Baltimore String Felons and R.M. O'Brien to Foist Joy Upon The Shattered Wig 28 Publication Party

The lineup for what I hope will be the Shattered Wig Review #28 publication party (I would have gotten a hell of a lot done two Fridays ago if not for the damn BGE outage!) is almost nailed down. It looks to be a fine night of rapture.

Of course this being modern day Baltimore there will be tons of other cool things going on, including a Sea Couch and Forks of Ivy show (traitors), but we will have a shiny new issue sporting the menacing front cover you see smack dab in the middle of the top of this "page".

And although I truly have grown to hate the ubiquitous "Boh" man, I can stand him with a top hat and a banjo.........

Here is the lineup for the December 10th Shattered Wig party at the glorious, glamorous, forbidden, luxurious, decadent, legendary 14 Karat Cabaret:

R.M. O'Brien - poet, emcee/curator of the fantastic WORMS reading series
Emily Crespo - - poet, traveler, alchemist.
Ryan Walker - D.C. poet extraordinaire, friend to all.

The Baltimore String Felons. Fantastic timelessly weird old American folk music with a punk edge. It will Mikey the lead singer's birthday so don't be a weenie - buy him a beer!
Tests. Music featuring two members of the dearly missed group Madagascar.

Here is what the City Paper had to show about a String Felons show they did a while back with Balti Mare.

Earlier in the night, the Baltimore String Felons offered their own unique twist on folk traditions, theirs being more distinctly American. And what’s so refreshing about the weirdo folk acts in Maryland, as opposed to say New York or California, is that we’re not so far from Appalachia that the musicians seem more connected to those influences, and more likely to have actual family roots. The String Felons, with their fiddle and banjo twang, have a definite mountain sound in their so-called “inner city doomgrass,” even with its oddball twists, including songs that detail the assassination of JFK or choruses that howl “please don’t kill me.” And like Balti Mare, the combination of tradition and playful irreverence is what makes the String Felons work.

An Extra Special Shattered Wig Night of Extreme Grandeur & Warmth - Friday, Jan. 29th

Shattered Wig Night Of Extreme Grandeur & Warmth -1/29/10


Redbird
John Dierker
Sea Couch

Goodloe Byron
Al Ackerman

With very special guest floating about in the crowd brandishing a cocktail: Courtney McCullough



Could it be nearly the end of whatever this last decade was called? The Oughts? The Naughts? How it flew by, taking with it most of my head hair and a lot of what was left of my belief in the goodness of humanity or faith that we can beat all the weird new viruses and microbes and booger bears and religious extremist wack jobs.

But then again the Harry Smith Anthology of Folk Music just get reissued on vinyl as did Roscoe Holcomb's "High Lonesome Sound" and The i.e. Series Reader has been published after much anticipation, so I guess there's still some spin left on the over-heated gumball of Earth, even if the polar bears are already being slated to go out next after the art of civilized debate.

How did I get on this, dear reader or two. Maybe it's because I just came from visiting an old friend in the ICU, a wonderfully strange old friend who just happened to be the guy who introduced me to my beloved, where I saw him without consciousness or words stuck to more tubes than I've ever seen in one place. The fact that we had to put on astronaut gear before we could even see him lent an extra otherworldly helplessness and removal from what we know as life. This after hearing the gifted guitarist Jack Rose died at 38 from a heart attack last week. We wish our friend well and all of us each one struggling with this sometimes cold and eery world.

The good and gooder news is the lineup for the next Shattered Wig Night that just happens to also be a bit of a birthday party for former Baltimore bon vivant, musician and Normal's employee, Courtney McCullough. He has just hit the half century mark and his wife Sabra and mother, Sri Rebecca the Desert Vixen, bought him a plane ticket back to Harm City from New Mexico so he could catch this show. I will take this moment to brag that I got lucky and was able to get Brett Sparks of the transcendent Handsome Family to play at Courtney's true birthday party at the Press Club in Albuquerque. There is a small, tiny chance I may be able to land the Family here when they come through Baltimore in the Spring.


As luck would have it, two days before finding out Courtney would be here, I had gotten a call from Amanda Pollock, another Baltimore legend who ran back in the '90s, looking for a booking. Amanda is an incredible vocalist, kind of in the soul folk category, who has done time with The Barnyard Playboys, The Velvet Mafia, Cloaca and many others, but also has always been mainly a solo vocalist with her own guitar accompaniment. She has a new duo in New York called Redbird and I'm excited to hear what she's been up to the last year besides writing twisted memoirs for her writing class.

Also performing is another great duo, this one local - Sea Couch, consisting of Dan Dorsey on banjo ukulele and regular uke and his fiance Amanda Copeland (she of the brightest smile) on banjo. Both warble pleasingly. Dan has the most clean picking style I've heard lately. He also plays in The Same Damn Thing and was in the Pasadena supergroup The Jumping Off Point and Other Moments of Grace. He also did this show's flyer, pictured above, saving me from another one of my tacky '80s School cut and pastes.

Knowing that Courtney would be in town for this special event, I had to muscle his favorite musician, John Dierker, into playing. Solo. Naked soul up against the wall of Oblivian demanding answers.

Our visiting reader this show is a novelist I've been wanting to book for a while, Goodloe Byron, author of The Abstract and Revisions Of. The Abstract truly reminds me at times of Flann O'Brien and Phil Dick, which is some fine company. Plus Goodloe is an interesting 21st Century Lamont Cranston kind of presence so I'm curious to hear him hold forth.

And of course it wouldn't truly count as Shattered Wig Night without Blaster Al. He's been on a particularly good roll of late, despite his recent mugging right on the front porch where he and I live with the reclusive millionaire Shuggie Berndt. The streets of this town are starting to really feel sinsiter again. Times are beyond hard. Rigor mortis stiff to the point of twisting.

At the 14 Karat Cabaret. Doors open at 9pm and the cover charge is a whopping $6 since we're top heavy with performers, aged ones, ones that have various monkeys to keep in silk smoking jackets.

Shattered Wig Night Will Smash You - 11/20/09

Gaze into the furtive eyes of Michael Kimball pictured here introducing the film "I Will Smash You" at the November 20th Shattered Wig Night, rabidly active writer and promoter of Baltimore literary arts. What dark secrets cause him to be so healthy and productive, to be so supportive of other writers? Do we need to wait until the corpses are uncovered in his Charles Village house or do we apprehend him now knowing full well that nothing is as it appears.

If any other evidence is needed of his subterranean other self it was the nervous pace at which his wife unwrapped and chewed various taffies tumbled from the splattered pirate pinata at the end of Sweatpants' set - she was afraid of leaving her tongue idle for fear it would speak truth, some possible horrible truth of the crushing fear she is forced to live with on a daily basis.

But aside from these speculations it was a great night of strong performances. Newcomer to the Shattered Wig stage, Ingrid Burrington,, who is also a conceptual artist, read some short shorts that telegraphed well with the lively audience. Blaster Al put a meta spin on his usual cleanup position in the reading post by reading so called unpublished and unused pieces from his notebook. As someone said: "I don't see Blaster owning a notebook."

After the break and a tense two or three minutes of wondering if the dvd projector would work Michael Kimball and Luca DiPierro's "I Will Smash You" was shown. For this viewer the Adam Robinson segment where he confronts his grandfather's religion through singing a hymn he associated with him was a highlight that sat perhaps a bit alone in its level of transcendence until Kimball himself got in the picture and bashed the shit out of an office environment.

Sweatpants, a rock band that is squarely and furiously in the rock realm, yet in a genre there all by itself, brought its usual vigor and full on joy. The set included an unusual sparse cover of The Cure's "Boys Don't Cry", many shouted recitations of the word "Sweatpants" and an inspiring truncated version of "Love Hurts". The show was ended by the fore mentioned Adam Robinson, who also happens to be the lead singer of Sweatpants, cracking and splattering a pirate pinata which spit out vodka miniatures and taffy. Somehow Adam, the drummer and the drumkit then ended up splayed on the stage in woodpile fashion and a good time was had.