Author Archive for liz

Steve Brodner signsFreedom Fries
Sunday, October 17th, 4:00 PM
FREE
 
For more than two decades, Steve Brodner has been the most savage editorial cartoonist/ illustrator to work in the United States. His pitiless illustrations, cartoons, comic strips, and illustrated reportages have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek as well as most other major magazines and newspapers in North America.
 
Freedom Fries is Brodner?s absurdly nightmarish journey through the last 30 years of American politics. And what a cast of characters: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II (and those are just the presidents). Add in such pretenders to the throne as Newt Gingrich, both Doles, Gore, and Nader, craven cabinet officers and legislators and you have the most horrifyingly hilarious rogues? gallery of striking resemblances anywhere.
 
Extensively annotated with Brodner?s own pungent commentary and reminiscences, and including some images that were simply too provocative to print the first time around, Freedom Fries is a stunningly reproduced, exquisitely barbed walk through the last 30 years? political landscape ? part coffee table art book, part madcap manifesto. In many cases, Brodner?s political perspective has only gained resonance in today?s climate.
Released as the 2004 election season heats up, Freedom Fries fits squarely into the tradition of provocative commentary by such firebrands as Michael Moore, Al Franken, Mark Crispin Miller and Molly Ivins ? except in Brodner?s case, the commentary is also a treasure of handsome visual art.
 
For this event not only will Steve Brodner be signing copies of Freedom Fries, he will also be drawing the 2004 presidential candidates live on the spot.
 

The Business of Holidays book release event
6PM Friday December 3rd
 
The Business of Holidays, ed. Maud Lavin (New York: Monacelli Press): Holiday celebrations in the United States are a surprisingly strong force behind the country’s $3 trillion retail economy. From New Year’s diets to Festivus-flavored ice cream, Presidents’ Day care sales to Independence Day barbecues, Hanukkah cards to Kwanzaa candles, the social and material culture of holidays has been transformed into a finely tuned marketing extravanganza. Contemporary holiday rites showcase a particularly American obsession with celebration–and the shopping, decorating, card sending, feasting, drinking, and advertising that goes along with it. This witty and satirical look at thirty-three of our most loved (and hated) holidays explores the history and the traditions, the kitsch and the color, of the business of holidays.
 
For the book release event join Maud Lavin, Alyson Beaton, Eliza Rosen, Courtney Perkins and Ben Finch
 
Maud Lavin is an associate professor in visual and critical studies and art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduate director of visual and critical studies. She is the author of a monograph on the Berlin Dada artist Hannah Hoch–Cut with the Kitchen Knife–and a book on design and politics–Clean New World.
 
Alyson Beaton is an instructor in visual communications at the School of the Art Institute. Her recent artists’ books are in the collections pf Printed Matter, Collette, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at SAIC.
 
Eliza Rosen is a freelance graphic designer in Chicago whose clients have included Deborah’s Place and Chicago Magazine.
 
Courtney Perkins is an independent curator who has organized exhibitions in Chicago at venues including 1926 and ThreeWalls and in Austin, Texas.
 
Ben Finch is the owner and creative director of The Killswitch Collective, a Chicago multimedia and design firm. He specializes in web and print design for the creative and music industry.

Perpetual Motion Roadshow #17
featuring Todd Taylor, Darren O?Donnell
& Jonathan Messinger
Thursday, October 21st, 8:00 PM
 
Perpetual Motion Roadshow #17 features: Punk Rock\’s Studs Terkel TODD TAYLOR from L.A., end of the world idealist DARREN O\’DONNELL from Toronto, and transit tale-teller JONATHAN MESSINGER from Chicago!
 
Jonathan Messinger has written humor for McSweeney\’s Internet Tendency, Haypenny and Opium Magazine. He also served for two years as the editor of the humor magazine WheatBread Magazine, which won several awards during his tenure, and was involved, in two legal skirmishes. As a reporter with Pioneer Press in Illinois, he served for two years as a transportation writer before parlaying that experience into the online journal This is Grand: Stories of Chicago\’s Rapid Transit. On the Roadshow, he will perform funny and bizarre stories from trains and buses, and soliciting the audience for theirs.
(www.thisisgrand.org, jonathan@thisisgrand.org)
 
Todd Taylor has been called the Studs Terkel of punk rock. He is the co-editor, co-publisher of Razorcake Fanzine (www.razorcake.com) and Gorsky Books. Both enterprises hope to establish that punk can be ethical, vital, and fun without being tamed. For years prior, he helped run Flipside, living the motto, \”Too stupid to quit, too high to care.\” He\’s been published in Suburban Voice, Sassy, Dispatch, Barracuda, punkvoter.com. and is a regular contributor to Thrasher. His first book, Born to Rock, which he will be reading from, is a collection of essays and interviews he\’s conducted over the last eight years.
(www.razorcake.com, retodded@razorcake.com)
 
Darren O\’Donnell is a writer, director, performance artist, designer and artistic director of Mammalian Diving Reflex. His shows include A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, pppeeeaaaccceee, [boxhead], White Mice, Over, Who Shot Jacques Lacan?, Radio Rooster Says That\’s Bad and Mercy!; he has organized The Talking Creature, a continuing experiment in public discourse and published his first novel, Your Secrets Sleep with Me, with Coach House Books. He has also won a few awards for writing, directing and design. He will be doing something interactive and nervewracking.
(www.mammalian.ca, darren@mammalian.ca)
 
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