Shattered Wig Press

Music:

Member Since: 13/09/2007
Band Website: www.normals.com
Band Members:

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
Influences: Russian Absurdists, Surrealism, The New York School, The Rabid Pavement of Baltimore, Literature of Dread, Lost & Found Times, LANGUAGE.
Sounds Like: Francoise Hardy and Charlotte Rampling wrestling in a Swiss snowstorm.

Shattered Wig Press
425 E. 31st St.
Baltimore, Md. 21218
Record Label: Unknown Major
Type of Label: Major