Megan McShea Rekindles The Fire of The Ancient Party

Long ago, when hairs gathered around heads, when more than five Baltimore poets would be home from touring or the madhouse at the same time, when Chris Toll and Blaster Al Ackerman still trod the earth like parallel universe Lenin and Marx respectively, when young Adam Robinson and Stephanie Barber still held partiers rapt with their wide-eyed tales of the fur trade in Milwaukee in the 1800's, when Amy Peterson still graced Normal's Books & Records on occasion before her step up into the rarefied world of modern New York and its tony celebrity filled co-ops, oxygen bars and petitions against mopery, before Ric Royer The Theater Lad, was thrown into the pee-stained trunk of a Dodge sedan by seedy barstool bard Gene Grigoritis, his fingers removed one by one over the course of nine days (Ric had already lost one as a child in Disneyland, bitten off by the Alexander Hamilton robot), each digit shearing videoed and posted to Youtube then sent to gadfly Tao Lin, with the thoughtful message "I bet this bitch's finger is bigger than your Johnson you poser" - before the writing scene spun out like the final crunchy tableau of "Fast & Furious XX" and toppled from its glorious peak, many disparate souls united by their weirdness and love of morphological word formation, jarring metaphors/contrasts and sometimes plain old oddball oddness scat goof met up every few weeks to become One Big Mind and Write As One With Many.

Usually within the comfort of Megan McShea's afghan-filled cottage where plump Sugar the cat would brush your ankles, yard sale Latin record finds would spin and Megan and Amy and Bonnie would quietly contend for "Most Raven Haired". Sometimes we would sit out on my ragged third floor balcony back when I lived in the Pego Mansion of St. Paul Street across from the Catholic High School.

(Ancient Party editor Megan McShea with author, artist and legend Al Ackerman in Austin in his post-Baltimore years)

Wherever we met, Blaster Al could be counted on to be there with beer and an anarchic spirit to keep the proceedings moving and not too academic and Megan would stir up the poetry machine gadgets to keep rust from forming.

Many nights after hours of scribbling, cutting up and jabbering the circle would fall briefly silent and someone would say "Hey, where's Lauren Bender? Did she take all the Hazelnut Breadstick Pop Tarts?" And there Lauren would be, stuck up in a ceiling corner, wide possum-eyed like a dollar store mylar valentines balloon temporarily forgotten as the young lovers moved into the love room to drop the needle on some Barry White.

(above - Lauren Bender mooshing Sugar the Cat)

But all things (almost all?) end. Or erode/evolve/mutate. Even though they feel natural as breath and just as rejuvenating as they are going on. Such be our writerly coven meetings. Oh they will still happen somewhere with some of us, but Blaster and Chris Toll are huffing ether and playing prepared harp with John Cage on the astral plane, Adam Robinson independent publishing pinup boy is off to Atlanta, Amy is in New York comforting Laurie Anderson and so on and so on, time marches on.

Luckily, though, Megan hung on to our sheaves of scribbles and pored over them, jiggling the ink until gold nuggets rose to the surface. Not only that, she assembled the best into an actual beautiful book and is throwing a Now Party for The Ancient Party at the Windup Space Sunday April 13, 3pm to 5. Come hear some reading from it, gaze upon it, pry greenbacks from your moneysock to buy for your very own. Here's the Your Face link:

The Ancient Party

Here are a few lines from "The Goofball Oracle" to whet your appetite. The Goofball Oracle exercise was everyone would write random questions and place them in one hat and random answers placed in a second hat. Questions would then be pulled from one hat and random answers from the other.

"Hey, what do you guys think of Pammy's new Bummer?" - "The sound of the louvre covered in mallo-mars."

"Was Lincoln a happy drunk?" - "A neon rose garden at the end of the world."

"How many of you are in there anyway?" - "Love is naturally pungent".

Or perhaps a "One Minute Story", s story written within 60 seconds, will win you over:

SKELETON
The way his skin sat on his frame, his skeleton, the whisper of ribs like an automatic round. I still see this sometimes and feel the recoil. Memory does that, transforming the banal into the fantastic.
- John Eaton

(John "Lucky Charms" Eaton, who has been trapped inside the Zoltar Fortune Teller booth on Coney Island since the last writers group gathering.)

SKELETON
The skeleton dancing across the lawn. The skeleton peeping out from behind the shower curtain. The skeleton in the bread box, smaller than the others, so obviously it was the baby.
- Blaster Al Ackerman

Here is one of the "Biographies". Each writer would write a false biography and then mouth the words to the other writers. Then each person would write down what they were lip reading.

"Mortimer Hadley" - by Megan McShea.

I am Mortimer Hadley. I was born in Challenger, Mississippi, along the shore of the Missouri River where seventeen dogs had recently died of exposure to second-hand smoke. No one really understood this at the time, but it would prove to be a fateful pre-episode to my life as an epidemiologist. I attended the Milton Military Pentecostal School for wayward boys until the 9th grade, when I ran off with my guardian angel and began practicing medicine on unsuspecting rural families. Some of my favorite and locally renowned diagnoses are Pale Ghost Disease, discovered in Fallow Holler in the Ozarks, Hollow Stem Fever, which overwhelmed a colony of rabbits in eastern Kansas, and Haddock Mouth, which infested a flock of tiny angels in my hometown of Challenger.

(Lip reading version by Bonnie Jones of "Mortimer Hadley"):
I am Putpott Riding. I was born in South Beach along the coast of whenever. It was heavenly and moldy. Although it was really strenuous for me in the formative years in Ecology I did my. It was wild but right after I was wasted in my family. Memory of an envelope water. Was a rabbit. Fine, back alley. Jaguar.

Well, to paraphrase Blaster, you don't want to sample too many of these deadly treats at one time. But I will leave you with a ritual, the rules of which were worked out in collaboration. This one was written by myself, Ric Royer, Bonnie Jones and Megan McShea.

How to March Into Jerusalem With Your Battle Dress On, Go On Girl!
1. Receive only the absence, not the presence.
2. Wave and pat pouch cloth. Form leg trumpet.
3. Make it ouchie in the Humvee.
4. Make sure that Kirk notices you by wearing so much makeup you look like a clown and appearing at his big gig at the MTV Music Awards with the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots and tell him you're pregnant.
5. Buy a custom fitted mouth guard, the kind for teeth grinding not hockey. Put your head down, groan a little, channel Cormac McCarthy, bend at the knees, wipe that tiny bit of spittle. Rush.

Come join in on the festivities April 13th at the Windup and hoist a glass of something for friendship, collaborations and a Spring much deserved.

Blaster Al Ackerman in City Paper's People Who Died

Baltimore City Paper - News and Features

The Blasterthon, Night Two

(Above - Lauren Ross portraying The Ling Master. Photos throughout, except the one of Francis Poole at bottom, are by Catherine Bennett)

There has been a well-oiled revolving door to the Beyond in Baltimore this year and the most recent to exit was slugger Blaster Al Ackerman. Every moment spent with him was a revelatory gift - other than when he was busting on some of my favorite grooves like Curtis Mayfield and Brigitte Fontaine, of course. I could leave Normal's for only ten minutes to make a bank deposit and sure enough I'd get back to ELO on the turntable.

But so many of my favorite books (including most everything by him), obscure movies and strange folklore I found out about through him. And his daily example of each day no matter what creating something new and " messing with the concept of time", pranking to create reality shifts, deflating the pompous or vampiric, will inspire me until I forget how to slip my hairy legs into trousers.

(Above - Blaster's most beloved and long running collaborator, editor of Lost and Found Times, John M. Bennett blowing Batworth's mind before the show).

Now that Blaster's gone I kick my gluey third eye for not running a tape recorder on at least a few of the days we worked together at Normal's, often hungover from an epic four hour Wig Night at Madame Drogoul's legendary 14 Karat Cabaret where Blaster would entrance the wild-eyed crowd with incredible output of new stories and poems. And Blaster was generally a pretty happy, fun loving guy - especially, of course, before the health woes that kicked in near the beginning of the new Millenium, but he was never happier than when he emerged from the back computer room of the store with a finished draft of a new story. Sweat, glowing skin, golden aura, the whole new poppa bit.

(Above - the set of Lauren and Gerald Ross' Ling Master playlet)

With Blaster dying when he did, though, right after two other close, beloved friends and the memorials and tribute nights that followed, my miserablist heart began to sag and I momentarily thought "Is another show a way to grieve? Shouldn't I just construct a large Shirker's Nest in Blaster's honor and eat only snackcakes and lose the resolve to defecate in receptacles?"

(Above - Eric Franklin performing with The Dirty Dozen)

Luckily, the thoughts and plans of a Miserablist are quickly scattered by the movement of life itself and with John Berndt doing most of the heavy lifting the Blasterthon was formed. In fact night two was my tiny contribution, organizationally speaking, JB did the rest.

(Above - The Dirty Dozen: Neil Feather, Bob Wagner, Eric Franklin and Dan Breen)

And through the acts of the great folks channeling Blaster and his work, once again it was made clear how fantastic, clear and distinctive his voice was, because it rang out chillingly and unmistakably like the creepy intro to the old Shadow radio show through John Eaton, Batworth, Megan McShea reading the gut busting recommendation Blaster had written for her to gain entry into a writer's retreat ("I wouldn't want to go anywhere where they didn't get Blaster," said Megan), Francis Poole, ex-Baltimorean and former Normal's star Courtney McCullough, who was the one who found Blaster post-stroke and convinced doctor hating Blaster to go to the hospital, singing George Jones' "The King is Gone"Catherine Bennett, John M. Bennett, Lauren and Gerald Ross' Ling Master play (wherein Gerald nailed the Ling Master's deranged nerdy secret master voice so well that I still belly laugh just thinking of it), The Dirty Dozen's new Orleans' style funeral march by way of Martian Harry Partch textured sound glory that built in exhilarating manic daffiness and then closed with a quiet spinning wheel of an energy that had to come to a halt and by Laure Drogoul's enchanting olfactory Blaster seance. Who that knew him doesn't have strong smell associations? Newly cracked beer can foam, tin of slightly impertinent tuna, musk of scalp oil basted bop cap. -

Blaster never went anywhere of course, other than to be everywhere still in the rich unforgettable voice of his large body of work. The Blasterthon brought him right up to the thin membrane of now for us to gaze once more with love on all he did for us and left us.

I will sign off with a beautiful email I received from Francis Poole, another beloved collaborator of Blaster's - in fact, I think their book Break Up My Water was Blaster's last printed book of his lifetime - after the soul salving Blasterthon.

"Every reading and performance flowed together seamlessly into one great celebration of Blaster Al's creative genius. While much of his work was playfully subversive it also had the power to reveal the sense of absurdity that lurks beneath the surface of much of what passes for reality and normalcy. The love and regard for Al and his works by those who read him or knew him is proof that his life and gifted imagination made a positive contribution to this crazy world. And ironically in sharing his vision he was able to show others that it's ok to give in to the undertow of one's own wacky universe. Blaster Al was an artist, a therapist, and a great guy. And like a mischievous ringmaster his spirit was there at the Blasterthon to keep the groove going. And it worked beautifully." - Francis Poole

(Below - Francis Poole)

Okay, actually I will wrap this with the lyrics to the Fitting George Jones tune that Courtney belted out for Blaster:

Last night I broke the seal on a Jim Beam decanter
That looks like Elvis
I soaked the label off a Flintstone Jelly Bean jar
I cleared us off a place on that
One little table that you left us
And pulled me up a big ole piece of floor


I pulled the head off Elvis
Filled Fred up to his pelvis
Yabba Dabba Doo, the King is gone
And so are you


'Round about ten we all got to talking
'Bout Graceland, Bedrock and such
The conversation finally turned to women
But they said they didn't get around too much
Elvis said, "Find 'em young"
And Fred said "Old Fashioned girls are fun"
Yabba Dabba Doo, the King is gone
And so are you


Later on it finally hit me
That you wouldn't be 'a comin' home no more
'Cause this time I know you won't forgive me
Like all of them other times before
Then I broke Elvis's nose
Pouring the last drop from his toes
Yabba Dabba Doo, the King is gone
And so are you
Yabba Dabba Doo, the King is gone
And so are you


Last night I broke the seal on a Jim Beam decanter
That looks like Elvis
I soaked the label off a Flintstone Jelly Bean jar

The Blasterthon, Night One

If you missed Friday night’s Blasterthon premiere in the Red Room at Normal's you missed a room full of love and a smorgasbord of derangement. John Pego Berndt filling in some of Blaster’s bio, including his brutal period trying to stay out of the Hell of Vietnam. And his secret life as the Lothario of the Mail Art World!

Plus there was hard charging performances by Rotty What with poet and publisher John M. Bennett, saxophonist Jack Wright and percussionist, frotteur, sound originator Ben Bennett, Kevin Takacs recounting tales of “The Old Spice Gang”, Bonnie Jones revealing her morbid dental history which used to enrapture Blaster, Catherine Bennett performing some of Blaster’s final texts, Bethany Sick Din going down a vocal dream corridor pursuing a dog and then Lauren Bender finished off the night by appearing in Blaster full dress all the way down to the slightly orphopedic white sneaks with untied laces. And the ever present beer and black plastic bag. (His were all from the Schnapp Shoppe).

And I swear to the gods that in the Red Room during the kickoff of the Blasterthon I heard Chris Toll’s chuckle twice and that of Peter Pan! Two sterling spirits visiting us from Beyond.

"The Kitchen Inside Me" by Blaster Al Ackerman

The tenth annual Transmodern Festival here in Baltimore starting on May 2nd is going to have up an art show of Blaster's work called "Blaster's Baltimore Years (1992 - 2010)".

Here be link to Transmodern:
Transmodern Festival

That Old Blaster Magic by Ian Nagoski

That Old Blaster Magic: I Remember Nothing, Unfortunately.

The first thing that those of us who knew Blaster will usually tell folks about him is how deeply he was committed to a unique vision of humanity. There’s a line in the intro to his Omnibus about his stories and images being populated with “ghoulish fools.” And there’s always something said by us acolytes about how incredibly funny he is, accompanied by descriptions of the tears, or, among his drinkier friends, pee lost in the process of enjoying his ohmygod harharlarious stuff . And then, at some point, there’s the earnest admission that after going down the rabbithole of his output, that the world looks different and that, although you can never really hope to be as good as him, that there’s been a successful seduction, and now you find yourself seeing with Blaster-colored glasses at times and feel proud when you feel that you’ve said or done anything vaguely Blasterish, usually in prosaic terms like, “he was such a huge influence on me.”

Since he’s been gone, I’ve been thinking about this little speech, the structure of it as I’ve heard it given and given it myself, and the ways in which I’m bound to hear it again in the inevitable celebrations of him in the months to come. There’s a lot I don’t know about how he transmitted to us because he operated as an anti-guru, teaching without teaching and studiously reckless about any sense of lineage. But because I was lucky enough to see him in his off-hours on a regular basis during a few years in the mid-00s when we were roommates in a one bed-room apartment (he had the back room and the alley entrance; I had the living room with the tiny kitchen and bathroom and his always-closed panel door between us), a few things do seem worth sharing out loud for the sake of celebration of the man he was and for comfort in the face of the grief that we feel for a friend and hero now gone. He was such a good pal and a great help to those of us who knew him.

Exhibit A: Dogs, Children, and the Creeps who Care for Them
I don’t know if it was ever published, but I recall Blaster reading at a Shattered Wig night a story in which he described himself as a one-man cheering section for the dogs he saw defecating on lawns around the neighborhood. The idea was that each time he saw some pooch taking care of business on a walk, Our Man would root him on with the encouraging proclamation that, “that boy’s moving his bowels pretty good!” And the thing was, he was just that kind of a booster for anyone he saw as innocent. Dogs and kids were alright with him, and he gave a lot of credit and warmth to people, although he was keenly discerning in the behaviors of the cast of characters that surrounded him. He stayed friends for ages with people whose behavior was unjustifiably chaotic or even dishonest, summing long-time friends up in moments of sad forgiveness simply by saying, “everyone knows he’s goofy,” or something equally diffusive of hostility or conflict. I mean that he was kind and compassionate, but I’m not saying he wasn’t clear about who was who. His shuddering revulsion at the simple presence of certain humans, characterized, for instance, with a summation that, “when that guy walks into the room, it feels like all the oxygen has just been sucked out,” made it clear that he’d been working all his life on a study of character. So, although he was never someone who shouted about anyone’s greatness much, if there was some laconic remark of approval or the opposite, you could believe it. I remember how he disliked seeing friends fall out, and while he and I had our ups and downs due to my chaotic behavior (while Blaster, meanwhile, was steady as a rock) the meanest thing he ever said to me, as I was on the precipice of some genuinely terrible decision was the sharp derision, “you FOOL!” Maybe he was capable of meaner words when he was younger or older, but during the time we were close, it was the worst insult I can imagine coming from him, and it saved me then from really fucking up.

Exhibit B: Endless Details of Tertiary Characters
If you ever talked with Blaster about books or movies, you’d notice that he rarely recommended anything unless he felt you were asking for it. He’d pass favorite recent reading and viewing along happily, but as a literary conversation progressed, that vastness of his knowledge became clear, startling, and intimidating. I once described a mutual aquaintance to him as being “like a character from a Russian novel,” to which he replied, genuinely annoyed by my indistinctness, “which novel?” And the truth is that if I’d named a book to him at that moment, he would have known just what I meant. He retained characters, in minute detail, in his memory banks from things he’d read once decades ago. I never heard him say, and can’t now imagine him saying, “I don’t remember.”

Exhibit C: A letter for a Letter
Because he self-promoted to the tune of deathlike silence, whenever I met someone who might benefit from his work, I asked him if it was alright if I passed his mailing address along. “Sure, baby,” came the inevitable reply. And as far as I know, he sent a postcard for a postcard and a letter for a letter to everyone who wrote to him. When I moved away, I got from him just as good as I gave and slightly - just slightly - more. (And goddammit, my greatest regret in our relationship was that I didn’t give more, partially because he deserved more from me and partially because of the chuckles and bafflement and fun I could have gotten in return.) I know it was that way with lots and lots of people.

Exhibit D: It’s a Loose Shoe
Often repeated, the advice to “Always Try to be Lucky Enough to Work in a Despised Medium,” was credited by Blaster to Frederic Brown from correspondence from Blaster’s youth. Blaster, of course, left little in terms of a paper trail that anyone could nail down and fucked around with who-did-what-when so much that Emily Fussleman’s Rabbit only knows whether Brown ever wrote any such thing, but it was a deeply sincere motto for Blaster. Freedom meant everything, and that meant sacrifice and self-attunement. Of the latter, I remember particularly a moment when arriving home one evening to find Blaster standing over the open, blue flame-peaks of the gas range with his hands held steadily a few inches from their tops. Peering into the otherwise dark kitchen, I quietly asked after his well-being, “Blaster? Are you cold, man?” Without moving his downturned palms, his gaze came dreamily toward me as he greeted with his traditional, “hey, baby.” As he moved his eyes back down to his spidery, white mitts and the quiet surrounding them, I tried again: “Y’alright?” “Yeah,” he said, “old Indian trick. If you feel like you’re getting sick, you hold your hands over a flame and focus on the warmth entering into them. I’m fine.” Meanwhile, evidence of years of deprivation overflowed in our kitchen around him. Anything he didn’t eat from any meal was retained assiduously for some unknown eventuality. Dozens of empty peanut butter jars eventually filled the cabinets, each with only bare scrapings inside. A few swallows of Coke stayed for months at the bottoms of plastic bottles, lined up like clay Chinese funerary sculptures in the fridge. The last two bites of any sandwich were carefully wrapped in tinfoil and stowed in the freezer until it was overflowing in graying, shiny packets of inedible crusts, and the top of the fridge was stacked in a tower of cardboard tubes from the insides of the tinfoil rolls. Eventually, I got the nerve to ask, “Blaster, how would you feel if I threw away those cardboard tubes or the peanut butter jars?” “Sure thing,” he replied, “you can do it. But I can’t. It’s no problem. I’m crazy, but I’m not THAT crazy.” Which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say.
(Once after I’d cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, Blaster was so alarmed that I got a full-on Redd Foxx about-to-have-a-heart-attack panic attack as he genuinely feared we’d been robbed of our grit and mold by bandits before I explained to him what I’d done. “What a homecoming! I’ve got to lie down!” He was fine an hour later.)

Exhibit E: What a Great Liar!
We were talking about possessions and moving once, and Blaster told me that once he’d helped a woman move and that among her effusion of stuff, he had carried a box labeled “Junior High School Sweaters.” I got a good laugh out of it. Years later, I met the woman in question, and told her smirkingly of Blaster’s divulsion of that intimate detail of her personal inventory. In no uncertain terms, she replied that she had never had any such box. It was clear that he’d made it up on the spot just to make a point and to make me laugh. Her name had simply worked in the moment as the character in the story he was creating.

On another occasion, I staggered into the apartment mid-afternoon after a catastrophically grim weekend-long date with a woman at my parents’ beach condo. Standing in the doorway of my room Blaster listened fixedly to me as I unwound the tale from my slumped position of a chair. My pathetic estrangement from this girlfriend came about gradually as I had repeatedly noticed gazing at me from behind a cloud of weed smoke with a terrified and puzzled expression. He retreated to his room, energized and poked his head back into my space a couple times to ask again about her facial expression. “Would you say that she had a look of suspicion and vague hysteria?” Yeah, I said. That’s about right. Later, “Would you say that she looked like a were-cat-badger-hawk?” I laughed. You know, she kind of did. The next day he, presented me with my own story, filtered through his own set of images and incongruities, titled “Hussrl” (who I was reading at the time) and, a blessing on his head, dedicated to me. (It wouldn’t surprise me if in a hundred years that dedication weren’t what I was best known for.) Blaster’s voluminous, voracious reading habit included bits of what he referred to as members of the “Poetry-Death Crowd,” in other words, the poetry establishment, the kinds of people who recognized in their own time as being Serious Poets for poignant images and downy styles. But he knew – KNEW – and showed by example that poetry is a behavior, a coping mechanism, and a way of being. It’s all of the playfulness and decent, kind fucking-around that you do because if you don’t, it all starts to feel like “nah.”

Hey, baby.
Sure, baby.
What’s happening, man?
How’s [that thing] going with [that person]?
Blaster’s voice in my head saying stuff like that are the core questions in every piece of work and every relationship I have undertaken since knowing him, just as much as:
Titans Be Pondering
Are You My Daddy?
Here Have a Peanut
You Are the Entity.
The Search for Puffy Treats
Why Did You Steal My Watch?
I Taught my Dog to Shoot a Gun
All Different All the Same
Or any of the other lugubrious gibberish that changed the world for me and my friends, feabs, floaters, and lurkers.

Whip it!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sir Ian Nagoski is the record magnate behind Canary Records, a musician and a musicologist whose brain contains and retains a frightening amount of information. At times during his scholarly talks he may even perform an old Greek dance step or two.

Blaster Al Ackerman: An Obituary, from Reviewiera

Blaster Al Ackerman: An Obituary

"Book in hand, I began to creep toward him. 'Wanna see something pretty?' I called softly."
[from "The Puffin Book", in Corn & Smoke: stories, performances, things, Shattered Wig Press, 2006.]

It started somewhere in 1994, I think. Out of school, working the kinds of jobs a pillow-soft high school graduate can get, ping-ponging between passed out on the curb, puking out the window, and white-knuckle sobriety. I was, obviously, the kind of adolescent who had as a constituative part of his self-identity something called 'being a poet'.

Part of this meant writing poems, and sending them off, to try to validate myself through publication. Being a corn dog in Denver, essentially completely without any connection whatsoever to culture, finding places to send my mediocre efforts to was a DIY affair. I had to buy Factsheet Five or The Poet's Market and work only thus dimly illuminated, with SASE and cover letter and three to five selected pieces, over and over again. (First thing you learn is you always got to buy an issue before you submit.) They list the editors in The Poet's Market, so your cover letter can sound professional—or whatever the analogue for professionalism is in the deliberately self-marginalizing, endlessly self-regarding, pseudo-mystical world of poetry. When I started submitting things to the Shattered Wig Review, their listed editor was Fred Engels. I didn't get it. I failed the test.

I wrote a couple letters to Fred Engels—I bought issues, I submitted stuff. And, page by page, issue by issue, the Wig changed my life. Mainly by way of regular and large doses of the writing of "Blaster" Al Ackerman. Weird little poems—often with faint, unplaceable whiffs of something irretrievably sad—hilarious and nightmarish stories, brilliant and unsettling cartoons. I started chasing him through the small press underground.

You Hear That
you were giving me a ride someplace
that didn't pan out, the movies I think
but that closet's too dribbly to go to the movie
you hear that
Words mean nothing to such a game of wetness and
that's why cats faint as they learn who made us
if not he who made the big purple heads
is like a wet dream of thought now willed
that can make a new being made of elements
which cannot be identified, only spent.
You hear that?
Words mean nothing to such a thing
These transitional expressions really can not be real
Now it seems to have disappeared
No, wait. It seems to be coming back again, a little
But it's becoming broken like a fruitcake
It's dreaming all the while like the blackness of sleep
But what is this? You say sleep is black as night
And yet it seems possessed by nothing but imagination
That is the way sleep goes and we are a lot like Dryden
We cannot be correct
We haven't time
[from JMB]

The most reliable source for the Blaster Al I liked best was John M. Bennett's Lost and Found Times, where Ackerman regularly had a few pages to detail his methodical and playful poem-making practices: "Ack's Hacks". One month he might take a John M. Bennett piece and a Steven Spender piece, rip each down the middle, and splice them together, left halves by Bennett, right halves by Spender. Another month he'd use what I remember he called the "World of Wastebasket": wad up and partially smooth out somebody's poem, and use the words you can see as a word bank for your own poem.

I adored the results, with their roiling mix of perspectives and rhythms, their weird, unpredictable lexical combinations—and a kind of surrealism that went ineffably deeper than unusual image-juxtaposition or unexpected placement—their humor and sadness. I also adored the window into their creation, the frank joy and attention to detail, the constant demonstration that "being a poet" is always dumped and trumped by "working to write a poem". Issue after issue of Shattered Wig Review and Lost and Found Times—and others!—taught by example that "inspiration" is nothing at all, that the poet-persona never matters as against an ass in a chair, doing the work, that doing the work was best done with humor and honesty as the watchwords, tempering the arrogance of making something with the humility in admitting where it came from and the determination to make it as good—and as well—as possible.

I found pretty much the whole world in these poems and stories. There was ugliness, horror, and immense confusion; weird rhythms of recurrence; humor that lacerated and healed by turns; references to genre from romance to hard-boiled to science fiction to newsletter to shaggy-dog story to rambling guy in a bar. Maybe sometime somewhere somebody will top The Crab as an exemplar of the personal essay; I'm not holding my breath. Sense was not always on display on the surface—perhaps the Doctor's most notable concession to consensus reality (and certainly his deepest subversion of same; one of the most consistent pleasures in this intensely pleasurable work is the slippage between name and thing and thing and thing—half his narrators spend half their time asking, and needing to ask, and not really getting straight answers to, questions like:

"Do you mean a bat like in baseball or like in 'any of numerous flying mammals of the order Chiroptera, having membranous wings and navigating by night by echolocation?'"²

² I won't leave you hanging. The answer: "I mean 'bat' as in Batman or Devil Bat."
[from] "The White Bat" (widely reprinted)).

Somewhere Ackerman noted¹:

so much of what I do is gibberish, but looking at the world, it's hard to say that gibberish isn't the central art form of our time

"Sideshow Days with Your Pop"
[from: Shattered Wig Review 18, Summer, 1999.]

When I found Feh! Press' brilliant Omnibus, the lessons only amplified, clarified, purified. Blaster introduced one piece with this:¹

These are words scribbled hastily in the margins of a life, by a man too often taken in drink, some written sitting behind the wheel of a car, waiting for someone to finish their physical therapy appointment

¹ This quote is from memory. Forgive my citational incompetence, please: I write these words without access to my full library.

This, then, was how to go about writing. His treatise on the "Tacky Little Pamphlet" was how to go about distributing that writing: you'd write some stuff, you'd stuff it all onto some papers, you'd leave them around, in magazine racks, or at the laundromat, or stuffed into envelopes and mailed to random addresses. This I did.

"Stamp: Can I Touch Your Leg?"
[from: Shattered Wig Review 18, Summer, 1999.]

Eventually, I sent a thing or two to Blaster Al himself. He always write back—his grand scrawl "Get This to:" on the envelope, usually a hand-drawn stamp: there was never any mistaking an envelope from Blaster Al Ackerman. I lost all this correspondence moves and moves ago, I think, but I have retained the kindness and generosity he showed to a nobody from nowhere, some dumb kid just trying to figure out how and what and why to write. He once sent a draft version of an as-then-unpublished story called "Floaters". It was so good, and meant so much to me, that I carried it through six weeks of travelling, Portland to Rome to Barcelona to London to NYC to Georgia to Chicago to Austin to Denver to Portland, nothing but a backpack and not much room for books.

C.S. shifts around in the golf cart, trying to ease his legs. How can there be so many strange and unexplained things in the world, he has no idea. Recently, he has read an article in Playboy about men who are turned on by wearing lobster claws and watching boa constrictors swallow alarm clocks. They are called Dadaists.

[from] "Floaters"

The good Doctor died last week sometime. I found out on Twitter. The link was to this, excellent, remembrance: Dear Blaster. Among the regrets this instanced: I had written him in years. I had not bothered to write this appreciation.

Al Ackerman was a great man. His work was varied and brilliant, and anyone free of dogmas about the inferiority of humor or prejudices about underground writing will find a lot to learn from, and laugh at, and linger over. If you care more about what he nice, I can assure you he was. There is much evidence on this point, and it all agrees with me. The evidence of his genius is even more abundant.

• Shattered Wig Review Catalog
• Direct links to Blaster Al publications
• Lost and Found Times

His democratic willingness to engage with just about anybody isn't there, anymore—but if a legitimate titan of underground writing could take time from his medical transportation gig to answer his mail, so can you...and so can I. Good things may come of it!

Back in front of my building, three men were out on the stoop—two of them were having a beer-pissing contest, the third was refereeing from the top step. The referee, I saw, was gross old Mr. Barsh, the building super, who never fixes anything.

Book in hand, I began to creep toward him. "Wanna see something pretty?" I called softly.
[from "The Puffin Book", in Corn & Smoke: stories, performances, things, Shattered Wig Press, 2006.]

In between work and mail and life, and fighting for what dignity and decency we can manage, we can write, or draw, or sing, or otherwise make stuff. Blaster Al did.

I want to close with a couple long sections from my favorite Blaster Al chapbook. They include the powerful repetitions, the humor, the sadness, the horror, the confusion I associate with the best of his work. It's the whole world, in other words—the best words: the words of Al Ackerman. The world is a poorer place without him.

--Fat

[from: Let Me Eat Massive Pieces of Clay, Shattered Wig Press, 1992.]

from DEATH DEAT DEPARTURE
                    Are you sick? drunk?
Well it's good to know that for a few days
Voices come alternately from both sides
Though under normal circumstances the saying that never comes true
Starts to smell after a few years--so that each day, after that, was
     akin to a large doll's face burping outside the window
Whew: that face was the size of a parking lot, and all onions, near which stood a man named Canarse Park
Now forget that

                    Congratulations!
That was no church! That was rodomontade,
Or the moss-hell "false memory"
Of lofting the teeming BALTIC AVENUE DRUGSTORE
To relocate it more nearly above locations that never change when
Proofs of dark, roam and percolate
Nourishing the urge to understand bur not hear about any
Plans to overrun or swarm about in large numbers but still, in the shredded-silver
REFLECTION that goes tearing along overhead
Topped with a drawing (chedderchrome) of mayonnaise congealing on
The lip of the drinking glass the Coca Cola and Jim Beam is in:
It was ten-of-seven
When Hawk realized he
Was unshaven and
Driving a van he had
Never seen toward
UNREALIZED POTENTIAL MORE FULLY UNREALIZED
.......................................................................
Now forget that

The Eternal Network

Dr. Blaster Al Ackerman 1939-2013
Love to you now in the eternal network!
Outside Normals Bookstore 2007
In the kitchen door like so many morning glory seeds
in your stomach golden and queasy wrapped up in
cellophane smelling of pine, deer park, old pulp
envelopes and centrefold yellow hacks who dream on
35c a word for truth and eerie goings on in the 'other
room'....

Andre Stitt

The Incomparable Amanda Pollock On The Incomparable Blaster Al

Blaster

You had moved in to Normals and seemed to like it.
Who was this new denizen of the murky book nook?
Rupert quaked and burbled in your presence, which made me wanna
Quake and burble too.
Soon after first meeting you… I would don the wretched yellow
Bathing suit and drag you around town for a night or two…
Or was it a week in that fucking thing?
You said the strangest things in the night that I could never quite remember... but you were quite serious
With the beer drinking quietude in the daytime.
And that always made me feel unsure… which turns out is
Something I thrive on.

Ca- Rack o Canned Beer! o yeah from the corner… and a swift Quay sashay…
You had a chair there… but I could swear it was a fucking merkahbah
You had access to… I was convinced you were an honest
To god time traveler. I liked that you liked beer how I liked beer.

Then one day I decided to pack up and leave... Rupert bought all my books which would end up being what I had to move away with. We had going away party… I heard that someone was getting a champagne enema in the basement and I wanted to go and look but you stopped me and you gave me One of your pastel 8 by 10 drawings… I think it was a self-portrait of you barely held inside a red Bathrobe… the NYC skyline in the background and the words… "Welcome to New York" were written in black oily scrawl. All the hair on the exposed body looked like gray ramen… how’d you do that? Shoo.

I seen done been so many fucking things since way back then… and from my travels I have very little left to show…. but that I held onto and still can admire. When I look at it… I remember all of us… fearlessly fucked up and all friends and friendly. Last time I saw you… you had yer soap in mouth maw a flappin… and out of the sudsy garbled sides flew your one of kind poetry. I knew it that first day I laid eyes on ya and also the last day… I was lucky… we were lucky when you decided to move into Normals.

- Amanda Pollock

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amanda Pollock is a singer songwriter, author, former nurse and undeniable force of nature. In the haze and fuzz of '90s Baltimore she was a member of the musical assault circus troupe Cloaca.

The Man With Two Hearts

(Photo by Patti Ackerman, supplid by Istvan Kantor)



Blaster with fellow storefront preacher, Father Higgs, in the legendary 14 Karat Cabaret during a Normal's Books & Records anniversary show/ party. Photo by Liquid Borgnine.

"Olvido" by John M. Bennett for Blaster Al, plus Blaster Bibliography

(above - Sleazy, Kantor, Ackerman, dec 20, 1985 San Antonio, Texas, photo Bretty Nova)

Dear Lord, or Shiva, or John Smith, or Vicious Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner Salesman,

Baltimore and the world of the arts have been losing some grand masters this winter! This blog is starting to feel like an obituary column! First Chris Toll, who on top of everything else, was my first publisher, so he was a god to me right off the first crack of the bat! Then sweet night prowling flesh covered music encyclopedia Pope Croke. Now dear old Blaster.

Blaster first blew my mind in the '80s when I came across him in Crowbar's "Popular Reality". Tentatively a Convenience and I were both working at Second Story Books on ye olde Greenmount Ave. and he turned me on to said rag. When a group of us decided to start Shattered Wig Review to push those we loved to create more of what we love, Blaster of course became my dream contributor.

I sent him a copy of Wig #1 with three sodden burritos and a case of Schlitz and begged him for some words of his Secret Master Essence. In a matter of weeks I was holding "2,976 Vienna Sausages" by Blaster, what proved to be one of my very favorite stories by him, and it found its first printing in humble side-stapled Shattered Wig Review #2.



(Blaster with my Chimp Tantalus)

When Blaster and his wife Patty broke up in the early '90s John Berndt and I told him he should come drink up the seedy climes of Baltimore and we even sent him bus fare to add to the temptation. The cheap bars, the populace packed with creative humans barely clinging to sanity and a huge appreciative fan base and like-minded weirdos was able to glue Blaster here. Every Shattered Wig Night he would hold forth and stomachs and minds would hurt from the expansion of laughter and beer and Phil Dickian time/world slips, not to mention drip with Lovecraftian ordure! He changed my life, he changed Baltimore, he made us all wonder if we were living in inside one of his stories.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

olvido

shoulder water an my wave re
petition the soggy blade my
leg remeats my repe
tition where my your po
cket cheese finds the rep
etition scrawls the nu
mber same the numb r
epetition ur swallow off
the elbow juice repetit
ion nods all closet
treasure repetition dust an
gritty sock repetitio
n ease yr fading b
ones yr repetiti
on itching like a g
nat repeats repeated
in yr r ear no wonder
they call you King of the World

John M. Bennett
for Blaster “All Different All the Same”
Al Ackerman (with tiny addition by Blaster Al Ackerman)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is a link to a bibliography of Blaster's writings that Sir Bennett worked on:

http://www.library.osu.edu/"

Click on "Books and More", and do an author search for "Ackerman, Al". There are 29 entries there, all stuff in the Avant Writing Collection.

onword
john

New Blaster Al Ackerman Drawing!

Literary Emissaries Take The Love to Blaster Al

It seems like only yesterday that Blaster stepped off the bus and we were getting mugged together in the alley between North Ave. and the Charles Theater after re-upping on beer for the Shattered Wig Night at The Astro Chimp Impact Crater. He's now been in Austin for a year and skull shaking hallucinations just haven't been the same, not to mention life behind the counter at Normal's or up on the Shattered Wig Night stage.

But he's getting daily fresh enchiladas and basking in the Texas sun, regenerating his formidable writing machine once again. Delaware poet and Blades editor Francis Poole and Baltimore poet and archivist Megan McShea happened to both be visiting Blaster this week and Francis was kind enough to send some jpegs.

"Yay Empty Spider Catches Fire" by Blaster Al Ackerman

I've been having too much fun with four out of town visitors a few weeks ago and then a glorious escape to Chincoteague Island, but it's made me fall way behind on posts. Here is a fresh morsel
from Blaster Al that came in the mail while we were away.


Yay Empty Spider Catches Fire


When empty spider crumpled in the gutter
gross this must be to those choosing sleep with my sweet clock choosing to eat
real clamor, real chamois, then over my kidney stone my sweet clock's blazing
and my drizzling bone on my desk
for the locker in my lap
let me fight them off with my Saturday afternoons
towelette when having sandwich reveal my paste hole
soon my squealing ladder mice go charging up the hill
but to be really out of it,
see how tongue shadow quivers on the page
and hopping toward the spat sardines
we'll be better too, better than your whistled eye, gasoline
helps taste the shadow in your sock that's friendship for you
but it's also obscure and nothing should be obscure when it's on fire

(thanks to JMB of 1/26/11 etc.)

"Fuzzy Grape Drink" by Austin Al Ackerman

Fuzzy Grape Drink

    And as my doggy link drops behind garage
my stone box rotted like a frog wet with what
I clawed forgot like head a box of matches
filled with
       buttons barking making those who come
to peddle
       flat pants and piles peddle flat pants and
piles plus certain large black face phones
             leaking
paragraphs. The Purple Big Heads with my ghost
sit there
       tantamount so that in the file cabinet
where my tongue sits greased you may find a little
laughter in your life.
          Still, you can't have everything,
I'm no Ray Bolger.
          I'm no collection of gopher holes
neither.
       I'm a believer! which is to say you can have
an OK time
       if you'll just realize that suddenly everyone
starts screaming.
       Because you might say dung clock radish
the size of a door while through it the noodles creep on an
adorable high
       as an enormous root begins breaking the walls


(from jmb of 1/17/11 etc)

Conflicting Mayan Prophecies & Start Your New Year With Blaster's "Great Yellow Hairs"

Well, what a year it was indeed. I bought a house at "George Bush Destroyed The World Cut-Rate All Houses Must Go" prices, got married, turned motherfucking FIFTY! (My legs, bring me my legs!), Normal's Bargain Cobbley World got a new landlord (praise him and his new roof and new Red Room and new facade soon to come) and turned 20!, Blaster Al moved back to Texas after a brutal winter of record breaking blizzards and the economy hit what I hope was the bottom of the Catfish Pond, rising, at least for Normal's, gloriously in time for Christmas just as my nails were eaten down to my hairy knuckles. And I finally put out a new Shattered Wig Review after a two year hiatus, my first as a domestic man, shredding papers from the couch as my beloved sipped a martini from the easy chair, watching Mrs. Minerva and eyeing my feverish actions warily. "No honey, I think it's good you have this outlet, no matter how futile and despised it is."

But, what about that Mayan prophecy, that our already tenuous time is about over? That the Cosmic Eggtimer sand is running as thin as my once glorious Glen Burnie 'fro? As it states in the sacred Popol Vuh: "well, it looks like we have run out of tablets and cave walls upon which to paint. Sacrifices just don't provide the rush to our groin like they used to. The skies roar no more, but kind of bleat. We seem to be at about 2012 White Man Time on this calendar, maybe we should just call it quits. After all, by then they will most likely have Mother Gia covered head to corns with Great Marketplaces filled with shoddy clothing that was made by enslaved peoples and will fall apart after three wearings, as opposed to one of our decorative huipil that will last for a dozen harvests. Let's just erase time after that, even though it will wash the Brown and Yellow down the Blackhole along with Whitey. Aaghh, I just had a vision of a woman resembling an Itzam Cab Ain and with the mindset of the young boy who hangs about the ceremonial platform in Tikal trying to lick the severed heads dripping from the tzompantli. She is wearing great spectacles that mask her face like a war eagle and she is laying down great stalks of corn and heralding them as wisdom. Apparently if we don't end the world she will rule "North America" and collapse the sky. Oh, I am in great need of many Balche and I must erase Future Time."

But also in the Popol Vuh there is talk of "The Decade that ends with Saint Roland delivering the Spaniel to the compact Asian car" will herald a new decade of great bounty and world peace. Above is a photo of just that act indeed happening. Perhaps, as it says in this kind of New Agey but fairly level-headed statement - http://www.13moon.com/prophecy%20page.htm#2 - the Mayan calendar has been misinterpreted by Westerners and it's just the end of a World Cycle, which it really does feel like we're at the end of something. Could we ever turn away from putting all our resources into endless fruitless war, or will we just start cranking out robot soldiers that will save the lives of some of our broke-assed young people that have no other career options, but kill lots of broke-ass people in other countries without the bother of emotions.

The Hell with all this. It is a glorious new year and new decade not yet tainted, though the cabbagey smell of the last one can still be detected, and the Blaster Al mail is rolling in from down South. Austin, to be precise, the oasis of Texas. Here is a new piece by him that he called his recent favorite:

POEM (The Great Yellow Hairs)

The great yellow hairs are not so different from the tiny yellow hairs/

so long as you're sorta slow and mistake the whistle in your elbow/

for one whose budget rent-a-car tumbles down the drain cute as cute can be,/

and all the dopeadicto logs wait for you as my crispy thumb peddles drugs./

No yellow hairs, no whistle from your elbow, these were using drugs long before

you knew it. The trout house madly bangs outside while you get your act together/

finally knowing that anything this "flabby-strong" rates an invite down the street/

to the birthday party where all the children watch you chew all the candles

not knowing you do this at every meal because every meal's a party

and because it is my chalchihuti.

Blaster Al Ackerman (from jmb of 11/24 etc.)

Wedding Eve

Rio landed yesterday and brought with her an all pervading sense of calm despite the continued searing heat. She and Everly worked for eight hours straight today on the house transforming it to a new level of cozy funk and folk grandeur. My beloved kidney shaped art deco table was lost in the groovy makeover, but in light of two endless wars and the death of the ocean I can buck up and take it.

As Charles Dickens said: "It was a time of windy squeaky hospital corridors, a time of villagers walking shredded carrying their own heads, but it was also a time of hunka hunka burnin' love". Or as Anne Murray said: "Even though we ain't got money, ten gallon hat on a rain barrel bunny."

Francis and Linda came by the store on the way to DC for the big library conference. Francis was in a giddy mood despite the conversation first being obsessively about the marathon oil spill and then his re-enactment of an assisted death video he saw that was shot in Sweden. He gleefully spoke in an affected accent as the Swedish doctor telling the patient "Drink this and you will die." "You must finish all of this and then you will fall asleep and then you will die." "Your heart will stop and then you will die." "You will die." He said he felt drawn into the video and began to feel hypnotized. That it was shot in closeup of the doctor's face repeating the phrase "You will die." Overall a pretty good setup, though, if things become too physically grim in your life. For around $4,500 you get set up in a very nice room in Switzerland in the mountains and you get to choose the music for your death and the time. You are brought a beverage to coat your stomach initially and then you drink the everlasting gobstopper itself. The whole procedure is videotaped so that both the police can view it to make sure it was all voluntary on the death voyager's part and also so that the deceased family can have a copy if they wish.

If the ghost of Alzheimer's makes spider holes through my brain in a few years and I can scrounge the money up I most certainly wouldn't mind going out in this way. And the price is only slightly more than the quote I got on having my house painted and much less than the quote I got on built-in bookshelves.

At any rate, that is how my wedding eve day began. With a nice visit from Francis and his wife Linda at the store, Francis giddy and repeating "You will die." And now that I think of it, it was just Tuesday that Daniel was in talking about different open mic readings he had caught in San Francisco. And his favorite one was one that happened at I think the 16th St. subway stop. There is a circle of bricks and when you step inside that circle you are the reader. When you've done your speak for a sufficient time the crowd will begin clapping to let you know it is time to step out. Daniel said the most memorable and moving reader was actually a crack fiend who stepped into the circle and very piteously and nervously kept repeating "I'm going to die. I never knew I was going to die. I'm going to die. You, you're going to die, etc. repeating the same phrases with different pronouns. Daniel left with thoughts of his new book perhaps becoming spoken word on cassette and he left in pursuit of water up North.

Then Madame X called sounding good, saying she was on methadone. This sounded good to me. A good ritualistic plan. I have heard many stories of people on heroin waking up dead with viscous stuff of their own devising lodged in their throat or maybe just hotwired dead from some crap that somebody scraped off the bottom of their shoe to sell, but I can't think of any dramatic methadone stories. Or maybe any at all, other than complaints about waiting in lines or maybe stories about people that sold their rations on the street.

Then amazingly Pope came in. With another Linda who was going to the same library conference that the first Linda and Francis were going to. Perhaps this is the major gathering that Edgar Cayce had talked about. But at the great cataclysmic moment everyone will silently and nervously be seated at industrial tables clearing their throats and checking their watches and iPhone messages. And it struck me watching complicated talented thoughtful Pope in need of a tasty fresh kidney the intense narratives of peoples' lives I was getting a taste of. Thoughts of Blaster Al, who Francis was mainly stopping in Baltimore to visit, emerging from the physical rehab place to approach the cabaret stage once more - this time with a cane - to read at the 20th Anniversary Party of Normal's.

Meanwhile, as the swirl of events, especially for a recluse like myself heated up and I prepared for marriage and a honeymoon and a possible end to two years of being tortured by the Lard Filled Maryland Comptroller's office I get an emergency email missive from Pappy in China that Mo needs American hair dye. The Chinese hair dye he got her literally almost killed her.

After hurriedly pricing another fantastic stack of vinyl from The Kindly Hardboiled Man of Catonsville I slipped out of the shop, feeling ancient and thinking "I am to be married." I had to stop off for wine so I chose the old Schnapp Shop I used to haunt every Friday night back in the end of my drinking days. Just a good imported six pack to take the edge off while watching "Homicide". Often in my single days I would fantasize marrying the Korean woman who ran the place and who I'd maybe exchanged a few dozen words of English with over the years. She always seemed so alert and straight forward reading her Bible behind the counter. I bought two bottles of white wine, smiling at the Korean shop owner who I hadn't seen in so long, thinking "I am buying wine at the old Schnapp Shop and I no longer drink and tomorrow I am to be married."

I drove home as the 100 degree heat still clung to everything, feeling sorry for the bus riders crumpling like tortured figures in El Greco paintings on the fiery bus benches.

I got home and stepped through the door and the light and sound and smell was the softest it had ever been. Gleaming floors, new art hung, my baby so happy with her mother, both of them excited and sweating and humming with life. It is a good door to have stepped through and tomorrow I am to be married.

Monstrous Snow Smashes 60 Writers

The kindly Michael Kimball was charitable and wise enough to include myself and Blaster Al Ackerman in his and Luca Dipierro's new film "60 Writers/60 Places". I got to read my poem "On Wallowing and Rapture" in front of the very diner that Barry Levinson shot his film that launched Mickey Rourke into the Public's Eye and Blaster did a Pepper Young translation in the legendary Red Room.

"60 Writers" was set for its Baltimore premiere at the Creative Alliance last Friday until the tumultuous snow event struck. It's now re-scheduled for Sunday, February 21st. It will show along with Michael and Luca's earlier film "I Will Smash You". Below is a link to information about the films and screening with great posters.

http://www.littleburnfilms.com/screenings.html

A Shattered Wig Night Oasis - 1/29/10

Courtney McCullough of the Lockhorns with artist
and 14 Karat Cabaret overlord genius Laure Drogoul.


Goodloe Byron, author of The Abstract and
Revisions Of, reading from his forthcoming free
book, The Wraith.


Blaster Al Ackerman with Geff Stewart and Beth Dinsick

Geff "Soft Serve" Stewart getting spiritual with it.

Courtney doing Lockhorns solo.

Poets Tom DiVenti and Chris Toll.

Actor, model, dancer, writer, Billy Bob Thornton look-

alike John Eaton on the left with artist and musician

Scott Larson.

Amanda Copeland of Sea Couch.

Dan Dorsey of Sea Couch and one of the Pasadena

music mafia. How the hell so many good musicians came

out of that hellhole in the same generation is a mystery

on the scale of "Village of the Damned".

Tears of joy and gratitude for John Dierker and his work.

Redbird getting up to some pre-set snugglin'.

Amanda Pollock of Redbird, formerly of Velvet Mafia and Cloaca.

Now I never served in Falluja or Nam or been a native in those places living sleepless in fear avoiding death by lead or fire volleys, thank God, nor have I served in the Red Cross during one of the many incidents that wipes countless humans off the Earth like a half asleep waitress wiping a coffee spattered lunch counter, nor have I shivered through nights of hypothermia in a small embankment up on an impassable mountain crag, but goddamned I'm freaking tired. And I never say "freaking". "Fucking" just seems so un-blog-like.

Four months of brain and soul penetration by a mortgage company to prove I am of standard enough fleshly issue to own a house, and a great great house it is with singing hardwood floors and jaunty one year old roof, followed by two weeks of muling two apartment loads of books and records has my yarbles and my lower lip dragging the pavement. Please, kind sir, a week of no moving, no work drama/collapse and no friends dying so I can get my dull on and spend all seven of those sweet days floating away on our new woolly mammoth of a couch reading book after book that I just packed and unpacked. Such sweet marvels, many that I'd forgotten!

That said, in the middle of this oddly domestic period of bliss mixed with crippling stiffness landed a Shattered Wig Night of Extreme Warmth and Grandeur. Not only did an old friend and former Baltimore rock star/provocateur/stream of consciousness wizard/wearer of supremely unique hubble jubble clothing Amanda Pollock descend from the Great North to play with her new duo Redbird, but Lockhorn songwriter and singer and old old friend of Normal's and Shattered Wig, Courtney McCullough, got flown in for his 50th birthday by his wife and mother.

My giddy feelings of love for Courtney and all the other acts on the bill this night could fill more Harlequin romances than your Aunt Padonia Road contains in her dumbwaiter. We got a huge crowd also, despite part of Saratoga St. being iced over by a broken water main and a huge huge show at the G Spot.

The night ended for me with a Time Machine moment when I was waiting for Courtney to arrive back from closing up the Mount Royal Tavern after the show so he could break in our new couch. We had attempted to find a bed at IKEA in time for his arrival, but we both were so fuddled from fatigue and IKEA's maddening mix and match overlit showrooms that we bolted after woofing down their cafeteria carbo-load wares (saving two of the rubbery "Swedish" meatballs for Max in napkins in my coat pocket).

I let Courtney in about 2:30 or so and he walked in holding Amanda's moon boots and looking sheepish. I was transported back 15 years or so except I should have been in Courtney's place. Asking him what was up he pointed down the shadowy street (lined with all our new unknown neighbors) to a graying ragtag post-bar time party headed our way.

Hopefully this show struck for others as it did me old roads and loves and the new and upcoming. But like watching "To Sir With Love" the first time and losing it when Lulu has her moment, this night was so tender it hurt.

Matt Kraft Video of "The Art of Disappearing"

This here new video by Matt Kraft set to the words of poet Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "The Art of Disappearing" spoken by Blaster Al Ackerman truly hits my sweet spot. Aching melancholy with a healthy dose of absurdity.