Rupert Wondolowski's Blog, page 7

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)

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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

A Chris Toll Celebration

(Above - Chris Mason with list of poets he wrangled at the Chris Toll fest)

One brisk chilly September night we stood together in the parking lot behind Dunkin' Donuts as he played me the two available songs from Dylan's upcoming "Tempest" album on his iPhone and a little over a week later the great poet and my old friend Chris Toll was dead. Here is his obituary:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/baltimoresun/obituary.aspx?pid=160210013



Chris' memorial at Ruck's Funeral Home was packed to capacity with loving friends and family in shock. It felt cathartic to be among the huge community of Chris' friends and riding on this energy Beefalo Bob Friedman got the idea to have a night of poets reading Toll words and musicians playing songs by chris' muse, bob Dylan. Above is a picture of Mr. Beefalo, who started the evening with a fine rendition of Mississippi".

Here is a link to Baltimore Fishbowl's write-up of the memorial service for Chris:

http://www.baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-poet-chris-toll-earns-tearful-funny-memorial-service/



Chris' activity in the poetry world spanned from the '70s through the first decade of the 21st Century and he was well loved, so the night filled and stretched on with people wanting to pay his generous spirit homage. I was happy to be in on it and got to do double duty, singing with Don Peyton's Tear Stained Bibles (above), which included my nephew Geff on fiddle and mandolin (below).





Above is the whole Tear Stained bunch.

One of the readers was Kate Pipken (below), who co-edited Open 24 Hours with Chris. This journal was the first to publish me as a young Colt 45 besotted lad before I moved to Baltimore, so I have particularly strong warm feelings for it.



One of Chris' most recent publishers, Adam Robinson, who made Chris a movie star with The Disinformation Phase on Publishing Genius Press did a duet reading with Lauren Bender. One of Chris' earliest publishers, Tom DiVenti, whose press put out Blue Confessions was present in the form of T.T. Tucker his country punk persona (below).



Coming along about three hours into the night was Alix Tobey Southwick doing a beautiful, soothing rendition of "Tomorrow Is A Long Time" that overcame the shaky sound system with its passion. Alix, below, painted Chris as The King of Hell and Pope Croke as Pan in the ladies' room of The Club Charles long ago and these two friends and Baltimore icons left the Earth within months of each other.



And in this cruel winter that demanded so many souls from us, even as we joined together to sing and chant in Chris' spirit a month or so after many of us did the same for Pope, there was a fresh sorrow of the death of Half Japanese and Spidercakes drummer/force of nature Ricky Dreyfus. And now when I've finally gotten around to writing this post Blaster Al Ackerman who is in my upper pantheon of folks who made my life an adventure worth living passed away in Austin from complications of a brain tumor.

All these departing giants are going to take a long time to digest and life will certainly never be the same, but there is the consolation and inspiration of the next generation of hepped up weirdos (Soft Serv God's Littlest Homie and Fletcher Smith Unlicensed Phrenologist below) and already the ones lined up after them like Lyra Marlowe, gypsy daughter of the Mainz Caravan. The Toll and Pope and Dreyfus and Blaster particles will live on and influence and inflame in many ways and forms. I will think of them and bow my unraveling head in all moments when life becomes so clear and raw that the membrane between Here and Other begins to split and when I am in the frothy embrace of the ocean reveling in the glory and fragility of existence.

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.

Chris Toll Spirit Celebration Thursday March 14

The Early Bird Aural Tectonic Shift Pageant at Normal's, Sunday February 10th

Study this head above well, my friends. It belongs to the body of Don Peyton, an iconic Baltimore figure who has more wild-assed stories than you’ve got grannies with carbunkles! One of my faves involves him as a youth in downtown Annapolis (back when it was 95% human, before the androids performed their nefarious takeover). He was gibbering like a squirrel with its nuts being pinched by a briar patch in front of the old King of France Tavern, waving around Black Beauties while on Black Beauties, rapping with none other than Stan Getz. Before he knew it a famous beat cop of the area was approaching and Don spilt his black beans on the pavement. Stan Getz, being old school hep jazzman begins playing his horn all around Officer Kransky to create a diversion while Peyton scrambled like an atomic crab to gather his winky bits!!!



Or there’s the story of when Don lived in New York and was becoming a member of a new band called The Swans. Before their first gig they were arranging what time to be at the show. When Don heard the scheduled time he said, “Good, I get off work an hour before that, I’ll be able to get there in time.” Herr Gira said: ”Swans do not have jobs. And Swans do not have apartments.” Don did not make it to the second Swans appearance on the Sullivan Show. He went on to play in the great group Songs From a Random House and eventually ended up back in Baltimore, living above ye olde "Bob's Subgenius Video Shoppe" in Sowebo back when about only a tenth of the living spaces were occupied and Dan Van Allan would wander alone late at night in nothing but jean shorts cut up to where his yarbles breath saying "Who will help me faux finish yonder Church bench? Meet me in the Arabbers' stable, I have a doobie and two carved coconut heads that resemble Captain Chesapeake!"



At any rate, Don has is a great musician, great storyteller and one of Baltimore’s treasures. On Feb. 10th, two Sundays ago, he and Dan Breen played some out freeform duets, covered an Earle Brown composition with Selena Schreyer on vocals and Charlie Chadwick on cello and did a beautiful cover of a Tinklers’ classic with the same quartet.





Opening was Geff Stuibbhart, who I wish Jack Rose was alive to hear. Geff knows his delta masters, the Takoma boys (Fahey and Basho) and all the rich American traditional folks and has absorbed it and oozes out a rich sound all his own. Despite still fighting off a version of this winter’s plague he played some incredible finger picking instrumentals on guitar and banjo, my favorite being “Buried Alive in Coal”.

old one ends

The sky has joined us in our heads
    an elegant rattling ensues
  &
 agony -
until the web between worlds splits
   and scary shit comes out

There is no safe place
   outside the tree fort
or Peter Pan's rec room
It's easier to take
with a nice chilly breeze
and a couple blankets on at night

Who's sitting here waiting for this cobweb
selling carpeting
from bankrupt motels

  a slow reveal

Exhibits from the school cabinets

a jellyfish could
 unlock
the secret of immortality
recently returned
from a tanning products
convention in Nashville
green effulgence
or rejected swain
it's the 13th inning
  after midnight

Right now I'd like to be
the reflection in a
   mirror
of a lake outside a window
as a gnarly hand pops out
  clutching
the bloodied white rag
    of peace

Pope Croke Tribute #4 - We Knelt, We Bit, It Was Over Too Soon, Part 1

-

It seems appropriate to be fighting off a flu and sinus infection from the sanctuary of my couch as the spirit of Pope and our time living together and playing in Kneeling On Beans, Furniture Falling Down the Stairs and She Bites fills my cobwebbed brain. His lair on Maryland Ave. that I got to hole up in for a few years was a sanctuary from the madness of drug and crime-ridden early 90's Baltimore. And most of my time there was spent in darkness recuperating from nerve blistering hangovers or burbling giddy past my saturation point from cheap Sam Adams pints from The Rendezvous, which was perilously close to our apartment.

I first met Pope in that subterranean, battleship gray apartment that seemed to hold the night in its walls. Anna Oldfield told me he was someone special that I had to meet and that he had punk rock albums to sell. I was immediately struck by his wise animal nature - a lot of sniffing and owly sidewise peering. At one point he danced upon his bed playing a flute while I flipped through his Crucifucks, Crass and MDC LPs. We talked a lot about music and writers we loved and in no time we were in Kneeling On Beans together with Anna, Mok Hossfeld, Angus and a crazed 18 year old red headed drummer going by the name Microcosm. We practiced in Microcosm's Calvert Street rowhouse, which quickly turned into party central, gaining the love and admiration of the neighbors, police department and landlord.



Mok Hossfeld eventually moved into this house with Microcosm and Matt, who were his Mt Royal Tavern pit bull bodyguards, along with Laura T. It was in this after bar closing party house that Mok got his nickname Pappy, being the professorial elder with a handful of years more under his stained cravat than his housemates.

One of the first things you learn when playing in a band with Pope is that he existed in his own time and you had to work hard to lasso him into an approximate time frame for practice. With the Beans this often meant Anna going into his bedroom before practice and making quietly passionate cases for why he may want to stir. Not that being on time for practice with the Beans was easy for any of us because it was a large band peopled with folks who worked all kinds of patchwork part time jobs. So we often even had to practice at godawful times like 11am, which of course meant we had to prime the mood with morning canned beer and skunk weed.



(Above is Microcosm as successful highly paid skins man possessed by Spike Jones.)

It was in the Beans of course that Pope somehow turned a tv hippy parody song from Get Smart into a thrilling frug-worthy punk song. His haunting intonation of "make her scahream! Like in your dreams", his voice choking somewhat, trance-like, captured with the rest of the Beans repertoire by Wally Novash expertly with just a cassette 4 track recorder in the basement of the party house. It's one of the few band recordings I've been part of that actually sounded exactly like the band.

There were some great shows - opening for Lungfish out behind the Mt Royal Tavern and playing some forgotten DC club with Monkeyspank come immediately to mind, but sadly no record companies were snapping up Baltimore acts in the '80s and band members began relocating.

One day driving with Pope, both of us single and aching at heart, we were discussing the rare, unique qualities of the fiery original singer of the Motor Morons (Michelle?) and Pope said in his best emphatic whisper "Hmmmnn...she bites!" Sometime soon after Skeeter Davis' "End of the World" came on the radio and She Bites was born, our lovelorn punk torch song duo to send our love calls out to the ladies.

FORTUNE 500......PLUS ONE for Brother Anselm

Joining the recently departed Chris Toll and Pope Croke is poet Anselm Hollo, who served some time in Baltimore three decades ago. I had the pleasure of working in Second Story Books, Baltimore, back in 1984 when he walked in with Andrei Codrescu. He checked out our local press section was and his gaze fell upon a tape I made with John Berndt called "Readings From Nether Lips". "Nether Lips", he said with amusement in his thick accent, "nether lips".

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FORTUNE 500......PLUS ONE
For Brother Anselm


Enumerated by calendar     (them
Sustained by pills      (me
2013's Hot New Diet Secrets        (bedsprings
Maverick is his name      (Sputnik
For all your caffeinated needs       (hoist
Please stay in control of your person     (amour or less
& so on     (fiasco
& so forth      (après bowling

"Let's see some ID here..."       (swollen foot
Lapdog or laptop      (the actual body
By the speed with which     (viral
Are we equal to the sequel?       (crowbar, flying
If nothing else     (translate
Let us be definite     (forever on the Page

by Joel Dailey

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Joel Dailey is the editor of Fell Swoop Press and author of Surprised By French Fries on Ugly Duckling Press.

Pope Croke Tribute #3 - A Letter From Mark Hossfeld

(Above - Mark "Pappy" Hossfeld as a starving young artist and bookseller)

Thomas Pope Croke

I'm very sorry I can't be with you today. I would give anything to change that, but poverty continues to bite off my freedom of movement. Speaking of poverty, when Pope and I lived together it was different times. I'm amazed now at the comfort and filthy domesticity of our poverty and squalor together, something almost impossible to imagine today. Low rents, dive bars and 7-11 microwave burritos are all extinct species now. I misspeaks; the burritos are eternal of course.



I was intimidated by Pope when we first met. I'm not sure how it happened, but he had developed or cultivated a reputation for difficulty. But our first meeting went very well. I can still clearly remember his profile in a smoky, amber light. He was smiling and he had such a beautiful smile. Everyone nodded their heads and dilated their pupils when I told them I was going to move in with him. It turned out just fine, strangely enough. I quickly got used to Crass and Sreavinsky booming through the apartment at three in the morning.

When he was learning a new instrument, the first week was pretty horrible, especially the wood winds, but by week two it was a pleasure. And the way he "thought" on the piano was wonderful. He could go long, long stretches improvising on the piano, running the gamut of emotions and styles.



Another of the pleasures would be when I ran into him in the hallway after he had finally taken a pee-break from his long composition sessions. The look on his face was like a Catholic saint after a good sit-down with the Holy Mother. Pope was capable of great joy. I have ever since striven to match him, but no luck so far.

Of course, when Pope was down, he was undersea trench down. It would start as a kind of cosmic grouchiness. He might let out a soul-crushing, despairing cackle at an episode of Dynasty on our little, defective black and white television. He might go all day saying nothing but "Bah", in a five syllable exhale. But he was right. I consider it one of his gifts to me. He had me dead-to-rights as a Marxist Pollyanna on the make. The world really is a horrible place and Pope was right to insist I see it so.

But Pope could always find the sublime humor in the horrors of this world. It seems to be a Baltimore thing and he was quintessentially Baltimore in his practice. When we were in Kneeling On Beans together we covered "Kill, Kill, Kill" from the old show "Get Smart". Written by Buck Henry, it was sung by an evil hippie group (CHAOS spies) called The Sacred Cows, whose mission was to lead American youth to ruin by means of hypnotic hippie music. It went:
Kill, kill, kill!
Thrill, thrill, thrill!
Make the scene
Knock off the Dean!
Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Knock off a square!
That's what it's about
Hate is in, Love is out
Pope added a verse that went like this:
See your Mom
Make her cum
Make her scream
Like in your dream
Now you're bad
Knock off your Dad
That's what it's about
Hate is in, Love is out

I have always admired that little addition to the song because it works on so many levels, beginning with the knee-slapping lay obscene. Just as super-villains in spy dramas compulsively reveal their nefarious plans to the hero, the song now embraces cartoon counterculture in all it's helpless, retarded glory. Maybe that's what we were getting at in the late 80's. I still love it.

I also remember one time Pope asked me if I really cared how the audience reacted to one of my readings. I said, Yes, of course, it's very important to me. The look on his face was somewhere between amazement and compassion. I say compassion because he felt art was so much further from entertainment than I did. Art was the alien other. Art was a magnificent world all its own for the audience to seek and find. It could not be delivered in less than than thirty minutes with or without anchovies.

Pope loved me and forgave me a multitude of sins. I love him because he left me with nothing to forgive. I wish I could be more like him. I wish I could have told him so.
Love to you all,
Mark Hossfeld



Mark Hossfeld is a renowned writer and artist who somehow created a tasty heady melange mixing Marx, Lacan, Dionysus and Archy and Mehitabel. He is also a world traveler and triple agent currently residing on a Canadian mountaintop where he frequently runs about in only gym socks yelling Stooges lyrics. His period of living with Pope in the '80s was a rich one in Baltimore history that included "The Spanking Party".