Friday, May 24, 2013

Adjurned

Holy crap am I dry. Just cracked throat, skin and eyeballs. Got that mile-high arid climate to adjust to, kids. Or, maybe all the beer and coffee yesterday has something to do with it. 

Here's a quick recap of last night's N@B-Denver (and check out that photo: Norb Vonnegut throwing gang signs, Jon Bassoff singing the national anthem and Mario Acevedo signaling Twist Phelan to steal second - chaos Denver style).

Hosts/emcees Bassoff and Acevedo welcomed the throngs (over a hundred people jammed into this bar) and touched briefly on the Cort McMeel sized hole in the event before kicking off the fiction of questionable taste.

Norb Vonnegut read a passage from his book in progress detailing a sordid matter of financial malfeasance and followed that up with an anecdote about the event that inspired the story.

J.L. Abramo proceeded to introduce the hardboiled segment of the evening with a selection from his next book - a prequel of sorts to Catching Water in a Net.

Next, Kristina Murray belted out an acoustic number from her roots, americana, country-tinged catalog. Go check out her website for a better idea of what you missed.

Next up, Michael Lion made the badass vibe even worse with a crazy violent passage from The Butcher's Granddaughter, and I was pleased to learn that there's a follow up coming down the pike.

Finally, Christa Faust put the oiled in the hardboiled with a flash piece from an upcoming Otto Penzler edited anthology. While you're waiting for that to hit the shelves, check out the first of her (three?) planned Fringe novels The Zodiac Paradox (and lookie who's got his own gun-manufacturing empire in that one.)

They let me say a few more things about Cort afterwards and it dawned on me after that that the very first conversation Scott Phillips and I ever had was about Murdaland magazine and just a few Short years later Cort was in St. Louis for N@B - which he then turned around and sprouted his own franchise of with Bassoff, Acevedo and Benjamin Whitmer, which in turn heavily influenced the patriarch Peter Rozovsky to pull a phoenix with N@B-Philly on the very night we were commemorating him. Cort's influence will be felt for a long time to come.

It was great hanging out afterwards with the whole gang including Nick Arvin, Court Merrigan, Jay Halsey, Twist Phelan and many more whose names are lost in a fizzy oat soda. Early lunch at Shelby's with Arvin and late night breakfast at Pete's Kitchen with Bassoff, Faust and Whitmer fucking rocked BTW. I recommend the pancake sandwich.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mike Lion...Hear him ROAR!!! So go on back to your Boys Ike and you tell 'em I'm comin'! You hear me!! You tell 'em I'm comin' and Hell's comin' with me!!! Mike Lion is the real deal!!

jedidiah ayres said...

Rawwwwrrrr

Peter Rozovsky said...

I didn't know Cort McMeel, but I can see that you guys obviously respected him.

As for Rozovsky, fuck 'im.