Michael Kimball Reads Your Life Story AT Shattered Wig Night Friday, March 29

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.

New Baltimore Vinyl Gold

Not since I was a wee lad living on Pennsylvania Ave. during the heyday of Billie Holiday, while my mom was a torch singer at The Ritz slipping around with Sammy Louis, or when I was a middle-aged drunken dockworker spending every other night at The Marble Bar in the Congress Hotel in the late ’70s/early ’80s, have I seen such a rich period of music in Baltimore.

This struck me strongest the other day when I got two new local releases which spent most of the day on the Normal’s turntable.

First was the long awaited Horse Lords lp on mad Dr. Stew’s Ehse label. If you’ve ever been to a show in Baltimore, say an Afrobeat Society night or crunchy sizzly noise jams at The Bank, you have most likely seen a lean balding bespectacled man, whizzing around the rafters like a popped meat balloon shrieking “This is the greatest music I have ever heard in my life! Dear God you are infusing me directly into my heart ventricles with these sounds which have completely changed my life!! Someone feel my leg, there’s an electrified wiggle worm loose in there!!!!”

That would be Dr. Stew (seen at work below), the multi-tasking, word gattling gun, somewhat ADD wunderkind of Ehse.

With the sweet release of the Horse Lords album I am joining him up in the rafters. It’s a strange synthesis of a lost Sublime Frequencies album (one of the smoking West African chugging and skittering guitar ones) with some mean clean saxophone and electronic dynamics blowing up the stew.

For me the heady concoction catches into blazing flames when it goes into what sounds like an electronic bagpipe breakdown. Father Higgs assures me this sound is created by Professor Owen Gaertner and saxophonist Andrew Bernstein playing together in exact note/pitch synchronicity.

And with Owen (above, addressing the Prince Georges County parole board) telling me that these songs and their general music sound even better after they worked on recording together, I will have to dust off my wingtips and catch these lads live.

The second album is “My Society” by Heart of Hearts, which was performed and produced by Greg Hatem. This is a beautiful end of night album or laying late in bed on a rainy Sunday album. Greg is also a member of Mr. Moccassin and Forks of Ivy. “My Society” was just released on Bleek Records, which is based in Brooklyn and also has releases by Nature Boy and House of Wolves.

This imaginative lp sports titles like “Owls Grow Up”, “Grass Mask”, “Goodbye Buttons” and “Feather Fast” and a sound not too far away from the haunted chamber pop of Beach House, but not quite so dreamy and a little more stark and electronic. It focuses on Greg’s experience as an aviculturist, breeding and caring for finches and doves, which is not a topic often touched upon in pop and rock music.

Senor Hatem’s Society is indeed a fine one to join or visit. Thoughtful and sensitive, but resilient, fresh and bound to stay on your mind.