Velvetron Strikes Back

Artifice ally, Colin Palombi, is at it again. We don’t mind hyping Colin at all, considering he is responsible for a special print found within Artifice 1 AND he’s making a super sick video for the upcoming Artifice 4 release party. Catch him and his band, Velvetron, this Friday for some wholesome, good-hearted fun.

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When: Friday November 4th @ 8 pm

Where: Nightingale Theater (1084 N. Milwaukee, Chicago)

Why: Velvetron presents a Rock/Paper/Scissors tournament

to celebrate the release of their new album 4.

There will also be a screening of a short documentary about the band entitled

Velvetron: Now, Where are They?

*Admission: Free

*Limited edition Albums: $5

*Entry to the tournament: $3

The Chicago band Velvetron formed in 2002. As Velvetron, Anthony Mizicko, Colin Palombi (The Homoticons), Tim Berthiaume, and Seth Vanek (Roommate, Thin Hymns, Tom Comerford) got their start playing parties and events at the now defunct underground space known as the Ice Factory. They went on to open for local and touring acts such as Sybris, The French Kicks, Scout Niblett, Office, and the Octopus Project.

Artifice Magazine Is All Over Logan Square

Artifice Magazine is now in Bucket O’ Blood Books & Records (http://www.bucketoblood.com). The picture above is photo evidence, something which we do not yet have for Wolfbait & B-Girls (http://wolfbaitchicago.com). But we’re there. You can go there to see for yourself if you don’t trust us.

Author Dossier 8: Joseph Scapellato

It’s a good day for a dossier. This week, Joseph Scapellato explores warmth as weapon, lakes as life source, and bread as backbone.

Joseph was born in the suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. Currently he teaches English/Creative Writing at Susquehanna University and Bucknell University. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Post Road, Gulf Coast, Unsaid, The Collagist, and others– like Artifice 4!

1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.): 

Displeased creator-god.  Specifically when the source of the deity’s displeasure is not mankind’s disobedience, impiety, or cruelty, but merely mankind’s inability to function properly. People made of mud who melt.  People made of matches who burn.  People made of mouths who eat each other up.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city: 

Chicago, the big-shouldered hog-butchering windy mecca of the Midwest.  There are many reasons to live in Chicago (here are the personal ones: I was born in the suburbs, have lived in Chicago, have loved Chicago, still love Chicago, want to be in Chicago right now, and look forward to Michael Czyzniejewski’s Chicago Stories), but in an apocalypse, when many will go thirsty, those reasons become one reason: the Great Lakes.

Author Dossier 7: Melissa Goodrich

Melissa Goodrich enlivens the Artifice blog this week.

She is that handprint in the mirror she swears she didn’t put there, the canoe in the canal, the underbelly of the stone so glad to be turned over.  She does that MFA thing at Arizona. Her fiction appears in PANK, Phoebe, American Short Fiction, and in Artifice 4 (!) alongside friend and old prof, Joe Scapellato.

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.):

Ice age. I like the image of us (whoever the us is) circled around a fire, the front of our bodies thawed, the backs of us freezing, frozen, our hair brittle to snap, our backbones, and how there are no body boundaries; we’d all be rediscovered some thou-million years later pressed and inseparable as bricks.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city:

Well not New York. And not London. And certainly not Des Moines.

Author Dossier 6: Richard Chiem

Richard Chiem joins us for a dreary day dossier about solitude, forgotten things, headlessness, and Paris in the rain (always).

Richard is the author of two e-books WHAT IF, WENDY and OH NO EVERYTHING IS WET NOW (with Ana C.) He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared in Monkeybicycle, elimae, and Everyday Genius. His first collection of short stories YOU PRIVATE PERSON is forthcoming from Scrambler Books (2012). Find his piece no school five // for stephen tully dierks in Artifice 4.

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.):

Maybe an apocalypse where everyone is poor. Everyone has been poor for quite some time, ten or twenty years or more, to a point where they have forgotten the use for cars. There are people who bike through the cities and people who walk alone. There are still a few buses up and running during the apocalypse, organized by a group of lonely men who just love to drive buses. But they would be more like big taxis and filthy inside.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city:

I am new to Seattle and already I have can imagine myself surviving here. It gets pretty cold and going from place to place is almost inherently passionate here, enduring the freezing cold from point A to B. Downtown Seattle is also particularly gorgeous and gray, with high-reaching and creative architecture (The Columbia Building) near large bodies of water (the Puget Sound). I want to stand on 5th Ave. and look up at the Columbia Building and its rows of black and broken windows, holding hands with the one I love.

In the apocalypse, taking time to look at the architecture of buildings will be a bigger thing. Clouds are important, too.

Author Dossier 5: Catherine Gammon

This week, Catherine Gammon, author of the Artifice 4 piece, Kafka Writes to Romeo / Romeo Writes Back, shares with us spiritual wisdom at the end of the world.

Catherine Gammon’s novel Isabel Out of the Rain was published in 1991 by Mercury House, and her shorter fiction has appeared in many magazines, including Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Manoa, Agni, and Other Voices. In 2000, Catherine left the literary marketplace for ten years of residential training at San Francisco Zen Center’s Tassajara monastery and Green Gulch Farm, where in 2005 she was ordained as a Soto Zen priest by Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi. “Kafka Writes to Romeo/Romeo Writes Back” is her first published fiction since her return to writing and reentry into the marketplace.

We think she would make a fine survivor.

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.): 

Ice is nice.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city: 

Forest and the green woods—Pittsburgh will do.

Where To Get Your Copy of Artifice Magazine

You can always order a subscription, individual issue, or snazzy special edition from this (safe) link on our website–> http://www.artificemag.com/subscriptions/

 

If you want to support an independent bookstore while you’re at it, you can also get your copies of Artifice from the following vendors.

 

 

Quimby’s

1854 W. North Ave

Chicago, IL 60622

(773) 342-0910

 

The Book Cellar

4736 N Lincoln Ave
Chicago, IL 60641

(773) 293-2665

 

Wolfbait & B-Girls

3131 W. Logan Blvd.

Chicago, IL 60647

(312) 698-8685

 

Bucket O’ Blood Books and Records

2307 N Milwaukee Ave

Chicago, IL 60647

(773) 715-5901

 

Logan Square Farmers Market

3103 W. Logan Blvd.

Chicago, IL 60647

(773) 489-3222

 

Vouched Books

Indianapolis/Atlanta

http://vouchedbooks.com/

 

Pilot Books

219 Broadway E, Ste 28
Seattle, WA 98102

(206) 229-7181

 

Quail Ridge Books and Music

3522 Wave Ave.

Raleigh, NC 27607

(919) 828-1588

Author Dossier 4: Curtis Smith

Double doses of dossiers from here on out! Lucky number two this week is Curtis Smith, author of Of Course Sara Does Not Hear the Ocean, set to appear on page 101 of Artifice 4.

His most recent books are Bad Monkey , Truth or Something Like It , and Witness.

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.): 

Plague, but one that involves a lot of sleeping. I’d like to dream my way into the next world.

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city: 

Washington DC. I’d like to surrounded by monuments and such.

Author Dossier 3: Trisha Low

Trisha Low joins us for this week’s Doomsday dossier.

She contributed her piece Letters to Charles Olson (for Charles Olson, duh) to the forthcoming Artifice 4.

Check out her online chapbook Confessions [of a variety] HERE, available for free download.

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1. Preferred type of apocalypse (plague, nuclear holocaust, ice age, etc.): 

If the world were a room, I would sit in the middle of it and start screaming. Well. It would start out a low whine, low in volume but high-pitched, and get louder and louder and then become screaming. You can’t comfort that, or help that, right? All I’m interested in doing is screaming and making sure everyone feels it, whatever the fuck that means. Your only sound option would be to start screaming as well, duh, but no one bothers. No one is paying any attention, so I guess nothing exists…

2. Preferred post-apocalyptic city: 

 Sentimentality

A4 Release Party / Reading & Screening

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Order Issue 4 here.