Closed for the 4th

Closed for the 4th. Back tomorrow!

Event: Beth Heinly & Meghan Turbitt

Friday, June 21st at 6pm

at

Brickbat Books:

Beth Heinly & Meghan Turbitt

Joins us! Friday June 21st at Brickbat Books, the best little, our favorite, book store in Philadelphia, 6-8pm at the birth of summer for *new comics* - Meghan Turbitt's "Laughter Birth" the follow-up to "Pregnant & Fired" about being a new Mom and Beth Heinly's "Cursed" another journal comic inspired horror story about cleaning houses that is really sad and not funny actually. Are you sensing a theme here? Come purchase these two comic books which express the very nature of making a living, surviving and having a life in late capitalism. 

For this book signing event Meghan & Beth will be for the first time ever achieving a "Two Panel Comic Challenge", a "Two Comic Panel Challenge" where two comic artists draw one two panel comic together! These original comics come as inserts for each comic purchase. 

Refreshments for all! Do attend.

More about the artists:

Meghan Turbitt is a self-described conservative media personality (lol) on social media. She lives in South Philadelphia with her baby daddy, daughter Billie "the chip" and two cats. Meghan's comics are a humorous romp in journal comic-ing, flipping the genre on its' edge stylistically - her lines are loose, improvised - like her sense of humor. You will feel like you have a new best friend once you start reading Turbz comics. Follow Meghan where ever you get your creative news feed on twitter @RIPMeghan, instagram @chips_and_tingles.

meghanturbitt.com

Beth Heinly is a self-described artist on social media. She lives in Philadelphia, nearly destitute. She writes an advice column on art making practice entitled "Ask Artblog" on theartblog.org along with her long running weekly journal comic "The 3:00 Book". Beth's comics are dark, strident, biting humor on the abject of mundane existence. That actually makes them sound more important than they are tbh. Currently she is desperate for patreons, so please do sign up: patreon.com/bethheinly, membership comes with all sorts of prizes and exclusive weekly comics. As if she doesn't have enough to do, you should follow her social media accounts if you are interested in guerrilla performance art, comics or cats @berthheiny. Tweets too @bethheinly 

bethheinly.com

Event: A Reading with Stacy Wakefield and Zachary Lipez (Akashic Books)

Thursday, May 9th at 7pm

at 

Brickbat Books:

A Reading with 

Stacy Wakefield and Zachary Lipez 

(Akashic Books)

STACY WAKEFIELD's novel Sunshine Crust Baking Factory is a riveting coming-of-age story that follows a young woman who squats abandoned buildings with comrades in 1990s New York City. 

Wakefield's artist books, published for many years under the imprint Evil Twin, have been collected by institutions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York and London’s Tate Modern. She runs a studio dedicated solely to book design and production. Her first novel, The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory, was published by Akashic in 2015. She lives in the Catskills and Brooklyn. Her other collaborations with Akashic are Please Take Me Off the Guest List and 131 Different Things, both with Zachary Lipez and Nick Zinner.

ZACHARY LIPEZ will read from 131 Different Things, an intimate novella of love and loss wrought from the cultural underground, perfectly expressed in an inventive object that rediscovers the magical possibilities of the book.

Lipez lives in New York City, where he has tended bar for the last twenty years. He is a regular contributor to Noisey, and his music and culture writing have also appeared in Vice, Hazlitt, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, Talkhouse, Inc., and Penthouse. His collaborations with Akashic Books, Nick Zinner, and Stacy Wakefield are Please Take Me Off the Guest List and 131 Different Things.

Event: Jon Collin & Bill Nace Duo + "Special Guests" (The Trio)

This Sunday, April 14th, at 7pm

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Brickbat:

Jon Collin & Bill Nace Duo + "Special Guests" (The Trio)

JON COLLIN is a musician from Lancashire, UK, now based in Stockholm, Sweden. He has released several LPs of freeform abstract guitar blues and several more short-run releases of through-composed drone works. He is interested in, amongst other things, recontextualising the role of the recording musician through outdoor recording and interactions with natural, mechanical and biological ambient sounds. As an artist his visual-conceptual work includes the long-term tape label project Winebox Press. His most recent LP releases are The Nature (Early Music, 2017) and Water and Rock Music Volume 1 (Feeding Tube, 2018).

http://feedingtuberecords.com/artists/jon-collin/

https://earlymusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-nature

BILL NACE is a guitar mistreater capable of conjuring swarms of noise clouds, textural splat bombs, and a huge range of other sonic malarky depending on the situation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW9Crja-bKo

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"SPECIAL GUESTS" (a.k.a. The Trio)

Tara Burke / Nathalie Shapiro / Brooke Sietinsons

"Special Guests" – This is not a coy surprise, they just have yet to come up with a proper name. Tara (Fursaxa), Nathalie, and Brooke combine voice, harmonium, and guitar drones deep into the heart of the mystery zone.

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$5 suggested donation.

There will be snacks.

Event: Kinloch Nelson and Scott Verrastro & Kyle Press

Thursday, April 11th at 8pm

At

Brickbat Books:

Kinloch Nelson (Tompkins Square)

Scott Verrastro (Kohoutek) 

&

 Kyle Press (Love Club)

Clavius Productions presents the Philadelphia debut of Rochester NY's Kinloch Nelson, a 69 year old acoustic guitarist who just released his first album on Tompkins Square. Nelson has been playing and teaching in the Rochester/Buffalo/upstate NY region for 50 years but has rarely ventured far from there. Saxophonist/throat singer Kyle Press (Love Club/Impressionist) and percussionist Scott Verrastro (Kohoutek/Curanderos) will perform as a duo for the first time. Starts at 8 sharp and will be done by 10! Plus Brickbat is one of the best bookshops in the city, so come by and browse and listen to some challenging acoustic music.

8pm, all ages!

$8-10 sliding scale

Kinloch Nelson (Tompkins Square, Rochester NY)

http://www.tompkinssquare.com/archives/1070

Kinloch (sounds like “kin-law”) Nelson (b. 1950) studied classical guitar privately with Stanley Watson, jazz guitar with Gene Bertoncini at Eastman School of Music, and music theory at the University of Rochester. In 1973, he began teaching both privately and at The Hochstein Music School where he was on the faculty for twenty-five years. In 1985, Nelson co-founded the Guitar Society of Rochester, which during its ten-year run presented many of the world’s greatest guitarists. Nelson is the author of a book, Alternate Guitar Tunings. He currently teaches privately, conducts guitar workshops and maintains a performance schedule.

Nelson came to the attention of Tompkins Square via Duck Baker, who visited Rochester in 2018 supporting his own Tompkins Square archival release, Les Blues Du Richmond : Demos & Outtakes, 1973-1979.

"Some time in the turbulent summer of 1968 I went to visit my sister who was studying theater at Dartmouth College that semester. Big stages, spotlights, cat walks, backstage access – it was pretty exciting stuff for a high school kid from a small town. One night we walked across campus to check out the college’s radio station, WDCR. She had a friend, Dave Graves, who was doing a nightly radio show there and she figured I needed to see this. I walked into the station and time stopped. I had spent many an hour, pretty much from the crib on up, glued to AM radios, soaking up the music and the mystery. And now, here was the real deal. I took a look around: there was a production room with a couple Ampex tape recorders, a mixing console, fancy microphones and a recording room. Hmmm… So, I called up my high school friend Carter Redd and said, “Get on a bus and come on up and record.”

Since late 1967 Carter and I had been playing guitars together, working on songs of the day: Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Donovan. Before long we were writing songs and instrumental guitar tunes. We borrowed someone’s Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder and started making recordings. But, WDCR raised the bar. Somehow we persuaded Dave Graves to record us, and that’s how these recordings came about. Recorded at various times in the summers of ’68, ’69, and ’70, and in the winter break of ’69-’70, three of the songs in this collection are ones we did together, the rest are solo tunes of mine.

The first two songs we recorded were “Funky Susan” and “Partly On Time.” “Funky Susan” was Carter’s invention; I added the harmonica part and the second guitar part. “Partly On Time” we wrote together. “Lazin’ In my Sleep” was done a year later. Dave engineered the first two, and a few months later he took a chance and sent them off to John Phillips of The Mamas And Papas. Phillips was looking for new acts to produce and, sure enough, he liked what he heard. Months went by…then out of the blue he sent word for us be at a recording studio in Connecticut one day in January of 1969 to record a Mason Williams song which he figured we could learn and record. It never happened. Carter, a year ahead of me, had already graduated and taken off for a drive across the country. He was nowhere to be found, and there were no cell phones in those days. Weeks went by. Phillips, engrossed in producing the film “Monterey Pop” eventually lost interest. I’ve often wondered what might have happened had we recorded all these tunes for him and put them out way back then…

In the summer of 1969 I went back and recorded some more, this time alone, and was there when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The first rumors of the coming Woodstock Music And Art Fair were circulating. FM underground radio was emerging. Music genres were cross pollinating. It was an exciting time to be writing music. Carter and I went back to WDCR to record again that winter, and I went again by myself in the summer of 1970 to work at the station and record some more. But after those days, we pretty much went our separate ways. Sadly, somehow during all this the master tapes got lost or erased. The tapes that survived are copies.

So, one night in the summer of 1970, after I recorded “Kittens,” Tom Siebert’s Boat,” and “Winnipesaukee Night,” a friend of mine and I were listening to the tapes on my crummy little stereo and decided to take them over to his house to play them on his dad’s amazing hi-fi set. Off we drove with the tapes, my new tape recorder and my guitar in our family car. There’s an intersection in my hometown where a town road crosses a highway. That night as we were crossing the highway, a drunk driver, running from an accident he had caused at the previous light, ran the red light and hit us broadside. Wham! The car folded in half, the windows shattered, our car spun around 180 degrees and the tape recorder and all my tapes flew out the window and landed all over the highway. I should have been killed, but fortunately the driver hit the brakes and crashed into the passenger door just behind me. Amazingly we survived with only whiplash! My guitar, a 1960s era Gibson J-50, was in the back seat and didn’t fare as well, taking the full brunt of the crash. But the tapes and the recorder survived, and no one ran over them. I never met the driver. He was immediately taken to the hospital. He never showed up in court. They jailed him. The insurance company replaced our car, gave us some cash and I bought a brand new Martin D-18. And, they let me keep the J-50, which I later fixed.

That tape recorder has long since failed, but the tapes held up. I never thought they could be released commercially because, being copies, the quality wasn’t that good. Over the years I figured I would re-record the songs. But ultimately I never did, because how can one recapture the original mindset, feeling, vibe of the times and in particular the sound of that now-replaced studio? But thanks to the digital era the tapes have cleaned up reasonably well and the songs have come to life.

As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in, of all places, Woodstock NY. At the concert here last night I happened to play one of the songs from those tapes, “Kittens.” And now, looking back, it occurs to me that the wrecked family car was the same one my sister and I drove in to that infamous Woodstock Music And Art Fair…that same summer in which I wrote and recorded that song…back when all of these songs were spinning constantly in my head. Now, half a century later, I guess they still are…Cheers"  (K. Nelson)

Kyle Press & Scott Verrastro (Philadelphia)

http://claviusproductions.com/

https://impressionist.bandcamp.com/

Press (Love Club/Impressionist): alto sax, throat singing, electronics

Verrastro (Kohoutek/Bardo Pond/Curanderos/Dirt Weed Revue): percussion, flutes, whistles, found objects

Event: Michael Gottlieb, Buck Downs and Meg Ronan

 

Saturday,  March 2nd at 7pm

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Brickbat Books:

The Hugely Popular Poetry Series

Presents:

Michael Gottlieb

Buck Downs

Meg Ronan

Michael Gottlieb is a poet and the author of nineteen books, a New Yorker and one of the original Language writers. His published work also includes memoirs and essays. His most recent title is What We Do: Essays for Poets (2016, Chax Press). 

Buck Downs' new book is Open Container (Private Edition); in 2017, Furniture Press Books released a selected poems, Unintended Empire. He lives in Washington DC and works as an executive writing coach.

Meg Ronan is the author of the obligatory garnish argument (SpringGun Press) and the chapbook The Friendship Blog. She is a cancer moon and she has a lot of emotional needs.

Event: The Hugely Popular Poetry Series : Hailey Higdon & Marion Bell

Saturday Feb. 2nd at 7pm

at

Brickbat Books:

The Hugely Popular Poetry Series Presents: 

Hailey Higdon
Marion Bell

Hailey Higdon is originally from Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of several chapbooks including A Wild Permanence (Dancing Girl, 2018), Rural (Drop Leaf, 2017), The State in Which (Above/Ground, 2013), Packing (Bloof Books, 2012) and How to Grow Almost Everything (Agnes Fox, 2011). Hard Some, her first full-length collection, is recently available from Spuyten Duyvil Press. She currently lives and works in Seattle. Find her online at haileyhaileyhailey.com.

Marion Bell is a poet who lives in Philadelphia. Her first book, Austerity, is coming out from the new Philly-based Radiator Press in January 2019. You can also find some of her writing in the Slow Poetry in America newsletter. She is a Capricorn/ Gemini rising and Scorpio moon. She is also a social work student working in community mental health. She is interested in psychotherapy, depression, liberation, queer kinship, disability, lesbians and making a different world.

Opening at Noon!

Brickbat will be opening today, Wednesday, January 23rd, at 12 noon.

Event: Laura Adamczyk in conversation with Sam Allingham

Tuesday, January 15th, at 7:30pm

at

Brickbat Books:

Laura Adamczyk

 in conversation with 

Sam Allingham 

Laura Adamczyk has won awards from the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation of Chicago and the Dzanc/DISQUIET International Literary Program. Her work has appeared in such publications as the Chicago Reader, Guernica, McSweeney’s, Ninth Letter, and Salt Hill. Her short story collection, Hardly Children, was published by FSG in November 2018. She lives in Chicago.

Sam Allingham's first book of stories, The Great American Songbook, was published by A Strange Object in Fall 2016. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, One Story, Epoch, and American Short Fiction, and online at Web Conjunctions and n+1.

"The stories are achingly open to the vulnerability that comes with forming attachments and the surprising difficulty of breaking them." --Danielle Lazarin, The New York Times Book Review

"A striking blend of graceful sentences and eerie premises." ―Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune

"Bold and observant . . . [Hardly Children] teems with wry writ as it explores memory and family and uncovers the unexpected in the everyday . . . Adamczyk considers the architecture of her stories, which often shift in striking ways." --Anne K. Yoder, The Millions

"Super weird, super unsettling, and super great." --The Boston Globe

“[A] knockout . . . Adamczyk’s Hardly Children focuses on young people waking up to the dangers of the adult world.” --ELLE

"Adamczyk’s accomplished debut collection pulses with an underlying sense of menace. The short opener, “Wanted,” has a quiet depth that moves it away from what is traditionally thought of as flash fiction . . . Adamczyk never writes the same story twice, giving this collection a sleek and unnerving feel as readers know something bad is going to happen, but are uncertain of what it’ll be." --Publishers Weekly

Closed for the Holiday!

Brickbat will be closed Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We will reopen on Thursday at 11am. Happy Holidays!