We have a sweet event tonight the weather is nice and the store has been busy all day due to the mega punk? Show this weekend, the secret nerdy comic conference, and maybe some smelly circuit benders stopping in while on tour. Banner weekend here.
Monthly Archive for October, 2008
Page 4 of 6
The final volume of this trilogy is the only one in print. The other volumes go for tons! If you’re not familiar with any of the books in the series, the deal is that they’re tattoos done with crude resources by Russian prisoners on each other, and they’re collected by this lifetime security guard Danzig Baldaev (his name is Danzig, heh heh hehheh). The KGB supported his collection! It was important to them to be able to establish facts about convicts by reading the images (both pictoral and text) on their bodies. You don’t need to have either of the other books in the trilogy to get into this one. Devils, penises (peni?), swords, SS cats, barbed wire, anti-party tatts — whether you’re an ink freak, photography nut, sociologist, political maverick (are any politicians really mavericks, I mean really?) or lowbrow art collector, this is the book for you. I particularly like the captions for many of the drawings that translate the meanings. Just as an example, dig the caption explaining the drawing of a rat with Russian text that translates to ‘Tightwad filcher’ for a convict sentenced for hooliganism: “He stole three packs of cigarettes and some sweets from the lockers of his fellow inmates. He was discovered and beaten up. It was decided by a group of ‘authoritative’ thieves that this tattoo should be forcibly applied as punishment.” Thazwutchoo get for stealin’ candy and smokes! These books have even influenced a movement in these parts where the youngins have actually started replicating these drawings on themselves by professional tattoo artists — would they get their asses kicked in a Russian jail?
| Nov ’08 |
| 8 |
| 6:00 pm |
Join Andrew Choate and Dmitra St. Oops as they read from recent works.
Andrew Choate grew up in South Carolina listening to free jazz and kraut rock. He moved to Chicago when he was 18 so he could hear concerts by AACM members and there discovered the cultural wealth and ethical abyss that was the twentieth century. He studied language and art at Northwestern, and moved to Los Angeles seven years later to continue his research and community-probing at CalArts. His first book/CD, Langquage Makes Plastic of the Body, was published in 2006 by Palm Press; it is a collection of essays, short stories, poems and songs. Pigs in Blankets, a radio play from 2004, and Spir-ahchoo!-ality, a sneeze-based recording from 2005, have been exhibited in London, Los Angeles, Rome and Yerevan. His writings about music and art have appeared in Urb, Coda, the Wire, Signal to Noise, Art Ltd., d’Art International, Facsimile and the L.A. Times. He has been a guest lecturer at the Museum of Contemporay Art in Los Angeles and until his performance on November 8th, 2008 has not read in Chicago, a place he considers a pivotal spiritual and educational home. His reading at Quimby’s will consist of selections from his book and excerpts from his new project Accounting for Taste: Fictional Food.
Dmitra St. Oops – grew up in Karkov, Ukraine and moved to Chicago when he was 18 to study mathematics. Stayed in Chicago for 10 years; currently lives in San Francisco. She writes fictional algorithms.
PLUS!!!!! DRAMBUIE AND KIM CHI WILL BE SERVED
This is no ordinary reprint. This version of The Wizard of Oz is an artbook illustrated by Graham Rawle, author of Woman’s World (a novel created entirely from fragments of found text from 60s womens mags, now being made into a movie). The text is the same — hence it being almost 300 pages long! There’s illustrations on almost every page, and they’re crazy. Collage-y type of stuff with dolls and toys and beads and doll slippers and bottles and things cut out from other things — like he cut up magazines and newspapers and then went crazy at American Science and Surplus. Kids would love this but adults may love it more. Even some of the font is spicy with cursive and italics and who knows what else. There’s little graphic surprises on almost every page. A lot of work went into this thing!
| Nov ’08 |
| 6 |
| 5:00 pm |
The elusive creator of Achewood has finally emerged! Chris Onstad is shedding his usual shroud of secrecy and hitting the road on a national tour to meet, greet, shake hands, and kiss babies.
On the heels of the release of The Great Outdoor Fight hardcover and a second straight Ignatz award for Best Online Comic, Onstad is making stops in major cities across North America to celebrate the success of Achewood with the dedicated fans that have made it all possible.
But these aren’t your typical creator signings. Tattoos, turkey, drinks, machismo bonding for ladies and dudes, topped off with enough Achewood merchandise for everyday of the week, each stop will be an event in its own right.
Come and join the party at comic shops across the country with the man who spends his days drawing cats and dogs as you’ve never seen them before.
Since 2001, cult comic favorite Achewood has built a six-figure international following. Intelligent, hilarious, and adult but not filthy, it’s the strip you’ll wish you’d discovered as an underappreciated fifteen-year-old. Dark Horse presents the hardbound edition of Achewood’s The Great Outdoor Fight, the story of “Three Days, Three Acres, Three Thousand Men.”
