blake 3:17
28th December 2013, 01:47
Never knew him, but he was a fixture? force of nature? wtf? in the world of anarcho small press DIY mail art funkiness
BLASTER AL ACKERMAN
1939 - 2013
PUBLISHED: DECEMBER 25, 2013
Blaster Al Ackerman left Baltimore a few years before his death last March, but news of his passing was devastating to the old school demimonde of Baltimores arts community, which Ackerman in many ways radicalized when he moved to Baltimore in the early 90s.
Ackerman grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where he began writing to his favorite science-fiction and mystery authors, saying, I am a very young person in San Antonio, Tex. Tell me how to get out of here. Though he subsequently spent time working at local television stations and a hospitals burn unit, these early letters prefigured one of the formative events in his life: the discovery of correspondence art in a 1972 Rolling Stone story on the subject. In a 2002 CP feature, Eric Allen Hatch wrote that The spontaneous, noncommercial nature of this artistic approach captured Ackermans imagination, and within a month he had established correspondences with several people mentioned in the article.
Such correspondences eventually brought Ackerman to Baltimore. John Berndt, the founder of the High Zero Festival, says that he began corresponding with Ackerman when he found the story Confessions of an American Ling Master in Dumb Fucker magazine when he was only 14 years old. It spoke so directly to me that I wrote him, Berndt says. Little did I know I was writing one of the great mail artists of the 20th century.
He was kind of the star of the whole early zine explosion, says poet, editor, musician, and co-owner of Normals Books Rupert Wondolowski, another early fan. He was a completely original blend of Lovecraft and the hard-boiled pulp people like Jim Thompson . . . with his extreme knowledge of pop art and modern art and philosophy and oddball science-fiction writers.
http://citypaper.com/news/8220-blaster-8221-al-ackerman-1.1605926
Blaster Al Ackerman is the greatest writer youve never read. But his new posthumous collection, The Complete Works from Lost & Found Times 19792005, as compiled by John M. and C. Mehrl Bennett of Luna Bistonte Prods, gives you no more excuses to keep seconding a writer who deserves to be at the top of your reading list. Active as an artist, writer, and curious collaborator since the 1960s and/or 70s, Ackermans style is at once serious, off-the-wall, bizarre, surreal, hilarious, ironic, parodic, and totally unpredictable. His death this past March (at the age of ??) invited some well-written homages from the fringe, but didnt otherwise make many waves in the greater literary or arts world. And thats because, unjustly, this world didnt know Ackerman.
In this worlds defense (a rare occasion where youll hear me defend this world), Ackerman wasnt always so accessible, with the bulk of his activity and notoriety supported by his ceaseless activity in the mail art world, itself a willful Fluxus brainchild and pasted with an outsider label as such. But whats great about being on the outside is that the rules of the popular worldand its ridiculous nuances and political correct-ness and senseless decorumno longer apply. This frees outsiders from the stringency of genre, of form, of expectation, and produces an art holistically and refreshingly independent. And thats probably a way over-intellectualized way of saying what I enjoy most about Ackermans writing: it doesnt give a shit, and does not giving a shit better than anyone else. With Ackerman, theres no contrivance. Its also why I often cite him as one of Anobiums favorite writers, and Ive published him in both Volume 2 and Noospheria.
http://anobiumlit.com/2013/06/22/blaster-al-ackerman-together-at-once/
BLASTER AL ACKERMAN
1939 - 2013
PUBLISHED: DECEMBER 25, 2013
Blaster Al Ackerman left Baltimore a few years before his death last March, but news of his passing was devastating to the old school demimonde of Baltimores arts community, which Ackerman in many ways radicalized when he moved to Baltimore in the early 90s.
Ackerman grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where he began writing to his favorite science-fiction and mystery authors, saying, I am a very young person in San Antonio, Tex. Tell me how to get out of here. Though he subsequently spent time working at local television stations and a hospitals burn unit, these early letters prefigured one of the formative events in his life: the discovery of correspondence art in a 1972 Rolling Stone story on the subject. In a 2002 CP feature, Eric Allen Hatch wrote that The spontaneous, noncommercial nature of this artistic approach captured Ackermans imagination, and within a month he had established correspondences with several people mentioned in the article.
Such correspondences eventually brought Ackerman to Baltimore. John Berndt, the founder of the High Zero Festival, says that he began corresponding with Ackerman when he found the story Confessions of an American Ling Master in Dumb Fucker magazine when he was only 14 years old. It spoke so directly to me that I wrote him, Berndt says. Little did I know I was writing one of the great mail artists of the 20th century.
He was kind of the star of the whole early zine explosion, says poet, editor, musician, and co-owner of Normals Books Rupert Wondolowski, another early fan. He was a completely original blend of Lovecraft and the hard-boiled pulp people like Jim Thompson . . . with his extreme knowledge of pop art and modern art and philosophy and oddball science-fiction writers.
http://citypaper.com/news/8220-blaster-8221-al-ackerman-1.1605926
Blaster Al Ackerman is the greatest writer youve never read. But his new posthumous collection, The Complete Works from Lost & Found Times 19792005, as compiled by John M. and C. Mehrl Bennett of Luna Bistonte Prods, gives you no more excuses to keep seconding a writer who deserves to be at the top of your reading list. Active as an artist, writer, and curious collaborator since the 1960s and/or 70s, Ackermans style is at once serious, off-the-wall, bizarre, surreal, hilarious, ironic, parodic, and totally unpredictable. His death this past March (at the age of ??) invited some well-written homages from the fringe, but didnt otherwise make many waves in the greater literary or arts world. And thats because, unjustly, this world didnt know Ackerman.
In this worlds defense (a rare occasion where youll hear me defend this world), Ackerman wasnt always so accessible, with the bulk of his activity and notoriety supported by his ceaseless activity in the mail art world, itself a willful Fluxus brainchild and pasted with an outsider label as such. But whats great about being on the outside is that the rules of the popular worldand its ridiculous nuances and political correct-ness and senseless decorumno longer apply. This frees outsiders from the stringency of genre, of form, of expectation, and produces an art holistically and refreshingly independent. And thats probably a way over-intellectualized way of saying what I enjoy most about Ackermans writing: it doesnt give a shit, and does not giving a shit better than anyone else. With Ackerman, theres no contrivance. Its also why I often cite him as one of Anobiums favorite writers, and Ive published him in both Volume 2 and Noospheria.
http://anobiumlit.com/2013/06/22/blaster-al-ackerman-together-at-once/