This will be my final post on ChicagoNow, and probably the last time I'll write under the Truthisms moniker.
Graduating soon and home is the only logical place my <3 can go. I'll continue writing all over from the best coast, so look me up if you enjoyed this blog, scarce as it was, being maintained between hectic grad school and freelance gigs.
Wondering what I've been up to for the last two weeks? Gapers Block was wonderful enough to assign me an awesome 3-part feature on the self-publishing scene in Chicago in advance of Chicago Zine Fest, which literally starts in 20 minutes at Columbia College with readings by Aaron Cometbus and Al Burian.
Don't fret if you can't make it--there are readings all evening starting at 5pm at 826CHI, as well as Zinester Karaoke tonight.
The official CZF zine exhibition and workshops take place all day tomorrow at Columbia's Conaway Center. For more info, visit Chicago Zine Fest or check out my 3 interviews.
Part one features CZF's beginnings with co-founder Neil Brideau, part two talks about the political and social impact of zines with Anne Elizabeth Moore and the final installment just went up, featuring an awesome chat with Quimby's manager Liz Mason.
I've got a great gallery for you: check out my photos of Saturday's sold out Girl Talk show on Filter Magazine's news blog. Many awkward teens in neon dancing. Pretty balloons. Hope you enjoy.
This year's Pitchfork Music Festival was just announced!! It's going to be from July 15-17 at ol' faithful Union Park in Chicago.
F*cked Up at Pitchfork Festival 2009
Of course there's no news of headliners or performers yet, but the fest usually sells out in a week tops. You can buy tickets starting Friday, March 4 here. Single-day tickets are $45, and it's $110 for the whole damn weekend.
I didn't get to go last year, but I heard the LCD Soundsystem and Best Coast sets were off the hook. You can read my Top 10 Moments of Pitchfork 2009 on Yahoo! Music.
Hey guys! It's been awhile since my last post. Unfortunately for Truthisms (but fortunately for me), I've been getting more freelance work.
You've got to check out Dee Dee and her amazing band Dum Dum Girls tonight at Empty Bottle. I had a chance to interview her over the phone last week for A.V. Club in advance of the show. In the interview Dee Dee curates her top 5 girl group tracks, it's pretty awesome to hear what's influenced her.
Please keep in mind, anybody who would like to contribute to this blog please shoot me an email, I'd love to have you: truthismschicagonow [at] gmail [dot] com.
I've got another pick for you this weekend--if you're into the '80s, head to Lincoln Hall tonight. L.A. punks-turned-post have joined up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing to play what will probably become an '80s dance party for everyone involved. Check out my Flavorpill preview for more info on the bands, and where to get tickets!
Welcome VIDEODRONE, where I won't ask you to get your body parts sucked into an uncomfortable television orifice, but will simply toss you a music video I've been watching.
This week features Asobi Seksu's vid for "Trails," their first single off Fluorescence which came out via Polyvinyl Records yesterday. This is such a silky pop ballad, and you can hear the surging guitar tremolos right from the beginning. It's also really satisfying to watch the snow in the video while I'm looking out at the sun outside my window.
Asobi comes to play Chicago at the end of the month, so be sure to check them out at The Empty Bottle if you dig their new style.
If you've got a cool section idea, or just like to blog about to music/shows/lit/zines/art you're down with, then I'd love to feature your work on this blog.
Send your pitches to truthismschicagonow [at] gmail [dot] com.
Gang of Four played an insane show last Friday. I had missed them when they reunited during my early college days so seeing them was a huge deal--I think I'm sweating just thinking of that killa dance set. Check out the photo gallery below, which includes a shot of the setlist. If you'd like more details on what epics went down you can read my review of the show which was published on Time Out Chicago's Audio File blog.
The Swedegazers of Radio Dept. are playing The Empty Bottle with Young Prisms at 7p.m. tonight...for more info check out my preview featured on this week's Flavorpill Chicago Guide.
Forget seeing Yo La Tengo and The Decemberists this weekend: tonight's not-to-miss show is Chicago's own sonic kraut mess Disappears, playing a record release show for their second LP, Guider, 10pm at The Empty Bottle tonight.
Drummer Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth fame will be playing with their current lineup, with openers Brain Idea and Tyler John Tyler. In terms of sheer decibel blasting damage, Disappears is the first local act I'm excited to see since New York's loudest band, A Place to Bury Strangers. Show's not sold out yet, grab those tickets while you still can!
This week's launch of the Google Art Project was godsend, especially for snowed-in Chicagoans stewing with cabin fever. Enabling virtual travel to 17 world-renowned museums, the new app offers street-view navigation of museum rooms and hallways, hi-res images of the works selected by each institution, as well as one painting per museum rendered in gorgeous gigapixel zoom technology.
With no way to visit our own Art Institute or MCA, I was browsing the Google collection last night to discover some pretty sultry self-portraits in my gaze. Maybe it was the romantic blizzard mix I'd put on play while I browsed the collections, or maybe I was trying to assuage the eye-wandering impulse we all get during solo museum visits. Nevertheless I saw some total art babes staring back at me, despite the slim choices--not to mention the severe lack of female artists or mediums represented outside of painting, which is no curatorial fault of Google, yet remains infuriating. I'm especially curious to see how the collection will grow.
Rants aside, click through these art babes and leave a comment with your score, based on their 1-10 hotness scale.
The White Stripes lasted more than a decade, which is 10 times longer than most indie douchebands. I can't give a proper goodbye without this Michel Gondry-directed vid from 2001, the first time many of us heard the band (in my case, at my parent's house on MTV2). Will miss you guys.
Welcome VIDEODRONE, where I won't ask you to get your body parts sucked into an uncomfortable television orifice, but will simply toss you a few music videos I've been watching.
This week features rare alt/indie blizzard-themed songs, some live footage and a fake snow music video you should definitely hold out for. If you'd like a mix of the album versions, comment below and I'll send you a link with extras!
1. Yoko Ono's "Listen the Snow is Falling" is from she and Lennon's 5th album together, Some Time in New York City, released in 1972 about a year after the couple moved to New York. (Edit: this track is only available on the 2005 remastered edition of the album, making it all the more rare and enjoyable.)
2. Curiously, Galaxie 500 covered this amazing Yoko track. Here's their own blizzard song, "Snowstorm."
3. Here's another cover from my Armenian brethren System of a Down, their take on Sabbath's "Snowblind." Theirs was a different kind of snow, as you can glean from the intro.
4. My Bloody Valentine's "Soft As Snow But Warm Inside" appears on their first of only two LPs, Isn't Anything. The band plays here at The University of London Union in 1989.
5. Sea Wolf's music video for "Winter Windows" is what the West Coast thinks winter looks like: indie precious paper snowflakes.
Your faithful Truthisms is back after a year-end hiatus with a very important announcement: this blogger has been smoke-free for nearly a month. I can finally write without craving a drag, so stay tuned for a steady plethora of weekly arts picks, reviews and original photography by yours truly.
Let's begin with the first Videodrone of the year, where I won't ask you to get your body parts sucked into an uncomfortable television orifice, but will simply toss you a music video I've been watching this week. Here's one of the most feel-good music videos from last year, El Guincho's "Bombay" (and by feel-good, I should probably mention it's NSFW-good).
Now that NaNoWriMo has officially reached its close, there's no better time to bind those words into print form. I invite you to read my exploratory survey of the current self-publishing scene, "A 'Novel' Idea," or you can check out a quick overview I featured earlier this month where I discuss 3 options for self-publishing outlets.
"A 'Novel' Idea: The Confluence of Print and Web in Self-Publishing" by Taleen Kalenderian
Imagining a granola-munching zinester, East Village poet or laid-off magazine editor as the next Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf or Anaïs Nin would be an exaggerated case of literary fancy. But with the increasing accessibility of the Internet, emerging authors can now enact a modern-day incarnation of what their literary predecessors did when they self-published their first manuscripts. The difference is, today's writers are armed with a barrage of online self-publishing tools at their disposal, an advantage the literary giants of old never had.
Writers who have self-published include Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Percy Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Anaïs Nin.
Despite its continuing history of negative connotations, self-publishing has redefined itself in the current online landscape of user-generated content (YouTube, Google Reader and the blogosphere aside). Salon was one of the first Web magazines in 1995, and now the literary news and book review authority has a user-generated social media site. Though it is still in beta mode, anybody can upload--meaning publish--content for consideration on the main homepage. Not only is the use of the term "publish" changing rapidly within today's context every time a new Web trend launches, it defies literary trends of centuries past, particularly in the case of the age-old concept of the "vanity press."
"In the literary world, self-publishing used to mean vanity press," said Sally Alatalo, founder of Sarah Ranchouse Publishing and a professor of publishing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). "What it meant was you would pay somebody to be your publisher, and that gave you a kind of standing as a writer. You wouldn't be published by a reputable publisher unless your work were of a certain quality. So vanity press came to denote people who were perhaps unable to get a contract with a reputable publisher, and paid somebody to publish."
Ariel Pink and Os Mutantes co-headlined Metro on Friday night. Here's a mini-gallery before the Thanksgiving holidays! I am off to sweet California, home of Ariel Pink.
Today marked the official halfway passing point for National Novel Writing Month, making it a ripe time to think about shipping those pages out to press. And what better way for emerging authors to get that ballpoint (or ink) pen rolling than the idea of a legitimate D.I.Y. outlet? The answer, dear scribes, is self-publishing. Here follow 3 eminent sources to publish your next great American novel.
With a Web site like Lulu, an author-to-be can upload a story and print on demand with the option of selling the book (at no additional cost to them), receiving eighty percent of the price they choose for the book. A 100-page black-and-white paperback book is priced starting at $6 (which becomes cheaper after purchasing at least 100 copies), and acquiring an ISBN number for bookstore cataloging purposes starts at $49. Publishing packages are also available from $360-$1,360, which cover editing, designing and marketing assistance services.
BookSurge, a subsidiary Web site of Amazon, represents itself as a vertically integrated service, taking care of everything from design, printing and distribution in-house. The company also offers package deals with custom designs, formatting and ISBNs for close to a thousand dollars, targeting to a market of authors who are prepared to invest for their book.
Blurb appeals to writers and artists in the market for high quality, on-the-cheap books with unconventional sizes and modifications. Prices start from $4.95 for a 5" x 8" black-and-white softcover, to $54.95 for a 13" x 11" hardcover. The site's Booksmart software, equipped with a tutorial, allows users to customize every aspect of the book's design, even accommodating text and image file uploads from a computer or the Web.
These excerpts were taken from my feature, "A 'Novel' Idea: The Confluence of Print and Web in Self-Publishing," which includes interviews with Liz Mason (manager at Quimby's Bookstore), Linda Bubon (co-owner of Women and Children First) and Sally Alatalo (publisher, Sarah Ranchouse Publishing).
You can explore the self-publishing 'verse in further detail here.
As indie guitar goddess Marnie Stern heads into Empty Bottle to load gear for tonight's show, she has a few minutes to speak with Truthisms about her favorite female guitarists, the Marnie Stern LP and of course, the Best Coast/Wavves feud.
Photo credit David Torch
"For the whole tour I didn't say what the meaning of the 'ODB' shirt was, just because," said Stern.
"So basically I've been explaining it and god we've been selling so many. God, we're almost out now! We thought it was so funny, the whole 'old desperate bitch' thing. It was just hysterical, so that's why we did it."
She'll never be an "old desperate bitch," but she's just as badass as the O.G. ODB any day. Get your hands on those shirts while you still can! Tonight Stern plays Empty Bottle at 9:30pm with Heavy Cream and Chicago's Electric Hawk, concluding the U.S. leg of her fall tour which heads to Europe next week.
Want to hear all about Stern's rrriotous guitar influences? Stay tuned for my Flavorwire feature coming through Friday.
Welcome to the second installment of VIDEODRONE, where I won't ask you to get your body parts sucked into an uncomfortable television orifice, but will simply toss you 3 music videos I've been watching this week.
This week's theme is indie picks from the great American L.A.-CHI-NY trifecta, starting with the Best Coast.
"We'll be considering submissions...until November 3. Please send them to fiction@chicagoreader.com. We prefer text pasted into e-mail rather than attachments. It's hard to find room these days for pieces over 10,000 words, but to a degree we're flexible on length. We pay for those we publish."
You can also check out their decade-old archive of published local writers and artists here, and a pretty helpful NaNoWriMo guide from the folks over at Flavorwire.
Last year around this time I spoke with Jay Babcock, founder and publisher ofArthurmag, a publication that's changed cities as many times as I have.
I've reposted our Q&A in light of their recent mixtape BLACKOUT, which according to the site is "specially designed to accompany (or simulate) a human-plant interaction." Real subtle cover guys. Their irreverence is only one of the reasons why we all need to keep reading/absorbing/supporting this site's content, a furious callback to everything that was great and immersive before our attention spans dwindled down into The Nothing.
Arthur Magazine's Jay Babcock On the Art of a Dying Medium
From mushroom-hunting guides and poppy seed-planting events to unconventional interviews with independent artists, Jay Babcock's counterculture quarterly--Arthur Magazine--has found its home in the hands of alternative music fans and tree huggers nationwide. However, for more than a year the publication has ceased print production and moved completely online, a change which has many fans concerned according to Babcock. In this interview the founder confesses his worries, talks about the first years of Arthur and imparts advice to young writers and artists who are still in love with the paper medium.
Truthisms: In the last two years Arthur Magazine has moved its base from Los Angeles to New York and then Philadelphia. Has it finally found its home? Jay Babcock: I'm living in Philadelphia. The operating base has always been my laptop. If you want to say Arthur Magazine exists where I exist, you're welcome to do that. But the art directors are in L.A. and the writers are all over the country.
Truthisms: How do you direct the unison of different styles to adhere to the voice and mission? JB: The idea was that we wouldn't have a central voice. We were against it--that was the point of the magazine. The operation, broadly, was to allow compelling individual voices that shouldn't be neutered, homogenized or forced into some sort of Arthur "talk." Part of the way we made all the disparate individual voices to agree was that the content and ideas that they were bringing into it were very strong. I jam with the writers and the artists, but they've already got the style.
If you're rockin' out as a glam, indie or punk icon this Halloween, be sure to check out one of Truthisms' top 5 concert picks. Selected according to costume, genre and overall party gold, the following 5 shows are guaranteed to knock your socks off Saturday night.
Goin' as Meaty Gaga? Get your freak on at Freaky Deaky 2 featuring Chromeo, A-Trak and Kid Sister. Playing at Congress Theater w/Theophilius London, Midnight Conspiracy, Zeebo, DJ Alex Zelenka, Mettle, Kool Hersh, Wolf Pack, and Gun Love, 7pm, 17+, $35, tickets.
'90s glam legends The Dandy Warhols loved their Velvet Underground and Nico, and your costume would probably make them feel cooler than before they started releasing compilations. Playing at Vic Theater w/Blue Giant, 7pm, 18+, $24, tickets.
If you're dressing up as Kurt Cobain and/or Courtney Love, get messy with White Mystery, Chicago-based brother-sister garage band (originally booked at Ronny's which was shut down on Friday, and was rumored to include glow-in-the-dark festivities). Playing at Cafeteria del Pancho w/Loose Dudes and Pink Torpedo, 7pm, all-ages.
I wouldn't opt to see Bob Dylan on Saturday, but if you're a hippie Halloweener like Joan Baez, dress up as his old flame. Playing at Riviera Theatre, 7:30pm, $60, tickets.
The only modern subversion that comes close to Sid and Nancy has got to be The Soft Pack, who thankfully didn't soften up their sound when they changed their band name (they used call themselves The Muslims). Playing at Empty Bottle w/Kurt Vile And The Violators and Purling Hiss, 10pm, 21+, $13/$15, tickets.
Are you attending one of these shows, but want alternative costume ideas? Leave a comment and I'll hit you up with more suggestions!
LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip played at Riviera Theatre on Tuesday night for the band's final tour in support of this year's LP This Is Happening.
LCD mastermind James Murphy seemed tired, even lethargic at times, and the fist-pumping bros and "Drunk Girls" left plenty to be desired. Nevertheless the set was tight and dance-worthy, packed with aneurism-inducing strobes--though there wasn't much space in the crowd to really get down with "All My Friends" and everybody's favorite dorm room jam, "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House." The most notable moment was Murphy telling the crowd 'It's okay for you to be recording this on your phones and cameras, but you might want to try putting down your screens and actually enjoy the show.'
Something tells me Murphy's going to be happier making music at his own pace in the studio, and while there's a slight chance things aren't over yet, seeing LCD for the last time is just fine with me.
Check out the setlist here and the rest of their tour, which is moving on to Europe.
Shortly after I wrote up last week's Videodrone, this awesome find showed up on both gorilla vs. bear and Pitchfork. Check out the video for Diplo and Lunice's remix of "Helicopter" by none other than Deerhunter, a band I can't ignore posting about (no matter how many times I try to restrain myself).
It's directed by The KiD, who synced up music to footage borrowed from artist Andrey Stvolinsky's Slow Moscow.
According to mP productions' Twitter status this morning, Logan Square's dive venue Ronny's has been shut down because "some 'other venue' complained about lack of PPA." All forthcoming shows have been moved to Panchos at 2200 N. California.
Damn shame, I never got a chance to catch a show there, but you can presumably still see the awesome bro-sis garage duo White Mystery play this Saturday's all-ages Halloween party at what seems to be a Cuban restaurant bar. Cuban sammich + garage rock? I've really gotta get to Logan Square more often.
Update: apparently the venue was shut down by cops on Friday. Here's some info and photos about the bust, posted by musician Annie Reese (rock falls) who was slated to play that night.
Welcome to the first installment of VIDEODRONE, where I won't ask you to get your body parts sucked into an uncomfortable television orifice, but will simply toss you 3 music videos I've been watching this week.
Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox directed this video for "Helicopter" himself, complementing the song's aquatic synth echoes beautifully with static double exposures. Don't miss their Metro show tonight, they've had this song in their setlists along with plenty more Halycon Digest material.
"Don't Turn The Lights On" is an ocularly disturbing vid from Chromeo's September release, Business Casual. Any other sci-fi/Whedonverse fans thinking about that season one Angel episode "I Fall to Pieces" at 2:47? Didn't think so, but Chromeo's apparently not limited to partying with fancy footwork: eyeball party, everybody!
Coasting is a new project featuring Fiona Campbell of Vivan Girls' drumming fame, and Madison Farmer on guitar. The two met at Market Hotel in Brooklyn after which jams, party bands and awesome stop-motion animation ensued. Look out for their full-length next year but in the meantime here's "Kids," directed by Alice Cohen, which feels like a zinester's rendering of old school MTV Peter Gabriel stop-motion.
Truthisms, your guide to indie music, art and writing has finally arrived in its shiny, new home. To my loyal Wordpress readers, please refer to this ChicagoNow address from now on.
Stay tuned and check out my fall concert gallery featuring Deerhunter, Chapterhouse and Neon Indian.
And while I sort out a few growing pains getting adjusted to Movable Type, you can read my Gapers Block reviews of the free Deerhunter freeway show and Chapterhouse reunion.
Writers who have self-published include Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Percy Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Anaïs Nin.
