Monthly Archive for June, 2005

Book Event for WOMEN AND SOCIALISM

Jun ’05
27
12:00 am

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.
 

25th anniversary of Sleazoid Express Event

Jun ’05
25
12:00 am

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 magazine Event

Jun ’05
24
12:00 am

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 Bars & More

Jun ’05
18
12:00 am

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.
 

Esther Freud at the Beat Kitchen

Jun ’05
18
12:00 am

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