We’re pleased to welcome Chicago artist and writer Damien James as our new guest blogger! Damien will be covering the Chicago Humanities Festival for us, and today brings us a preview of what we can look forward to at this year’s Festival.
The Chicago Humanities Festival has just kick-started it’s 20th anniversary programming with the theme of Laughter. “Not Happiness, mind you,” writes the Festival’s artistic director Lawrence Weschler. “Happiness is smug and bland and self-satisfied. Laughter, on the other hand, runs the gamut: from blithe to bitter, raucous to serious, fond to angry,” and so on.
Spread out in venues across the city, the Chicago Humanities Festival will giddily dance through Laughter in all its permutations with the same expansive worldview and near-reckless abandon it has brought to the table since 1989, when Richard Franke got the bright idea to bring intellectually stimulating, entertaining, and entirely accessible lectures, performances, and all-around amazingness to our Midwestern metropolis.
On hand will be such distinguished guests as Harold Ramis (sharing some of his favorite funny moments in cinema), Matt Groening in conversation with Lynda Barry, Pulitzer Prize-winner Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize-coveter John Hodgman, Chris Ware and his beautifully sad art, Bob Sabiston (of Waking Life fame), the Neo Futurists, Chicago Reader’s Michael Miner, the Guerrilla Girls, and 151 other presenters that you’ll probably want to see.
CHF has literally changed peoples lives, my own included, and I’ll be attending from now through mid-November and sharing some of my experiences with you. Maybe this year I’ll explode.
The Festival runs through November 14th. For more info and tickets, visit http://www.chicagohumanities.org/.
Damien James is a self-taught artist and writer living (barely) and working (constantly) in Chicago. He has contributed to Chicago Reader, New City, Saatchi Gallery Online, Art Voices, and the general goodwill of mankind, among other things. His art has been seen in Chicago’s Around the Coyote Gallery, Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward Gallery with Art House Co-op’s Sketchbook Project, various apartments in Berlin, London, and a tiny village in Romania.
Without the good sense and inspiration of his paramour, Cassandra, he would most likely be a small blot of dirt about to be washed away by an only slightly larger puddle of inky water in some back alley.
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