Corn and Smoke: Stories, Performances, Things by Blaster Al Ackerman
88 Pages, perfect bound, $12 postage paid from:
Shattered Wig Press
425 E. 31st St.
Baltimore, Md. 21218
Al Ackerman is the Mark Twain of the 21st Century, with a strong dose of Phil Dickian time warp and a heavy reading of every sci-fi pulp of the 40s and 50s ever printed. Not to mention the wry wit of a Perelman. Ackerman is serious about language and presenting the myriad onion layers of the universe, but he chooses for his subject the margin dwellers, the avatars, all the while with great empathy for the lost souls of The New Age.
This collection brings together some of his out of print classic stories like "What My Bible Did For Me" and "The Crab" with new brain teasers like "The John Eaton Recommendations" ("little gauzy winged things fascinated him") and "Ten Finger Earl".
Shattered Wig Review 27, Winter 2007
After probably our longest silence - over a year - we decided we didn't care whether the world needed another issue of our stunted style of cutting and pasting and stapling, we were going to do it for love. And because our files were bursting with good material. Plus it helps convince our rich Great Uncle Seward to continue sending the checks.
This issue boasts front and back covers by Baltimore's recent MICA graduate who has gone super nova in the last year or so - Erin Womack. Seemingly possessed by Star Wars, Weird Old Ladies With Mysterious Crystals and Persian Folktales that don't exist, Erin's art has been popping up everywhere in multiple mediums - children's books, cassettes, DVDs, storefront windows, shirts, hand printed posters, paintings, drawings.
Other young Baltimore upstarts included are the poets Lauren Bender, Justin "Wifehair" Sirois, Jamie Gaughan-Perez, M. Magnus (from Alexandria, VA, actually, but he sure spends a lot of time in Baltimore), Stephanie Barber and Adam Robinson. For us they write in the sweet stew of language that blends post-surrealism, eternal absurdity, pathos despite itself and echoes of the ever looming LANGUAGE.
27 is also chock full of most of the damaged geniuses you've grown to love or despise: Mok Hossfeld, Blaster Al Ackerman, John M. Bennett, Eerie Billy Haddock and Andrew Goldfarb. And I defy anyone to not love the poems of John Colburn. His "Human Being In Celestial Mode" is the one thing that gave me hope in the new year. All that plus feverish cartoons, collages and drawings.
$8.00 postage paid. Or you could buy it at City Lights in San Francisco or Normal's and Atomic Books here in Baltimore.
Our twenty-sixth issue, with front cover by Gerald Ross. 58 pages with copious illustrations, including many tipped-in full color artworks. With writing by Joel Dailey, Al Ackerman, Lauren Bender, Mok Hossfeld, Francis Poole, Greg Evason, John Eaton and Megan McShea. Art by Haddock, Scott Larson, Bo Thompkins, Nancy Greenia and Andrew Topel. $8 postage paid.
The Whispering of Ice Cubes - By Rupert Wondolowski
52 pages perfect bound. Prose and poetry by the editor of The Shattered Wig Review. $8 postage paid.
"Rupert Wondolowski's gritty work is macabre, mischievous, playful, and irreverent, approximating a fusion of William Kotzwinkle, Ron Padgett (circa Great Balls of Fire), Richard Brautigan, and Charles Bukowski. These 39 pieces are delivered with the power and polish of French surrealism, and yet they are particularly American in nature, informed by a sort of seamy-underside-of-society perspective, presumably influenced by Wondolowski's residence in Baltimore, Maryland, stomping ground of two other great American surrealists, John Waters and Edgar Allan Poe.
This is not some dour, pretentious art-for-art's-sake surrealism, nor is it some tepid experimental workshop riffing, but rather the work of a highly accomplished and unique writer with a twisted sense of humor."
- Mark Terrill in Rain Taxi
Invloeden
Russian Absurdists, Surrealism, The New York School, The Rabid Pavement of Baltimore, Literature of Dread, Lost & Found Times, LANGUAGE.
Klinkt als
Francoise Hardy and Charlotte Rampling wrestling in a Swiss snowstorm.
Shattered Wig Press
425 E. 31st St.
Baltimore, Md. 21218
"The Critics Shine Our Apples (For the Non-Believers)":
"Shattered Wig Review is the best of the many underground experimental/surrealist magazines I have encountered in recent years. It is a mother lode of strangeness. Wild juxtapositions, bizarre use of language, and weird art/collage; always raw, sometimes crude. Highly recommended."
The Shattered Wig Review was started in 1988 in Baltimore by Rupert Wondolowski, Nancy Sexton, Anne Bonafede, Alfred Merchlinsky and Louise Spiegler.
One by one the weak dropped by the roadside, felled by paper cuts and a barrage of rejected confessional verse. Now Rupert stands alone, partially because gravity glues him to the warped reality of Baltimore.
Eventually, after a few issues, we branched out into publishing local and then national poets in a chapbook series. A few years ago we graduated to the perfect bound format for occasional single poet books.
Some of the writers we've published are Blaster Al Ackerman, Chris Toll, Batworth, Megan McShea, John M. Bennett, Lauren Bender, Sarah Fox, John Colburn, Ric Royer, Justin Sirois, M. Magnus and Jeffrey Little.
From "Book Reviews with Michael Basinski" - www.the-hold.com:
"I began to read this issue (20) of Shattered Wig Review and could not place it back on the pile. I was enjoying myself with a poetry magazine!......You must engage the Shattered Wig Review, which is a tremendously refreshing poetry and prose and comics and all around insanely beautiful magazine. This issue is 68 pages of wild humor, biting ridiculous, ironic intelligently and artistically moronic art and excellent poems and innovative poetry and prose and art and collage and snips of reality right out of the newspaper (the true lit of idiots) and all of it points out how truly crazy everything about the human race is in fact.....Rupert Wondolowski, editor, is my new hero - what he got is guts and what insight into this frail world in which we live as demented animals.....get this one if you wish other poetry that is not dull, dim, mundane or vapid."
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thanks for checking out my blog page it means a lot to me and please read my
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I post a lot so thank you and hopefully I catch your ear .....david hey here is my link to my blog
In March the sun hurls fireballs at Pennsylvania, which melt the snow, which turns into ice overnight and makes the streets very dangerous. You're gonna want to wear a T-Rex pelt (is it 'plet' with them?) and I recommend clear platform heels, also.
Hello lovely Marylanders! It's been ages since I've seen most of you. I miss Charm City...Just thought I'd drop a quick line and let you know I'll be playing at the 13th floor (one chase street, in the belvedere hotel) Thursday, Sept. 4 from 10-1am, with my wonderful Boston band, The Bon Ton Parade. It would be great if you could make it.
THANK you for dropping the monsters off ..it was nice to see them again. got em zeroxed. Ya know, I think you were the person who taught me the concept of "chapbook". Why do underground zeroxers close for the 4th of July, day?
hello, my friend, work was incredibly brutal this year - but it's over now and i'm slowly getting back to normal (what is normal?). i've been totally out of touch - just reading my buffy comics in the fortress of solitude. i'm sorry, but i will miss the wig on friday - i'm performing at load of fun. but yes, sushi and a movie sounds good. call me.
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