Tuesday 2/21 @ MCA Chicago
If you missed Hennessy Youngman's sold-out, standing-room-only performance at the MCA last September (which was hilarious) now is your chance to catch him in a return as part of the museum's latest speaker/performance series, Internet Superheroes: Art and Tech. There are few details to know what to expect, but one hopes that he will reprise his last performance, filming a live episode of his smash YouTube series Art Thoughtz, where he reduces art-world figures and theories to snarky yet insightful commentary.
Coming Up
Today @ 57th Street Books
To leaf through the pages of Roctober, Jake Austen's decades-running, Chicago-based obscuro-rock zine, is an experience more akin to viewing an inspired piece of outsider art than suffering another corporate-music rag or hype-prone blog. DIY-infused and wholly unencumbered by "cool," Roctober exhaustively profiles rock and pop's forgotten mavericks: subjects range from semi-obscurities Zolar X to the marginalized-from-the-margins Guy Chookoorian, a bizarre Armenian novelty act. Austen, who – fun fact! – also produces the beloved public-access show Chic-a-Go-Go, compiles the best Roctober interviews in Flying Saucer Rock 'n' Roll, a must-read for fellow cultists and obsessives. Start plumbing here at 57th Street Books' author spotlight.
Today @ Columbus Auditorium
Sam Lipsyte and Ben Marcus are individually responsible for some of the most wonderfully wicked prose of the decade: Lipsyte's wildly acclaimed most recent novel, The Ask (2010), is a hilarious, virulent, and moving tale about a middle-aged New York City slacker and his overdue comeuppance; and Marcus' equally feted Flame Alphabet (2012) imagines a decaying world where the poisonous sound of children's speech literally plagues humanity. In other words, today's joint appearance is the kind of dark-comic literary power ticket that doesn't come along often, and it shouldn't be missed. The authors discuss their craft and recent work, with a book signing scheduled to follow.
Today @ The Empty Bottle
In her excellent list of cultural resolutions for 2012, Flavorwire's Judy Berman lamented indie rock's return to "belabored, faux-rustic, quasi-literary troubadour stuff that we thought had passed its expiration date," adding that, "The Bruce Springsteen impressions are getting tired." She certainly has a point, but we are willing to make an exception for the man who's probably done more to bring Springsteen-esque blue-collar character-based lyrics back to the world of indie rock than anyone. We remain huge fans of Hold Steady singer Craig Finn's sharply observed and unrepentantly literate lyricism — and we're looking forward to catching his new solo material, which Finn aptly describes as "a little quieter and perhaps more narrative" than his work with his band.
Today @ Various Chicago theaters
This black-and-white, near-silent throwback by French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius (OSS 117) delivers film-geek kicks in both form (gleefully antiquated transitions, early-cinema special effects) and content (a plot straight out of A Star Is Born). Jean Dujardin is George Valentin, a silent matinee idol swept away by the introduction of sound; his love interest, played by Bérénice Bejo, is a former extra whose career is on the upswing. Still, for all its knowing conceptualism, expect a warm and frothy crowd-pleaser. As Hazanavicius told the New Yorker, "It's language that is intellectual — images are about feelings."
