Weekend Wrap-Up: We Were Everywhere
Our Stain Bar show on Thursday went exactly as planned. We wanted to do a good show, where everybody went home feeling nice. We made people line up several times and do things we thought they'd like: we gave them bread, we made them say nice things about themselves, and we collected their spontaneous drawings of "hope" into an impromptu short film that melded the spirits of each of the participants into a song. It was triumphant!
I don't know how to say it, but our man Surgeon Goodman Carter was DEEPLY, MIGHTILY IN-AND-ON-IT during all our performances this weekend. The man is a living instrument, a walking chord, a blade so sharp and fast that he can cut raw emotions into Starburst-sized chews and carry them around in his hip pocket. The man is a goddamn genius, and if you want to know why people come to our fiction reading instead of yours, he's the short answer, except he's also taller than King Priam and six times as good at splicing Cat5.
Dr. Future read a short story called "Wall of Sound" about doing the best work of your life at gunpoint for Phil Spector. I read a story called "Benjamin's Abomination" about a pregnant man who has the first pregnant-man abortion. And Claire O'Connor (who published a story this month with us called "The Second Door" which you will find to the right) read a story about Ted Hughes trying to fuck a kangaroo.
It was great. Claire also brought cupcakes with candy on them. Man, they were good. I had one with honey-roasted peanuts. Maybe it was the best cupcake I've ever had.
And then YESTERDAY, we dragged our asses over to the Upper West Side and the Ding Dong Lounge, where the twin ferocities of Fractious Press and Kaboom Press welded together a day of small press networking, alcohol, readings, and music. We read the same stories over again, but this time we read them to:
1). A naked poet named Tommy.
2). Legendary cartoonist Mike Diana, who was once arrested in Florida because his comic "Boiled Angel" did not contain a recipe, but instead contained many graphic depictions of murder, rape, and dismemberment. He read several stories, including a story about a dog with a tapeworm that will now haunt me forever and which will be soon published by Kaboom Press, which is no longer bankrupt.
It was a fine show all around, with many powerful and talented musical acts, such as Ed Askew, "Escape Key," "Wolfhaven," and "The Shot Heard Round the World."
Fiction Circus even made money this weekend, which we stuck into a jar.
Posted by miracle on Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:58:51 -0400 -- permanent link
