadian anthology AIM FOR THE HEAD in 2008. Larry lives in Chicago.

More info at http://www.annihilationpress.com/

Crimethinc’s Middle West Cloak & Dagger TourThurs. July 19th 8pm

Crimethinc presents the “Crimethinc Middle West Cloak and Dagger Tour”, members of the Crimethinc collective will be visiting various Midwest cities (Davenport, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Kalamazoo, Columbus, etc) with puppet shows, workshops, and more. They’ll be presenting about Security Culture, Consent, Animal Liberation, and possibly Queer/Trans Awareness. The final destination of our tour is the Crimethinc Convergence, which is to be held in Athens, OH this year from July 25th-31st. There we will have many workshops on just about everything, all the while camping and enjoying the company of others in a community-oriented setting.

A group of 5 young activists from all over the US. with various activist backgrounds make up the Crimethinc members on this tour. There’re all anticapitalists, antifascists, and animal liberationists

More information is available at www.crimethinc.com

Dancing Girl Press Presents Simone Muench,
Brandi Homan & Erin Bertram at Quimby’s!

Saturday, July 14th, 7:00 PM
FREE

Simone Muench is a poet, editor, assistant professor, and horror film fan. She is the author of *The Air Lost in Breathing* (2000) and *Lampblack & Ash* (2005) recently released from Sarabande Books.  Her chapbook, Orange Girl, is due out from dancing girl press in July.

Brandi Homan’s chapbook, Two Kinds of Arson, is available from Dancing Girl Press . Her work has appeared in magazines like Salt Hill, North American Review, Fugue, CutBank, Natural Bridge, and others. She recently completed her first book-length manuscript.

Erin M. Bertram is a fellow in the MFA Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis. She writes for The Vital Voice and edits shadowbox press, which publishes progressive writing, always by hand, and often by underrepresented writers, with a tendency toward poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, MiPOesias , and Ugly Accent. Two chapbooks are forthcoming: Alluvium (dancing girl press, 2007), and, with Sarah Lilius, Here, Hunger (NeO Pepper Press, 2007).