The House Was Full of Love and Then Full of More Love and Hard-Earned Wisdom and Whimsy, So Much Said So Simply - The Chris Mason Book Party

A few years from now when books no longer exist and the only things being read will be descriptions of the daily stool samples of the latest 16 year old pop star or of the drug addiction meltdown of some hack pseudo actor on the i-Pad X along with snuff e-magazines giving detailed photos and brief descriptions of daily murders and the most recent flood, drought and/or earthquake, complete with devastating videos one click away, the drones for the privatized "Removal Works" will be loading me up into the van for obsolete laborers who are not employed by search engines, hospitals, rescue agencies or radiation treatment plants.


And just before they slam the lead-lined door of the vehicle that will take me to the factory that will convert me into soylent green I will have one last tiny bit of courage and will and yell out "People once read books! Even poetry! And not only that, one warm Sunday in March, 2011, a book of poetry was published by a thing called Narrow House. It was written by a man named Chris Mason and not only was he not 18, he was not carried into the show in a giant egg carried by servants. In fact he drove up on his own volition in a kind of battered family type station wagon, his grown talented daughter Elizabeth seated beside him.


"People turned out in great numbers for the event of this publication and hung on the words of his verse. Music was played. The bald one calling himself 'Dierker' played so swift and passionately that his likeness could not be captured on camera except as a demonic blur! Surely there must be a copy of Chris' book Hum Who Hiccup surviving somewhere. Ask Secretary of Defense Justin Sirois. He once ran Narrow House before he renounced the printed word and art. Colonel Qaddafi's all female security force shall avenge not only my death, but the death of all booksellers!"

Above are proud Narrow House publishers holding the fine new book, which contains most if not all of his poetry from the last decade or so, including his dreamt poems of poet friends, "Homeric Hums" and the beautiful spare "Hiccups" themselves. As Jamie Gaughan-Perez held the book up someone yelled out "Lauren Bender, if the book is as good as you say and you are truly so proud of it, pose as if you are hypnotized and being forced to stare at the nude engorged wang of Mel Gibson with a small anvil attached to it". And indeed she did.

Kickstarting the event was young Robert Michael O'Brien, curator of the WORMS readings. I wish I had had a notebook with me to jot down a few quotes that really grabbed me since my retention rate is that of a banana peel, but two of his pieces grabbed me in particular. One was about being pulled over by a cop late at night and the officer is impressed by his love and feeling for life and expresses his own lack of such feeling. It was not all Ice-T hatin' on the cops, just using the uncomfortable situation of being halted on the roadside as a vehicle for getting across the inexpressible.

Another standout was his chant-like piece that included the lines "The body is power/The abandonment of body is power". Which made me think of the Gang of Four's "Our bodies make us worry". What more needs to be said?

Taking the stage of the re-vitalized Red Room of Normal's Books & Records next was an expanded trio version of The Tinklers with Downtown Blood on My Spatz Peyton on ukelele. His slick licks interwove nicely with Charles' slide guitar excursions. Recently the Tinklers have added "Bully of the Town" from the Harry Smith Anthology of Folk Music to their set. I would love for them to take on an extended project of covering that entire groundbreaking collection with various friends sitting in.

Also sitting in on a few Tinklers' songs was Chris' talented daughter Elizabeth. She sang on "Splash Splash" and did an acapella duet of "I'm Sticking With You" with her pops that was truly moving. Long long ago Elizabeth interned at Normal's and when things were slow we would get her to play the hell out of Bartok and Stravinsky on the old Red Room piano. And Elizabeth, like her dad, being both a populist and a consumate artist, would be playing beautiful, complicated classical pieces on the piano while at the same time talking loudly to Courtney about how she wanted to be a cheerleader.

And here be just a slice of the crowd in attendance. Study them well! The swarthy bearded one there, in foreground in white t-shirt - surely he is a threat to homeland security? And the one in the maroon hoodie, next to the one they call "Magus" who resembles a choirboy, surely his dry laconic joking covers for a heartless hatred for pickup trucks, reality shows and the right to keep impoverished people from having health care.

Speaking of choirboy Magus, here he is reading along with Chris on the poem that Chris dreamed of him. I believe this piece is called "I Will Read Every Poem In This Book Except The One for Rupert, Despite His Being Seated Right There in the Front Row Making Doe Eyes At Me". I have to say that the whole reading Chris did was masterful, but this was probably my favorite piece of the day. The two readers really worked well together and the sounds and words resonated like a big old gong on Kung Fu.

And speaking of that long gone loved show that would be most likely torturously bad today if I were to view an episode, what to make of this bald master, Grasshopper? Here is reed king John Dierker playing with the energetic dynamic improv trio Microkingdom, along with drummer Will Redman and guitarist Marc Miller. Dierker's passionate face while playing is so difficult to capture on camera that he made a five figure deal with both MAC and Windows where you have to pay for a special APP that will present him clearly. And clearly I cannot afford that.

All in all, a great day. Beautiful words read well conveying strong messages of caring and hope. Goofy music of love and concern for all people and nature. And the underloved cash register of Normal's was embraced by wallet food!

But if all this wasn't magic enough, when the show was over and no one was left in the store other than me and Anthony, Anthony told me that none other than Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) of The Wire popped in the store looking for a book during the show! Luckily I didn't notice her or I would have left everyone with a bad taste in their mouth for the event by breaking down into some kind of Jerry Lewis spazz out. Truly her presence was a sign that we were all on the right path!

Cheers to Chris Mason for creating writing from both the head and heart that will withstand the horrors of time and to Narrow House for containing so much of it so well within a beautiful object once known as "book".

Publication of The Elements by The Tinklers

It was a busy week at Shattered Wig headquarters. Preparing our always capricious nerves for the big publication party for The Tinklers new book, The Elements, while also getting to open up for Tao Lin at a reading at Atomic Books on Oct. 8.

Due to the lightning quick quality work of Live Bait studios typesetting and layout on the book we actually had all our copies weeks in advance of the October 9th show at the 14 Karat Cabaret. This was a very welcome change from the usual nail biting waiting at the door in dirty robe for the UPS man on the night of the show scenario.

The book looks great, the show, featuring The Tinklers and Blaster Al Ackerman reading and music by Zomes and Ghost Life, was well attended by lively enthusiastic humans who were treated to some top notch performances. Not only all that, but we actually sold a goodly amount of literature. Not bad considering we almost had to greco-roman twist Chris Mason of the Tinklers into a Pennsylvania pretzel to let us publish it.

In a mere 78 pages the courageous Tinklers take on explaining the Periodic Table of Elements (Hydrogen to Argon), the strains put on love by economic hardship and the need for a unified ecology that protects Mother Earth. All written in their uniquely cosmic populist prose. The book is out now, a perfect bound paperback and available for $8 at Normal's Books and Records and Atomic Books in Baltimore or $10 postage paid from:

Shattered Wig Press
425 E. 31st St.
Baltimore, MD. 21218

"It is a rare thing when I am jealous of the concept behind a book, but I am jealous of The Elements, and you will be too." - Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody and The Way The Family Got Away.

The City Paper's Bret McCabe interviewed Chris Mason and Charles Brohawn of The Tinklers about the book and here is his story:

Every Story Paints a Picture
With the publication of The Elements, long-running Baltimore duo the Tinklers return to their spry narrative roots

Michael Northrup

Charles Brohawn (left) and Chris Mason have been the Tinklers for 30 years.

By Bret McCabe | Posted 10/7/2009

The Tinklers read from The Elements, with Zomes, Blaster Al Ackerman, and Ghost Life.

Shattered Wig Night at the 14 Karat Cabaret, Oct. 9

Consider: One morning Mary sees her husband Steven off to his first day at an aluminum beverage-container manufacturer. He returns looking broken, a shell of the man who left that morning. The next day, Mary meets a neighboring woman who tells her two very important stories. One is about how the manufacturer's greed led to layoffs and higher productivity demands, pushing the local workers to strike as the company brought in scabs. The other is about how lava cools to form granite, which includes feldspar--made up of aluminum, oxygen, and silicon--and briefly explains the long story of pressure and time producing aluminum silicate, which, when water-logged, becomes clay.

This story, one of 18 collected in the Tinklers' new book, The Elements (published by sometimes City Paper contributor Rupert Wondolowski's Shattered Wig Press), ends with Mary crossing the picket line to pull her husband out of his job and continue on their journey across a landscape that feels and sounds very much like America. "I was reading about a few different strikes at the times we were writing this," says Chris Mason, one half of the Tinklers, of the early 1990s. "I think it was one in Austin, Minnesota. And I was thinking about aluminum cans. This was all done before the internet, so we just had to read a lot of books to learn this stuff."

Mason sits next to his creative partner, Charles Brohawn, on the couch in Brohawn's eclectically decorated Idlewild home. A striking array of paintings hang on the walls, and the living room feels like an ideal incubator for creative whimsy. Mason pulls one of the duo's old rubber-band guitars out for a demonstration. And Brohawn need only walk a few steps to snag a 1950s/'60s era scientific textbook about the atom as an example of the sort of research they explored in creating The Elements.

"It's not really serious science, because we're not, you know, scientists," Mason says. "But we have researched it. Just like in ancient times people would look at the world and would be amazed by the winds and the stars and describe it to the gods, we're just amazed by what's happening inside the atom."

"The elements are kind of a frame to look at the world through," Brohawn agrees.

If authoring a book sounds like a change of pace for a musical duo, bear in mind that the idea of the Tinklers as a purely musical act is a 1990s phenomena. The pair recorded three albums for indie label Shimmy Disc between 1990 and 1993. Riddled with deceptively precious melodies and faux-innocent ideas--the immortal "Mom Cooks Inside, Dad Cooks Outside" off 1990's Casserole, "Dinosaurs Are Better" off 1991's Saplings, "Dog Sounds" off 1993's Crash--the band was, arguably, too hastily aligned with the primitive-punk naivetAc of Daniel Johnston, Happy Flowers, and the twee Pianosaurus.

When Brohawn and Mason first coalesced into the Tinklers in 1979, though, it was to create narrative performances that included songs, visual art, and theater. Brohawn was coming out of MICA's painting department, Mason out of Johns Hopkins' poetry program, and they encountered a rich Baltimore community of poets, performance artists, video artists, and punks, including City Paper photographer John Ellsberry and his brother Richard, provocateur tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE, and MICA poetry professor Joe Cardarelli. It was a hearty brew of art and DIY that, well, doesn't sound too far removed from what a different generation has discovered in Baltimore in recent years.

"That's why I wanted to start doing music," Brohawn says, recalling seeing a band such as Half Japanese deliver its goods. "Just seeing something like that and thinking, Why not?"

Early Tinklers shows were less concerts than performances that combined visual art, puppets, and songs played on homemade instruments. They performed their "History of the World"--illustrated on a gigantic single roll of paper and dramatized through songs and plays--in 1981 at School 33 and in New York. The songs themselves were often the products of free-flowing binomial idea trees that concatenate out into something else. Mason pulls out an early book of song charts to illustrate the point.

"Like, if you have 'scary things,' you can divide that into 'scary things that are moving' and 'scary things that are not moving,'" he says. "And then, scary moving things that get on top of you, that don't get on top of you; scary moving things that get on top of you could be buzzy or squirmy; scary moving things that get on top of you that are buzzy could be electric or flying; scary moving things that get on top of you that are buzzy and electric could be things that you could get your fingers caught in or things that shock you--and from that we did the song 'Don't Put Your Finger in the Fan.'"

It follows a rigorous logic, but one predicated on an outlandish idea. "On some level, we were kind of making fun of performance art by just telling these stupid stories in these stupid songs," Brohawn says. "There wasn't any mysterious aesthetic or anything going on."

Other narrative projects that became self-published books followed. "Manifest Destiny," which also involved The Elements' Mary and Steven, "was kind of an American history book with songs and performances," Mason says. "Our Childrens' Childrens' Worlds" followed in 1984, the story of Siegfried and his cousins--Marcia, Missy, Megan, Sam, and Simon--who get lost in a cave during a family picnic, during which time the world ends and begins again, and they emerge to be adopted by three utopias.

"It's kind of a poke at the post-apocalyptic thing, because the world ends while they're in the cave but starts up before they get out of the cave," Brohawn smiles. "But 'History of the World,' 'Manifest Destiny,' 'Our Childrens' Childrens' Worlds'--they were thought of as these stories with songs. I think we were thinking of Wagner or something--our own version of it."

Just don't mistake this irreverent streak for irony, and don't misjudge the Tinklers' seemingly simple sounds and drawings for insincere ease. "Simple" and "childlike" are two of the most overused adjectives when describing the band; "efficient" feels most accurate. The music and songs may sound easy, but they deal directly with sophisticated feelings and emotions. They're just delivered extremely directly. And while such economy may suggest the childish, consider how conflicted childhood is: a time period that adults nostalgically look back upon for being more innocent and idyllic, but also the locus of psychological and emotional trauma that lingers well into maturity.

The Elements is an equally complex document. It works on multiple levels: organized periodically, the stories offer basic science information, and those scientific facts frequently provide thematic structural elements to the stories themselves. The book also tells the story of Mary and Steven as they travel across the country; inside their journeys, though, they encounter the often difficult socio-political realities of an unsettled country. Given that each of these stories is but a few pages long at most--the entire book a mere 78 pages--The Elements starts to feel less like a simple, childlike tale and more like a surreal adventure of a couple set adrift across America's unstable time and space.

And it makes you curious as to what sort of big idea the Tinklers might next wrap their brains around. Brohawn mentions Darwin, and how 2009 is the 200th anniversary of his birth. Mason smiles at the idea of the Tinklers getting a grant to do research on the Galapagos. Since they've already done the history of the world, Manifest Destiny, and a good chunk of the periodic table, evolution is just the sort of small topic that fits into their bailiwick.

"And it's controversial," Brohawn smiles, before audibly deflating into the realization, "well, it is here."

Email Bret McCabe