As easily as you or I may drink a cold or hot beverage or lay on a ratty couch smoking a doobie watching cartoons, Michael Kimball writes novels. And not blind-assed word churning either, but books that seemingly every major media outlet races to pour honeyed praise on. If he is not careful Joyce Carol Oates may plant a deadly scarab beneath his pillow to take him out of the literary running.
Michael's latest publication is a book collecting life stories of real people that he condensed onto postcards. We are holding a Shattered Wig Night Friday, March 29 to celebrate this new treasure and to let people love up on him. Here is what he says about it:
Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) started five years ago at a performance arts festival. Between then and now, I wrote over 300 postcard life stories, condensing over 10,000 years of life. Now it's a book. You can get it directly from Mud Luscious or from Amazon. Unfortunately, I couldn't publish everybody's postcard life story in the book or it would have come in around 700 pages.
Here is a link to his blog about the book:
www.postcardlifestories.blogspot.com
Michael's last novel was Big Ray.Big Ray was named an Oprah Book of the Week, featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the like and excerpted in The Collagist. Michael provided a context for Big Ray in the Huffington Post piece “Obesity Book: The Underrepresentation of Overweight Characters” and showed another aspect of his succinct writing style in “Audacious Ideas: Postcard Life Stories,” posted here.
In addition to Big Ray, Michael has authored the novels Us, Dear Everybody and The Way the Family Got Away. His books have been translated into a dozen languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean and Greek. His shorter works have appeared in Bomb and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for a couple documentaries, the 510 Readings, racing around softball fields like a madman and the conceptual pseudonym Andy Devine.
Josh Fruhlinger is a writer, editor, and comedian who lives right here in Baltimore. He's the creator of the Comics Curmudgeon, a nine-year-old blog about Mary Worth and Rex Morgan, M.D., that proves that you can become semi-famous on the Internet for just about anything as long as you post something every day. He'll be reading a chapter from The Enthusiast, his novel-in-progress, which is a satirical tale about unorthodox marketing strategies, post-industrial capitalism's claim on our emotions, and subways. The Enthusiast was launched as a Kickstarter project and will be available in November, hopefully.
"If an opium pipe had vocal chords, it would sing like Wheatie Mattiasich," Prague music magazine Ucho Med stated in their "Why aren't These Artists Being Worshipped?" december 2012 article. Wheatie is a fantastic singer songwriter who plays a mean autoharp and guitar and is known to do haunting covers of John Jacob Niles. She's currently wrapping up a new vinyl lp.
Baltimore's Mr. Moccasin is led by Hanna Badalova, born in Baku, Azerbaijan. A poet, she sings sometimes in English and sometimes in Russian as moods change in the music. Their influences are Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses, B-52s, and The Sugarcubes.
Musicians in the group are Jared Fischer, Chris Martinelli (guitars) and Greg Hatem (drums) back Hanna up with rock, folk and punk.
XAHA is the band's forthcoming album, produced by Greg Hatem. XAHA is the Russian cyrillic spelling of the name Hanna, the singer of Mr. Moccasin. The album is rallying around her as an artist. Her stories, visions, and expressions come to the foreground on this record, as in "Black On Black," the first single.
The Wig Nights are still fortunate enough to be housed in the legendary 14 Karat Cabaret at 218 W. Saratoga St. The cover is $5 and doors swing wide at 9.
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