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Flotsam and Jetsam / Lit & Lectures / Visual Art Saturday is Fluxus Day!

Posted by Sam Worley on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 2:13 PM

Patrick_Hoesly.jpg
  • Patrick Hoesly
What’s happening this weekend, and it may not be anything at all, is happening at the Chicago Cultural Center, which hosts a day of happenings inspired by Fluxus, the 1960s anti-art movement famous for its bizarre, anarchic “happenings.” George Maciunas coined the term, which is related to the Latin word for “to flow,” in 1961. In a review in the Reader in 1993, Fred Camper noted that Fluxus artists “worked in a wider variety of media than any other ‘movement’ I know of,” and to the extent that people still follow the movement, that’s true—in 2010 the Experimental Sound Studio hosted a Fluxus-inspired musical bike ride. In conjunction with its show "Write Now: Artists and Letterforms," that bastion of avante-gardism the Cultural Center presents Fluxus Day on Fri 2/11 from 11 AM to 5 PM. Some highlights lie beyond the jump.

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Flotsam and Jetsam / Media / Lit & Lectures Walk a lonely superhighway

Posted by Sam Worley on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:30 PM

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  • Archibald Ballantine
A suite of essays on Facebook in the New York Times Sunday Review this week includes a contribution by local legal scholar Lori Andrews, who was featured in December in the Reader's People Issue. (My boss, Mara Shalhoup, is treating Andrews’s piece elsewhere.) I was particularly befuddled by Evgeny Morozov’s “The Death of the Cyberflaneur,” which takes the discussion in a direction . . . you wouldn’t expect. Morozov laments the passing of what he calls the “cyberflaneur” (actually the term was coined on a website called, for some reason, Ceramics Today), based on the original, more corporeal flaneur—the boots-on-the-ground flaneur. A 19th-century French ideal whom Baudelaire and Benjamin (stay with me here) viewed as “an emblem of modernity,” the flaneur in Paris “would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades . . . to cultivate what Honore de Balzac called ‘the gastronomy of the eye.’ . . . His goal was to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, its cosmopolitanism.”

OK, now think about GeoCities circa 1995.

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Chicagoans / Lit & Lectures Today's Chicagoan: Anne Ford

Posted by Jerome Ludwig on Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 2:12 PM

Anne Ford
  • David Figlio
  • Anne Ford
For the Reader's Chicagoans column, writer Anne Ford switches into oral-historian mode, seeking out interesting characters and letting us hear from them directly. Here we turn the tables in honor of Anne's book signing Tuesday at the DePaul Center Barnes & Noble.

"I got asked to write Peaceful Places Chicago for a few reasons—I used to be a travel editor at Rand McNally, I still do travel writing in addition to other things like Chicagoans, and I’ve lived in the Chicago area for 15 years. But my secret qualification is that I really hate loud noise. Fortunately, I mostly work at home, but a girl has to leave the house sometimes. So, this book.

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