Baltimore Magazine Names Shattered Wig "Best Literary Magazine" and an exciting call from a sufic prankster

Okay, this is slightly old news, two months old to be exact, but just bringing this new shell game up to date. Plus truly to be honest it was a bolt out of the blue that helped reignite some publishing passion.

Shattered Wig has been going for twenty-one years now (!) and is so out-of-fashion - hand cut and pasted and hand stapled - that hopefully it can be seen as a creaky cabinet of musty forgotten wonders. We are regretfully old enough now that a few of our original and favorite contributors have passed on to another plane. Its original intent was to spread the words and art of people around us we loved and who energized us and that's still the mission, we're just trying to expand that circle physically further out into the new boundless internet world.

Recent very fresh exciting news is that I got a call from Daniel A.I.U. Higgs proposing that Shattered Wig Press put out his new book of lyrics, poems and drawings to coincide with his upcoming Thrill Jockey double album release. Needless to say, more than a few of my Hummel figurines were smashed in the ensuing pinwheeling of my aged arms in ecstasy.

One of my first sights of Baltimore live music was a few weeks after I moved here (from dreaded over-congested Rockville) checking out the first Sowebo Arts Festival. As I strolled up to the main avenue of smoking meats and arts vendors I heard and saw an impassioned vaguely threatening man beast on top of the Sowebo Market building on Hollins St. It was Higgs with mic in hand singing with his then band Reptile House - which was too crunchy and metallic for my taste, but Daniel's yowling vocals and electric presence pinned me to the spot.

Then a few years later I remember catching a real early Lungfish show at the old Hour Haus on North Ave. when it was truly an old school Baltimore dump that artists and musicians lived in without heat or much else other than a lot of other sodden warm bodies around.

Some of my favorite "poetry" performances of the late '80s were ones that Higgs did with musician and filmmaker Dick Turner backing him on piano.

Senor Daniel luckily comes in often to the store I co-own, Normal's in Waverly, and his sufic conundrums are often the highlights of days that can be frequently brought down by haints and the psychically unhinged and can afford no treatment other than walking into a used bookstore or record store and dropping a bucket of bile giblets on the dusty floor. And his three annual "Christmeastermasses" that he's put on in December at the shop have been life altering.

To put it lightly, we here at Shattered Wig are thrilled at the thought of this new venture.