Archive for the 'Store Events' Category

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Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking Release Party with Nic Collins at Quimby’s!

May ’09
2
3:00 pm

workshop-tokyo

Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking provides a long-needed, practical, and engaging introduction to the craft of making – as well as creatively cannibalizing – electronic circuits for artistic purposes. With a sense of adventure but no need for prior knowledge, the reader can subvert the intentions designed into devices such as radios and toys to discover a new sonic world. At a time when computers dominate music production, this book offers a rare glimpse into the core technology of early live electronic music, as well as more recent developments at the hands of emerging artists. In addition to advice on hacking found electronics, the reader learns how to make contact microphones, pickups for electromagnetic fields, oscillators, distortion boxes, and unusual signal processors cheaply and quickly.

This revised and expanded second edition is extensively illustrated and includes a DVD featuring 87 video clips and 20 audio tracks by over 100 hackers, benders, musicians, artists and inventors from around the world, as well as 13 video tutorials demonstrating projects in the book. Further enhancements include additional projects, photographs, diagrams, and illustrations.

What might happen at this event? Maybe some and/or all of the following: an anarchic hacking orchestra composed of multiple uncoordinated performances distributed around the store, each performer using individual small sound systems? Speakers amplifying bent toys, battery-operated mini-amps, video, and demos of a few projects? Who knows?

Nicolas Collins, an active composer and performer of electronic music, and has worked with John Cage, Alvin Lucier, David Tudor, and many other masters of modern music. Dr. Collins is Professor of Sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has led hacking workshops around the world. Since 1997 he has been editor-in-chief of Leonardo Music Journal. For more info: http://www.NicolasCollins.com

A Night of Bizarro Fiction

Apr ’09
18
6:30 pm

Join four authors from the Bizarro fiction movement: D.Harlan Wilson, Andersen Prunty, Eckhard Gerdes and Garrett Cook as they read from and sign their books. The material is sometimes profane, sometimes funny, but always weird and engaging.

D. Harlan Wilson is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, literary critic, screenwriter, and assistant professor of English at Wright State University-Lake Campus.  His recent books include a novel, Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria (Raw Dog Screaming Press 2008), a novella, Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance (Shroud 2009), and a book of cultural theory, Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction (Guide Dog Books 2009).  Visit him online at www.dharlanwilson.com

Andersen Prunty is the author of The Overwhelming Urge, Jack and Mr. Grin, Zerostrata, Market Adjustment and Other Tales of Avarice, and The Sorrow King (forthcoming). He naps in Dayton, Ohio. You can call him Andy and visit him on the web at www.andersenprunty.com

Eckhard Gerdes is the author of several unusual novels, including My Landlady the Lobotomist (a top-five selection for novel of the year in the Preditor’s and Editors Poll), The Million-Year Centipede (a top-ten selection the year prior and a nominee for the Wonderland Award), Przewalski’s Horse (which won the Bissell Award), and Cistern Tawdry (nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award). He teaches at Lake Forest College, DePaul University, and Triton College. He has three sons and lives in the Chicago area.

Garrett Cook is a Bizarro, horror and crossgenre novelist currently residing in Warrenville, IL. While he is not reading submissions for Evil Nerd Empire publishing (www.evilnerdempire.com) or dealing with his duties as Associate Editor of Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens magazine, he is promoting his book Murderland Part 1: H8.

Other info: find out more about Bizarro fiction at www.bizarrocentral.com

Gabriel Boyer and Malcolm Felder at Quimby’s!

Apr ’09
10
7:00 pm

surveyweb1

Gabriel Boyer began his performing career at the age of eighteen, singing-Blood-Sweat-and-Tears-while-adorned-in-condiments, this period ending when, at the age of twenty-one, he discovered soul music and formed the band Extra Play with Malcolm Felder (who will also be in attendance in the band Normal Feelings with Mr. Boyer), then abandoned said musical project to relocate to New York City where he curated the spoken word portion of the DUMBO Arts Festival in ‘99.

In summer of ‘03 Mutable Press (a company founded by Zachary Katz and Gabriel Boyer) released its first book, a collection of manifestoes edited by Mr. Boyer. In the winter of that same year Mutable Press released How to Tell the Living from the Dead, a novel by Gabriel Boyer. In the course of the following year Mutable Press released four books, among which was Seven Nights in the Bedroom, a memoir of Bedroom Theater, also by Gabriel Boyer.

Then Mr. Boyer moved to China for a year to contemplate what he had done. Afterwards, relocating to an anarchist commune just south of Eugene, OR, where he filmed an anarchist musical entitled Free-Thinking Man as Commodity. After a brief stint working in a fish processing plant in the Bering Strait, he and Malcolm Felder recorded a radioplay, Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies in the spring of ‘08 at Shady Pines Studios. He now resides in Chicago, IL where he and Felder run Mutable Sound.

Gabriel Boyer will read from his new book, A Survey of My Failures this Far, which is actually a collection of seven books.

For more info:  www.mutablesound.com/home

Off-Site Event: COME IN THE NAME OF CRUMB! at the STOP SMILING Space

Apr ’09
2
7:00 pm

crumbforquimbys

Quimby’s and STOP SMILING present an evening with R. Crumb (or, rather, the documentary about R. Crumb, CRUMB!).*

The new issue of STOP SMILING features an in-depth cover-story interview with the legendary comic-artist provocateur, who rarely speaks to the press. Crumb and Celia Farber, who made her name as an investigative journalist covering AIDS research, discuss her area of expertise as well as his, which makes for a lively and telling dialog.

The Crumb! documentary is a cinematic portrait of the artist as a weird man, and explores Crumb’s traumatized family, his strange sexual tastes, and allusions of racism and sexism that some find rampant and disturbing in his work. From his childhood home to the San Francisco streets where he started Zap Comix, the film sets Crumb in a panoply of settings, all of which come across as somehow unsettling.

Copies of the new issue of STOP SMILING with the R. Crumb cover, as well as an array of R. Crumb merchandise from Quimby’s, will be on hand.

WHEN: April 2, 2009, 7 p.m.
WHERE: The STOP SMILING Storefront (1371 N Milwaukee Ave., Chicago)

Free drinks will be provided (21+)
To attend, email rsvp@stopsmilingonline.com (subject: Crumb)

*R. Crumb, the actual person, will not be at this event