Featuring host Harold Ray (aka ACM fiction editor Jacob Knabb), The2ndHand contributors Chris Bower and Jill Summers, and "literary stalker extraordinaire" Amanda Marbais.

Musical backing throughout will be provided by Nora Barton on cello, Eliza Bangert on clarinet and Allie Deaver on flute. Billie Howard of Paver assists.

Music starts at 8 PM, readings begin at 9 PM. Presented by The2ndHand.

• Chris Ware Self-Portrait

I don't know if the auditorium at Parker can hold that kind of turnout, but tomorrow the two will return for a CHF panel discussion moderated by the Reader's Michael Miner.

"There's something about walking into Encore, in a space where the titles are almost falling down because the stacks are so high," [U. of M. assistant professor of musicology Mark] Clague says. "And you get a visceral sense, a physical sense, a psychic sense of the kind of legacy and amount of art that's been created that there is to grasp . . . If you just started at one end and tried to listen your way through the store, you'd die before you made it 10 feet past the front entrance."

If you're enough of a record geek that a four-and-a-half-hour drive seems like a fair trade for some serious crate digging, you owe it to yourself to make a pilgrimage there.

(via the Daily Swarm)

• Eugene Luzcz

I stopped by Lincoln Square's shiny new Gene's Sausage Shop yesterday at a lucky time. Patriarch Eugene Luzcz was hanging the sausage in the front window of the massive double-decker superstore that rose over the footprint of the old Meyer Delicatessen. I've been watching these developments for more than two years now, and I'm relieved that they're finally opening Saturday morning at 9 AM.

• Carol Gillott/Paris Breakfasts

I know, there are fashionable people all over the globe, but let's face it: Paris still sets the pace. I've collected some clues about what regular Parisians are wearing from the Paris-based blogs I check out regularly and a quizzed a couple of friends who just got back from a vacation in the City of Lights about what they saw:

• "Great American Desert"

A staged celebration of the Hiroshima bombing and a seasonal camp of RV drivers share the Arizona landscape in British filmmaker Stephen Connolly's 2007 short film Great American Desert, invoking, Connolly says, "an examination of ‘social liberty’ in the West in relation to war, spectacle, the environment and consumerism."

Great American Desert screens in "Occasional Pieces," a selection of Connolly's short films and videos Saturday 11/7 at the Nightingale

In a post on the website scribd.com that appears to be from May, a writer named "NidalHasan" likened a suicide bomber to a soldier who jumps on a grenade to save the lives of his fellow officers in that both were sacrificing their lives "for a more noble cause."

That cause, he wrote, "is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan."

The Scribd.com page is here. The unedited comment is below. You may find it less inflamatory in the original:

From the Reader's music Flickr pool, which is of course open to your photos as well.

Not to be annoyingly pedantic—I try to keep it in check, I really do—but perhaps a lesson in some of the major methods of electronic voice alteration used in music might be in order. After the jump, some examples.

Continue reading "Fraternity Accused of Stealing 10,000 Student Newspapers to Cover Up Date Rape Story">>

Today, she withdrew from the race.

• George Whiteside

Atwood's tweeting away while on her tour: she just posted "In airport on way to Chicago, writing strange Tweets."

For her Chicago appearance, Atwood's reading will be supported by actors and singers drawn from the DePaul theater and music schools. The event costs $20, with a portion going to support nonprofit environmental organizations. Tickets available here.

Here's an excerpt from The Year of the Flood:

And the next day Mount Eerie, whose sound Reader critic Miles Raymer describes as "epic, fascinating, and more than a little scary," plays at 1 PM at the Broadway location (3126 N. Broadway).

So it was as much of a blessing as it was a curse when I discovered the blog Stuff You Will Hate, a tribute to the one-way love-hate relationship between a self-described "old" hardcore and metal fan calling himself Sergeant D and, well, scene kids in general. Though he occasionally engages in a bit of Carles-ian faux-naive irony—like in the current entry, "Life's Big Questions: Are Hollister/Abercrombie Scene??"—he claims that anything he says he likes he actually likes, and he tends to stick up for the kids.

But man is that ever an appropriate name for a blog.