"Blaster" Al Ackerman (1939-2013)

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"Blaster" Al Ackerman (1939-2013)

"Blaster" Al Ackerman died on March 17th 2013. Some will know him for sure, and this group is to share some of our memories.

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Latest Activity: Aug 16, 2023

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Comment by Ruud Janssen on March 19, 2013 at 6:43pm

Comment by Ruud Janssen on March 19, 2013 at 6:43pm

Comment by Ruud Janssen on March 19, 2013 at 6:43pm

Comment by Ruud Janssen on March 19, 2013 at 6:40pm

Blaster Al Ackerman

Doctor Al Ackerman and "Blaster" are the most      commonly used pseudonyms of well-known American mail        artist and still little-known writer who has been active      since the early 1970s. A Vietnam veteran, Ackerman worked in      hospitals in Texas in the 70's, where his extrordinarily      pessimistic but also highly idiosyncratic worldview further      crystallized. He moved from Texas to Baltimore where he became      highly collaborative and a fixture of the burgeoning experimental      cultural scene from 1992-2010, after being financially encourage      by Rupert Wondolowski and John Berndt to make the move. In 2010 he      moved back to Texas due to ill health, and currently lives in      Austin with his daughter.

Heavily influenced by post-war pulp writers like L. Ron Hubbard,       Theodore Sturgeon, Raymond Chandler and Fredric Brown (with whom Ackerman corresponded as a      young person) as well as by modernists like Johnson" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Johnson"">Ray Jo..., Ponge" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Ponge"">Franci... and the Oulipo,      Ackerman's writing has dealt playfully, if obsessively, with      themes of madness, derangement, and weird phenomena.

Comment by Ruud Janssen on March 19, 2013 at 6:37pm

R.I.P. “Blaster” Al Ackerman

March 18, 2013
                By

By Eric Allen Hatch

If you moved to Bal­ti­more in 1996, as I did, you might find your­self won­der­ing if you’d made the right decision—until, that is, you met “Blaster” Al Ack­er­man. Get­ting to know Blaster wasn’t only adding a warm, wise, and deeply hilar­i­ous per­son to your cir­cle of friends. It was also unlock­ing the doors behind which Baltimore’s most inter­est­ing music, per­for­mance, and visual art then lurked, reveal­ing the strange, inter­wo­ven strands of rich sub­cul­tural activ­ity that gave this city its unique flavor.

It was a rare day dur­ing my first decade in town that I didn’t see Blaster, whether he was hap­pily doo­dling at the counter while hold­ing down the fort at Nor­mals Books and Records, or care­fully select­ing VHS tapes at the Charles Vil­lage Video Amer­i­cain (more often than not leav­ing with the max­i­mum six rentals each morn­ing).  I’m sure I wasn’t alone in see­ing Blaster as a grand­fa­therly fig­ure, but Blaster was the grand­fa­ther who had cor­re­sponded with pulp fic­tion writ­ers and hung out with Gen­e­sis P-ORRIDGE; the grand­fa­ther who could turn a Bal­ti­more new­bie on to Lung­fish, the 14 Karat Cabaret, and the exper­i­men­tal music scene that would soon coa­lesce into the Red Room Col­lec­tive and High Zero festival.

Blaster seemed to live his life ded­i­cated to mak­ing ours a stranger world—or, per­haps more accu­rately, nudg­ing us all into acknowl­edg­ing the over­whelm­ing strange­ness already in this world that bor­ing peo­ple would rather sweep under the car­pet. From his beau­ti­fully ren­dered mail art and unfor­get­table short-story read­ings to his imp­ish and leg­endary pranks, Blaster radi­ated a feel­ing that he was liv­ing an inner life more fan­tas­ti­cal, spon­ta­neous, and just plain inter­est­ing than the rest of us—one that could be ours to expe­ri­ence, too, if we’d just screw on our heads a bit differently.

 Re-reading this piece I wrote about Blaster a decade ago brought back a lot of mem­o­ries, and reminded me just how many forms his cre­ative ener­gies took. Blaster was a man who fed on warped cul­ture and the glee­ful chaos of the human imag­i­na­tion, one who filled his life with friends, art, and good humor. If he knew you had cre­ative aspi­ra­tions, he never for­got to ask you how your work was com­ing along, and always left you with encour­ag­ing words. I didn’t know him as well as some, but I knew him well enough to say it would be hard to over­state how many peo­ple he inspired and how much he did to shake and stir this city’s cul­tural life. We’re all bet­ter off for him hav­ing been here; he will be dearly missed.

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