SMILE, HON at Baltimore Book Fest, tattoos, zombies and more!

BALTIMORE – Eight-Stone Press and CityLit Project put the "Baltimore" in the Baltimore Book Festival with an evening of literary mayhem, music and more beginning at 6:00 p.m., Friday, September 24, 2010, at the CityLit tent, on the circle in Mount Vernon.

Smile, Hon, You're in Baltimore! contributing authors Earl Crown, E. Doyle-Gillespie, Sharon Goldner, Fernando Quijano III, William P. Tandy and Lisa Wiseman will offer live interpretations of their work, highlighting the good, bad and ugly of Baltimore life. And don't miss the aural spectacle of "interstellar misfits" The Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad, whose musical canon includes such classics as "Do You Got a Disease?" and "Show Us Your Boobs (Buy Me a Beer)". While you're there, crack open a complimentary cold one, courtesy of Clipper City Brewing Company, or browse a wide selection of Smile, Hon back issues, t-shirts and more.

For more information, e-mail wpt@eightstonepress.com.

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Going to the Baltimore Tattoo Arts Convention this weekend (9/10-12)? Stop by Atomic Books and pick up a copy of Skin Deep, a special ink-oriented edition of Smile, Hon featuring tattoo-related stories, essays, poetry, color photos, tattooist interviews and more! "[Skin Deep is] a great read." – C.W. Eldridge, Tattoo Archive

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In related news, regular Smile, Hon contributor Davida Gypsy Breier announces the release of locally-produced horror zine Rigor Mortis #3, featuring original art, genre analysis, reviews of movies, books, graphic novels and more! This issue's highlights include a remembrance of author Z.A. Recht, the "Sexiest Monsters of Filmland", the Feast trilogy, Tony Todd, Nazi zombies and gargantuan movie monsters! Pick up your copy locally at Atomic Books; visit www.leekinginc.com/rigormortis/index.htm for more information.


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LIBRARY JOURNAL Reviews SKIN DEEP, Local Zines

Here's a nice write-up of Skin Deep - the special "tattoo" edition of Smile, Hon, You're in Baltimore! - in Library Journal. Also, kudos to local zines Xerography Debt and Leeking Ink for garnering positive reviews...

Cancer Man

Ever since doing six months of chemotherapy in 2007, I’d had this idea floating in my head to get some sort of a “crab” tattoo, for multiple reasons: 1) I am a Cancer, astrologically speaking; 2) perhaps more obviously, I had cancer; and 3) well…I thought that it would be somewhat apropos since I live in Baltimore.

The big hang-up: I couldn’t find any crab images that 1) I liked enough to commit to flesh/weren’t ridiculously cheesy, or 2) would have been workable as a tattoo. Eventually, however, I did, on the cover of the first edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, first published in the early ’30s by Paris-based Obelisk Press. The publisher’s teenage son, Maurice Girodias, provided the cover illustration:



Later in life, Girodias took over his father’s business, and with the newly-dubbed Olympia Press, went on to publish some of the great literary “smut” of the 1950s and ’60s (including the likes of Miller, Terry Southern, J.P. Donleavy, William S. Burroughs, etc.).

The tattoo was rendered by Josh Griffin at the Baltimore Tattoo Museum.

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