a literary confidence
Listen here to I'll Be Blasting You!: Picture This 113, which was originally broadcast on Sunday, December 14, from 6 to 8 PM on WRIU, Kingston, 90.3 FM and streaming at wriu.org. Join host Wayne Cresser and special guest, Mike "Dai Bando" Stevenson, this Sunday (12/21) at 6 PM for the third annual Picture This Christmas Party, Once again, you will find us at 90,3 FM, and streaming at wriu.org.
Picture This 112: Getting to the Good Stuff!, originally aired on Sunday, 12/7 at 6 PM on WRIU Kingston, 90.3 FM. and streamed at wriu.org. Join host Wayne Cresser on Sunday 12/14, same time and place, when we'll all get lost in space music together. As the brilliant rock poet Steve Miller said, "Time keeps on slipping, into the future!"
If you missed Picture This 111: All About the Bard ( which aired on WRIU, 90.3 FM, and streamed at wriu.org on Sunday, November 23, from 6-8 PM), you can catch it on the Mischief Time Blog at wcresser.com. We'll do one from the archives on November 30, but host Wayne Cresser will return with a whole new show on December 7th, same time, same place. As always, thanks for listening.
If you missed Cover Me II, the latest edition of Picture This; Film Music on the Radio, which was originally broadcast on WRIU Kingston, 90.3 FM and streamed at wriu.org this past Sunday, November 16th, from 6-8 PM, you can listen to it here on the Mischief Time Blog. Join host Wayne Cresser same time, same place this Sunday when Picture This presents All About the Bard, music from film adaptations of the plays of William Shakespeare.
"In the frothy days of hit parades and top forty stations that could in the space of thirty minutes serve up pop songs from Eydie Gorme’ to Frank Sinatra, jazz from Cannonball Adderley to Ramsey Lewis, garage rock from ? Mark and the Mysterians to the Standells, soul from Aretha Franklin to Otis Redding, psychedelic rock, blues rock, folk rock and novelty hits from alpha to omega, the occasional tribute song offered a wonderful little diversion." Read more of Wayne Cresser's Meta-hits of 1967: Spotlight on the Year Pop Music Celebrated Itself in Song, here on the Mischief Time Blog ...
Listen here to Gallant Gulls, Episode 55 of Catunquit Chronicles, for which your intrepid scribe was invited by hosts James Allan and Ashland Comorack to drop by for a chat and to read some of my short stories for their podcast. I am very thankful for the chance since it was a joy to talk about writing with people who appreciate it and do a fair amount of it themselves.
Happy to let all readers of the Mischief Time Blog know about the activities of Jamestown literary group, The Rhodeo Poets, whose active citizens have pulled together a monthly open mic at the popular Narragansett Cafe. If you're around. you don't want to miss it. And if you've got the work, they would love to hear it.
Hello Mischief Time Blog readers...Yours truly has been gone for a while, traveling the beautiful Canadian Maritimes, covering many miles on the Lobster Trail. More about that shortly; I’ve got some goodies on my plate that need to be shared. Much thanks and announcement about an upcoming live event!
News from the Bubble World of Pop Euphoria: The French Connection Comes to WRIU Radio! and we here at the Mischief Time Blog just want to let you know. Bonne journée!
Meet the author: Wayne Cresser will be signing copies of The Book of Norman at Wakefield Books, Wakefield Mall, 160 Old Tower Hill Road in lovely (it is!), Wakefield, RI from 10 am to noon on Saturday, May 3. If you're in the area, please drop by.
Henry slipped the clipping between the last page and the back cover. He’d get back to it later. Right now he felt like he needed to start at the front of the book. He turned to the first page. At the top, in tidy cursive lines, he read, January 1, 1978, These are the ramblings, musings and meanderings of Henry Louis Bell. May they someday find their way to the ones I love.
During this time of national and global turmoil and fear, poets and other artists are more important than ever because they have the capacity to remind us of what matters and what is possible. Please join the Friends of the Jamestown Library for their presentation of RI Poet Laureate Colin Channer at the JPL on the afternoon of Saturday, April 5 at 2 PM.
Once upon a time, kids, very popular recording artists could sing about love--- tribal love, love for humanity, love for joining together in song and love for each other without irony, without schmaltz, and without embarrassment. I’m time traveling now, but that’s Just Between You and Me. Here’s some tunes from the heady days of Brotherly Love, a short list of 10 of the best.
A few weeks after Molly Tuttle took home a Grammy for her Crooked Tree album, she and her band Golden Highway visited the new Groton Hill Music Center, which is as awesome a music venue as you will find. Read the rest and More! More! More! at the Mischief Time Blog!
I do believe you’ll want to get a hold of The Book of Norman, my collection of 18 connected short stories, either for yourself or to give to someone else at this time of year, or both.
And that was the setting for the happy news that The Book of Norman has been reviewed by critic and poet Fred Shaw for the Ocean State Review Read all about it.
I'm a little excited, no, a lot. And so giddy I could continue to string together loosely related song lyrics for another few paragraphs, but you're time is precious. Shouldn't waste it. It's money. And there is no time like the present for me to announce that The Book of Norman, my new collection of short stories, is available for sale now on this platform. Go to this page to find out more: https://wcresser.com/
Lo and Behold: Believe me, I was drifting, off the mooring entirely. Didn't want to work. So, just for laughs, I searched my name, and lo and behold, this video came up.
Everybody at the Club is talking about it! The Book of Norman, Wayne Cresser's new collection of short stories, which is for sale at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Lulu and Kobo now.
Good news about The Book of Norman, my new collection of short stories.
"A comedic universe awaits in the stories of Wayne Cresser’s The Book of Norman, a landscape that revolves around his Everyman protagonist, Norman Winters, suffering the relatable slings and arrows prevalent in a world of prevaricators, weirdos, and bullies so you don’t have to." Now available at Amazon, Barnes. Lulu amd Kobo.
by Dai Bando Beginning in the 1950s and peaking in the 1960s, there sprang forth from the hills of Hollywood, a loose collective of session musicians whom industry insiders nicknamed "The Wrecking Crew." In the post-Brit Invasion recording frenzy, L.A.’s star-making machinery wanted their young performers to quickly grow their hair into a pudding bowl... Continue Reading →
I’ll go inside and seek out the laminated card that tells me I was watering a Double Pink Fuchsia, known for its beautiful, multi-colored, pendant blooms which can grow up to three inches long.
-by Dai Bando (originally published in The Hobbledehoy): https://thehobbledehoy.com/) - The Voice Squad "The Parting Glass" (from Waking Ned Devine 1999) The Hothouse Flowers front man Liam Ó Maonlaí (surname pronounced O’-man-lee) performs this in 1999’s Waking Ned Devine but I prefer the recording sung acapella by The Voice Squad. Said music critic Rick Anderson, "The Voice Squad represent the melding of two related but... Continue Reading →
by Wayne Cresser (Author's note: In the realm of publishing, I am happy to report that a new story called, "The Last Time Norm Took Acid," was included in an anthology called 20, published by Carlow University Press in recognition of the 20th anniversary of their MFA Program. Lots of fine writers in these pages,... Continue Reading →
Wind and rain came up after that and I pulled Rhonda under the boat cover. When we crawled out again, we were adrift at sea and there was nothing in sight.
by Dai Bando There are five new additions to my annual “Greatest Christmas Songs” list, now thirty songs in total! This is disconcerting, since my original raison d'être was the claim that there are only about ten good Christmas songs. Then ten became fifteen, then twenty-five, and now thirty. So, I appear to be wro…wr… challenged, in my... Continue Reading →
The well-dressed man in the film says, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” Maybe then, it’s a good life if you don’t weaken much and an okay life if you don’t weaken a lot, and a shitty life if all you do is weaken. That’s the thing about film heroes, though, they get... Continue Reading →
by Wayne Cresser (Originally published in the Ocean State Review Volume 8: No. 1, 2018) If you hang around Art's parties long enough, you're bound to run into the guy who resembles Crispin Glover, in anything, a gawky watch-capped scarecrow whose clothes add up to thrift store poetry and ragamuffin rhymes. He's the guy who... Continue Reading →
Oh, if and when you go there, stay for a while. Look into the nooks and crannies, and try to remember, you've got to come back out sometime, if only to go back again later, if you know what I mean.
One of the keys to their success was that early on someone in their circle of producers and artists, had the idea to list their names on the records they supported, unlike during the era of anonymity the Wrecking Crew worked in. And brother, did the hair grow, the word spread, and the work pile up.
As he said this, he began removing what appeared to be crumpled homemade flyers from my hands. They advertised Italian lessons at home and outboard motors for sale, charity 5ks and flower shows. And I held them in tightly clenched fists, like a crabby schoolteacher who snatches paper airplanes out of mid-air.
Here Comes Herodotus, Again! (and other miscrohistories), is a forty-page chapbook comprised of 14 short stories which examine how life can be a series of swift mementos.
Tonight's theme is the Western, that hallowed, long past its heyday but not totally bygone (if I have anything to do with it), genre of Hollywood storytelling.
Surely, they are castaways now and although I cannot see them, I hear them chattering when I put my ear to the sea.
Scuttling on his knees now, he crossed to the other side of the boat and dropped the fish into a bucket of water. He knew what he had to do next.
To my teenage self, dizzy with wonder at the lyrics of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Keith Reid looked brainy and hip, which I didn’t know could be a thing, but there he was in band photographs, usually front and center, as if he was Mr. Procol Harum himself.
But tell me, did I not suffer a vision, that is to say, see something dreadful at my door?
The whole business makes me dippy, and honestly, I don’t care about any of it unless there’s some magic in the work itself, a spark in the melody or the lyric that will distinguish the work the way all great art is distinguished, by its timelessness and universal appeal. A song, for the sake of this argument, like the small wonder that is 1968’s, “Till Death Us Do Part.”
I dream that I forget in which direction I am headed. The road splits. I panic and take an exit unknown to me. It doesn’t make any difference.
long suffering spring phrases seek a shot of poetry B-12
Number one, Fred Shaw represents: Pittsburgh, reading everything and writing narrative poetry from his own experience in the argot (lingo) of the Rust Belt restaurant worker. As he has said, “the workaday speech of line cooks and dishwashers is the signature sound."
So, in the spirit of establishing a courteous process going forward and to avoid confusion, I...
Pagan's tiny cottage in the woods became what the Scots refer to as a "howff" – a gathering place for hunters, shepherds and drunken wags.
..."Triad" and "The Lee Shore." I learned them both but had no clue what they were really about. They confused a 7th grade boy. What the hell is a “sister lover” or a “water brother “?
On the track "Rubylove" (Cat's nod to his Greek heritage) he features traditional bouzouki and sings a verse in his Cypress-born father's native language. And thank god for Greeks: lamb souvlaki, dark olives, John Cassavettes' movies, Platonic relationships, Nana Mouskouri and Cat Stevens.
But wait, there's more. And it's the thing I really wanted to talk about from the start: Joe Pug's monthly newsletter called The Enthusiast Digest. There's something kind of vaudevillian about Joe's mix of links to must-read articles, unusual podcasts, literary tidbits and recipes.
Just Between You and Me 