Pungent Parlour - An August Must.

I've got this swell reading series in Chicago called Pungent Parlour that I co-created with my friend Jeremy Solomon. For a couple of years I did one called The Liquid Burning of Apocalyptic Bard Letters with my friend Aaron Cynic. That was, you guessed it, apocalypse themed. After a year away from it I was hungry to have a similar series to look forward to, something salon style, maybe a little looser in terms of theme, in that space in the back room at Black Rock Pub & Kitchen. Fireplaces and couches. Rustic wood. We did The Liquid Burning there, before we got booted from Matilda Baby Atlas when they converted it into a "dance club." We wanted to create a series that was a cozy "safe" space in the sense of writers trying out pieces from any stage of the writing process. New work. Old work. Published work. Desk drawer dust covered work. Each one we've done we've seen a wide variety: funny, violent, poignant, avant garde, interactive, grotesque. List expands. Chicago has a ton of good live lit going on, and I love it all. But I especially love our literary home. We're going into our 7th one tomorrow. We do it every 3rd Tuesday of the Month. I'll be there. I hope you'll be there. 8:30pm

See Facebook event for details.

Lucid Slap

I've been wayward from posting, but I've been stricken with the common cold. It started in my throat, as though a switch had been flicked and boom: sore throat. The virus then toured around my nasal passageway, chest, sinuses, in that order. You know the story.

We launched our Pungent Parlour reading series on the 19th of February, and had a solid turnout, people are excited to come back to it, Gapers Block did a fine mention of our fireside ambiance, and we are booked for 3rd Tuesdays of the month going forward at Black Rock Pub and Kitchen. We're jacked to have a regular thing, so we can get off on oral lit. We had a wide variety of pieces; some humorous personal essays, some violent-esque, intense short stories, a fantasy story. I'm excited to see the range each future month to come.

On another note, I had a lucid dream last night:

I was elected senior class president. The sky was light purple, there was ice on the streets and hills, but we gathered in some stone tiled square where the weather was warm, like a pocket. From there we got on a bus, a nice bus with tinted windows and seats lining the walls facing in. I saw between two girls, J####### and A######. J####### was talking about some aspect of credit card processing. It excited me and I said "I can talk all about this, in the future I work in the credit card processing industry!" And I sort of realized, I wasn't back in high school from the future, I was dreaming. I decided to test reality. I reached out suddenly and slapped both girls on the cheek. They didn't react, and this was some how proof to me that this was a subconscious rendering. Whoa, shit, a dream. I looked out the bus windows at the ornate marble architecture of the town square were riding through and felt a weird rush, like I've stumbled on something big. And I realized the Godlike fabric of the dream was aware that I was aware, and it was tugging me out...

I drifted back to drowsy wakefulness.

I want back in to this lucid dream thing, it has been awhile since I had one. Might be time to pull out my "Lucid Dreaming in 30 Days" book be like a dude who's suddenly into camping who reads how to survive in the wilderness books, but with dreamland.

The Pungent Parlour

For a bit, my friend Aaron Cynic and I hosted a reading series called The Liquid Burning of Apocalyptic Bard Letters. We mostly just called it The Liquid Burning. It started when I released my novella Turban Tan, I was looking to do some readings, and I knew Aaron from the days when my old roommate Alicia would participate in zine readings in various spots throughout Chicago; storefront apartments, the old MoJoes coffee shop before it moved to West Belmont, before unfortunate ownership issues and its closure. I teamed up with Aaron because I felt his writing and mine would mesh well thematically, a apocalypse/dystopian reading. We grabbed some other readers, my friend Ian Randall, I think Marcus Gilmer read at that first one, so did Donny Rodriguez. I don't think I read from Turban Tan that night, I think I read my short story about sewage backed up on the streets of Nagasaki. We enjoyed ourselves, enjoyed the wide range of pieces and each's take on apocalypse. We wanted to do it again, we wanted to keep the theme. 

For a year we did it at Matilda Baby Atlas, where we had done several Three Leaves Theatre fundraiser performance parties. It was the most colorful basement bar imaginable. Supposedly it was haunted - I learned of this several years after we had to move our reading series to Black Rock Pub & Kitchen after a redesign of Baby Atlas and a shift in direction made it a dance club. But we came to like Black Rock, it's wood paneled and fireplace warmed back room was perfect for a little gather of literary performance.

I think we did The Liquid Burning for 2 years or so. We had some good turn outs, some intimate ones with us gathered round the fireplace reading to each other, those were also special. We even one time had a noise musician whose large amplifier, on its lowest setting, shook the building and I thought that would be the end of our show, but no, we did a few more before Aaron and I each respectively had chock full life plates. Occupy Chicago was ignited, he was covering it for a variety of outlets. I became obsessed with revising my novel Votary Nerves, and moving apartments, and trying to close deals at my sales job so I could afford to contribute to mine and my girlfriend's household. The monthly Sunday kept falling on some sort of a Holiday (excuses, excuses), then 2012 rolled around, the time when an "apocalypse" themed reading series would have possibly thrived. But we let it run its course. I kind of wanted to move onto new themes, after all having a monthly reading series is a great motivator to create a new piece and share it, to hear it, and I felt like stepping outside of that kind of zone. 

I've been wanting to do a new reading series for some time, and damn, the year flew, we all felt it. But my friend Jeremy Solomon - who read at quite a few Liquid Burnings, been in many of our Wood Sugars live shows, does his own stand-up comedy, has written some novels - and I joined forces, got our shit together, and have something new going on at Black Rock Pub & Kitchen. Drawing on elements of a salon, we're keeping the themes a little more liquid than the apocalypse tones of the Liquid Burning.

To any in Chicago interested in checking it out at some point, please follow our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/PungentParlour.

And interested in getting involved? We're doing this monthly and want to rotate in a nice variety of writers, please do drop me a line at jeffphillips dot thirdleave [at] gmail dot com.