A few weeks ago, Andrew Huff of Gapers Block issued a fascinating challenge to Tuesday Funk co-host William Shunn: to take a piece of original poster art by Chad Kouri and produce a piece of writing of between 1,500 and 2,500 words to accompany it.
The resulting art/writing combo, along with seven other collaborations between artists and writers, will be on display and on sale at The Coop on May 18th. All the info is below. Hope to see you there, Funkers!
8 x 8
Friday, May 18, 2012
6:00 pm until 10:00 pm
The COOP | A co-working space in River North
230 W Superior, 2F, Chicago, IL 60654
In the spirit of artistic collaboration, The Coop and Gapers Block teamed up to produce 8x8, an experiment in writing and design. Eight Chicagoland designers were paired with eight local writers to create collaborative works, with text informing and influencing art and vice versa. The results of this experiment are presented in limited edition poster form, with writing and design back to back.
Writers:
Patrick Somerville, Claire Zulkey, Ramsin Canon, Kevin Guilfoile, William Shunn, Veronica Bond, Wendy McClure, Scott Smith
Designers:
Jesse Hora, Andy Luce, Chad Kouri, Ina Weise, Letterform, Ryan Sievert, Paul Octavious, Kyle Fletcher
At our April Tuesday Funk reading, Nebula Award-winning author Richard Chwedyk shared with us the prologue of a novel written by a dinosaur who's a character in his ... um, hey, let's just let Rich explain!
And if you enjoyed that, please join us on Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 for more great readings from Samantha Irby, Kristin Lueke, Dion Walton, Jennifer Schaefer, and L.A. Times Book Award recipient Alex Shakar. Be there!
Greetings, science fiction writers from around the world! This is a friendly reminder that Tuesday Funk wants you as a reader for our September 4th edition!
With the 70th World Science Fiction Convention coming to Chicago from August 30 to September 3rd, we couldn't just sit back and not try to lure some of the best of today's speculative fiction writers into our cozy little lair, so here's the deal.
We're looking for five writers to read for us on September 4th, the night after Worldcon ends. If you're a professionally published science fiction or fantasy writer who will be in town for Worldcon and you plan to stick around Chicago for an extra day or two afterward, please submit a work of up to 2,500 words to tuesdayfunkchicago@gmail.com. This can be a complete short story or a novel excerpt. Use "Post-Worldcon Reading" as your subject line. (Please see our guidelines page for a complete explanation of how to submit.)
Submissions must be received by Tuesday, May 22, 2012, to be considered for one of these five slots. Decisions on the lineup will be made by Tuesday, June 5, 2012, and announced at the Tuesday Funk reading that evening.
In the past we've hosted such names as Jody Lynn Nye, Richard Chwedyk, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Brenda Cooper, and Steven H Silver, and in the months to come we'll bring you Alex Shakar, Holly McDowell, and more. Want to add your name to that roster? Drop us a line!
And if you're a science fiction fan, please mark September 4th on your calendar. It's going to be a terrific evening!
At our April Tuesday Funk reading, Mary Anne Mohanraj shared her (NSFW) short story "The Night Air," and it went a little something like this...
And if you enjoyed that, please join us on Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 for more great readings from Samantha Irby, Kristin Lueke, Dion Walton, Jennifer Schaefer, and L.A. Times Book Award recipient Alex Shakar. Be there!
Good morning, Funkers! Your humble co-host regrets the tardiness of this debriefing, but (as you know if you were there) he very regrettably was unable to attend our 45th edition this past Tuesday evening. However, by all reports we hear that co-host Sara Ross Witt and substitute co-host Mare Swallow had the evening well in hand, and the readers were as fine as you have come to expect.
In lieu of the usual play-by-play, let us present instead a gallery of photographs from the evening provided by local artist Kevin Swallow. Please enjoy this pictorial recap (click the photo to the right to get started), and then plan to join us again on Tuesday, June 5th for a terrific evening with Samantha Irby, Kristin Lueke, Dion Walton, Jennifer Schaefer, and Alex Shakar!
A few weeks ago, Andrew Huff of Gapers Block issued me a fascinating challenge: to take a piece of original poster art by Chad Kouri and produce a piece of writing of between 1,500 and 2,500 words to accompany it.
The resulting art/writing combo, along with seven other collaborations between artists and writers, will be on display and on sale at The Coop on May 18th. All the info is below. Hope to see you there.
8 x 8
Friday, May 18, 2012
6:00 pm until 10:00 pm
The COOP | A co-working space in River North
230 W Superior, 2F, Chicago, IL 60654
In the spirit of artistic collaboration, The Coop and Gapers Block teamed up to produce 8x8, an experiment in writing and design. Eight Chicagoland designers were paired with eight local writers to create collaborative works, with text informing and influencing art and vice versa. The results of this experiment are presented in limited edition poster form, with writing and design back to back.
Writers:
Patrick Somerville, Claire Zulkey, Ramsin Canon, Kevin Guilfoile, William Shunn, Veronica Bond, Wendy McClure, Scott Smith
Designers:
Jesse Hora, Andy Luce, Chad Kouri, Ina Weise, Letterform, Ryan Sievert, Paul Octavious, Kyle Fletcher
Hey, Funkers! You'll definitely want to tune in for our very special 46th episode of Tuesday Funk, which will feature readings from Samantha Irby, Kristin Lueke, Dion Walton, Jennifer Schaefer, and recent L.A. Times Book Award winnerAlex Shakar! You'll also get a new Poem By Bill, not to mention your pick of dozens of varieties of cold beer at the bar.
The evening gets underway with your co-hosts Sara Ross Witt and William Shunn on Tuesday, June 5th, 2012, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark St., Chicago. Arrive early for a seat, and grab a beer from Mark at the cash-only bar. We start seating at 7:00 pm and no earlier. Admission is always free, but you must be 21 or older. And come early or stay late after for some great Belgian-style food downstairs.
Please bring plenty of friends, and become a fan of Tuesday Funk on Facebook so you never miss an invitation to one of our readings. Same Funk time, same Funk channel!
I learned something very cool yesterday. Of course, I'm a science geek, but I still thinks it's cool enough to share.
I'm in Los Angeles this week, doing what I hope will be ongoing programming work for a new client. The client is a big printing facility that spits out reams of paper by the minute, sorts, collates, folds, stuffs, and meters. If you've ever received a one-page explanation of benefits from your health insurance company, or a huge booklet with all the legalese for your policy, this is the kind of place that produced it.
I went on a tour of the facility yesterday afternoon. Among the huge laser printers and folding/inserting machines chained together like a mechanical version of the Human Centipede was a big blue roll printer. It was fascinating to watch in action. At one end was a giant roll of white paper, about six feet in diameter and 17 inches wide. The paper was fed at high speed into a unit that printed two pages side by side. As it emerged from that unit, the continuous paper strip went through a complex series of rollers, some set at a 45-degree angle, that turned the paper over so the blank side was facing up as it went into the next printer. As the paper emerged, now printed on both sides, a blade sliced it lengthwise. The two narrow side-by-side strips were then brought together, one on top of the other, and fed into a cutter that chopped them up into perfectly collated stacks of 8.5 x 11" duplex-printed paper.
That was cool enough, but I noticed that as the paper emerged from the machine that sliced it lengthwise, it passed beneath a piece of wire that had obviously been juryrigged. The wire was wound with a spiral of tinsel, the kind you'd use to decorate a Christmas tree. The tinsel brushed the paper as it sped past.
My guide pointed to the tinsel. "Every big print shop I know stocks up on tinsel at Christmas time," he said. "It's perfect for discharging static electricity from the paper."
Which then makes the paper behave better down the line and helps prevent jams in the equpiment. Pretty cool, right? I know.
So "like" us today on Facebook, grab one of dozens of varieties of beer from the bar, and get set for an evening of entertaining and provocative live literature with host Sara Ross Witt and guest host Mare Swallow. You can thank us later.
Oh, and one more thing. Tonight will be the last night that Johnny Wider is with us as bartender. He's being moved to the downstairs bar on Tuesday nights, and has been training his replacement Mark, who will be our new Tuesday Funk bartender. If you won't turn up for the readers, please come out to give Johnny a happy send-off. He's been with us nearly every month since we moved to Hopleaf!
Hopleaf Bar is at 5148 N. Clark St. in Chicago. The reading begins at 7:30 pm in the upstairs lounge. The lounge opens at 7:00 pm. Arrive early if you want a seat.
As always, the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf is cash-only and 21 and over. Remember also that no food can be brought in from the restaurant.
A couple of weird things happened yesterday. The first came relatively early, as Ella and I were out on our Sunday morning walk. Laura and I usually walk Ella together on Sunday mornings, but Laura had a cough and a fever so I was walking Ella alone. We try to walk her for a couple of hours on weekend mornings, to wear her out for the rest of the day. I took Ella on a long loop to the Lake Michigan shore (about a mile and a half from our house) to run around on the sand, then to a big adjacent park to chase squirrels.
We were on our way back home after nearly two hours out when Ella communicated to me that she would like to explore the alley we were passing. She did this by stopping at the mouth of the alley and looking down it pointedly. At this stage in our walks, I'm usually eager to get home so my custom is to tell her no and make her keep walking. But we had plenty of time that morning and I'd made her leave the park before she was quite ready, so I relented.
Ella spent a lot of time sniffing around a group of black plastic trash bins in the alley before she'd let me move on. Her fascination with squirrels is rivaled only by her fascination with rats, so I kept a close eye on her. We continued through the alley and then back up the next block where a squirrel with a peanut in its mouth taunted us from a tree behind a fence. Soon we were back on our original route home, but Ella tugged me into the next alley we passed. She made a beeline for another group of black plastic bins and darted into a gap between them.
I saw a little shadow with a naked tail flash through the gap. Ella struck, and when she drew her head back a rat the size of my fist was wriggling in her jaws.
Several things happened very fast all at once, or in such rapid succession that I couldn't tell any differently. I let out a low, loud, gutteral yawp of surprise and fear. The rat let out a squeaky shriek. Ella released the rat. The rat flew through the air, flailing all its limbs, and scurried away behind the bins.
I dropped to my knees to check that Ella was okay, that she hadn't been bitten. (Of course she hadn't—she would have yelped, I'm sure.) She was fine, if you ignored the look of utter disappointment and contempt she leveled at me. Ella has been chasing squirrels and rats and rabbits and even the occasional opossum or raccoon for all of her eight and a half years. This was the first time she had ever caught one.
And I yelled like a scared puppy and made her drop it. "Oh, Nice Bill," she seemed to say with the contemptuous expression she turned upon me. "Are you ever on my whatever-smells-so-bad-even-I-won't-go-near-it list now."
I swear to God, she pouted all the way home.
The other unsettling thing yesterday was something I saw while I was out biking. Laura and I are training for one of the crazier things we've ever attempted—RAGBRAI, a 7-day, 470-mile bike ride across Iowa this July. I'll post more about that another time, but suffice it to say that I've been doing my best to adhere to the recommended training schedule with increasingly long rides along the Chicago Lakefront Trail. Yesterday I was supposed to ride 25 miles, but since I'll be working in California for the next several days, I decided to push it to 36 miles instead, my longest day yet this year by far.
That was fine, but as I was rolling south on the outbound leg of my trek I saw a police SUV parked on the grass between Lake Shore Drive and the bike trail. Off to my left, a small yacht was beached in the choppy surf, rocking back and forth. Down the slope, a police officer was talking to two men who looked, at least from a distance, to be in shock.
I passed the scene, then pulled over and watched the yacht rock for a minute or two, waiting to see if anything else interesting would happen. I figured that two unlucky or foolhardy boaters had tried to get a little too close to shore and had run aground. I shot a brief video and continued on my way.
I reached a good turnaround spot a couple of miles later, at the 63rd Street Beach. We live way up on the North Side, and I had come 18.5 miles from home. Definitely time to go back. (Especially since my phone battery died while I was taking pictures there, and I wouldn't be able to text Laura for the rest of the ride to keep her apprised of my whereabouts.)
So I headed back north, into the wind (sob!). As I approached the site of the boating accident, I saw a Chicago Police boat not far offshore. Two officers in lifejackets were making their way like commandos toward the prow of the boat. The first one there picked up some kind of long boat hook and readied it over the water. I couldn't see anything in the water. Apparently they couldn't either, but this made me worry that someone had been lost overboard in the accident.
There were at least three police vehicles parked near the boat as I passed. I didn't stop this time, and I have no idea what happened before or after I happened on the scene. I haven't found any news reports about a boating accident. I suppose I might find something in the police blotter if I knew where to check on Everyblock.com. I keep thinking about that boat, though.
Anyway, I made my 37-mile round trip in about three hours. I'm a little stiff this morning as I sit composing this on my Virgin America flight to Los Angeles. More on this trip later.
