Coming Distractions – August Edition

Good morning & happy weekend, everybody.  I’ll be off today to play a short set at the Council Mountain Music Festival—delta blues is just not that big a draw at what is for all intents & purposes a bluegrass festival.  But I’m sure it will be fun—performing is one of the things I do best & most naturally.  The pic is me at the festival last year.

In other news: speaking of music, be sure to check out this space on Monday when I’ll be writing about a really fun music duo called the Mad Tea Party.  The Mad Tea Party describes themselves as "a happiness-inducing rockabilly - retro pop - rock n roll duo from Asheville, NC.”  They’re all that & more—guitar, uke & kick drums.  I’ll have much more to say on Monday, but do check out the video below—“Zombie Boogie” from their latest EP of the same name (please note: there is a slight delay at the beginning of the vid—the music starts after the background video begins to roll—not a synchronization issue).

& don’t forget—one more week of Homegrown Radio with Carrie Bradley.  It’s exciting to have a musician with Carrie’s talent posting new music on Robert Frost’s Banjo, so please come on out & show some support.  Also, in case you missed Friday’s post with Carrie, I’m embedding the mp3s differently now—you can listen to all the songs posted by a given musician to Homegrown Radio all at once without having to go back to previous posts.

On the writerly front: Thanks to all those who stopped by for last Thursday’s Writers talk interview with Eberle Umbach.  If you missed it, you can read the interview here; there’s also an excerpt from the beginning of Eberle’s novel The Sportswoman’s Notebook over at the Writers Talk blog.  Next Thursday we can all look forward to an interview with poet Jessica Fox-Wilson of everything feeds process.  & some more exciting news: We’ll be serializing a story by B.N. entitled The Lost Train on August 30-September 2; B.N. has given us permission to serialize a few of her stories—which are excellent—& I’ll be posting them about once a month, usually over the course of four days.




Also: Alcools is back off the mat!  Yes, there will be new posts on my Apollinaire translation blog for at least the next few weeks, & having finally made a satisfactory translation of "Le Voyageur," I'm hoping to keep the momentum up for the other poems I've yet to translate.  New translations are posted each Monday on Alcools.


In the commercial department: don’t forget my poetry books are available here.  They are currently seeling for $10 each for the print editions, but they can be downloaded free.  I'd be curious if folks are taking advantage of the pdf option, as I have no way to track this.  The books are The Spring Ghazals (poems from 08-10), The Days of Wine & Roses (San Francisco poems from the 90s) & Nightingales in a Stateside Zoo (poems written in Charlottesville, VA in the 80s—my salad days when I was green). 

& speaking of free, remember: you can download the Alice in Wonder Band’s one & only album for free right here on BandCamp.

Hope you enjoy your Saturday, & do rock out with the Mad Tea Party!