Rare, Unreleased and Out-of-Print

Elliot Sharp

Elliot Sharp, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, playing mainly guitar, saxophone and bass clarinet, is one of the major figures in the New York downtown and experimental music scene. Sharp has led many ensembles over the years, including Orchestra Carbon and more recently the blues-oriented Terraplane. Since the 1970s, he's released over 85 recordings, ranging from contemporary classical to free jazz, no-wave, ambient and sophisticated rock. He has collaborated with John Zorn, Butch Morris, Zeena Parkins, Vernon Reid, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Hubert Sumlin, Jack DeJohnette, Sonny Sharrock, and the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

In This Issue

On the Customs of Whey-Guts

Patricia Eakins

Now the DEROGATIONS by means of which the whites belittle the honor and dignity of blacks are very well known, among them as among us, viz.: dog lips, shuffle-grin, worm-ass, louse-ring. Less well known to them the derogations by means of which we darker fellows contemn their loathsome pretensions, viz., whey-guts, cotton-snatch, stink-pits, porridge-arse, rule-shitter, clod-squawk, pig-fart, gout-bag, flux-face, bone-nose, bubo-cheeks, widower.

Now we do name them widowers, yet though they have a hundred women, one legal in the house, ninety-nine unacknowledged in the yard. Now the women in the yard but use the white man's rut-lust to prize concessions from him. They throw him out of their minds when they have got what they want, and the thought of him dries up in the sun. Widower be the name these white men share with the dog's scats, when the dog has left them in the yard to whiten in the sun.

John Griffin

Ice-T Spit on My Foot

Sean Flaherty

I have been going

to night school

after work

so I can learn

some new things,

to broaden myself

at forty-three,

Marra

Jennifer Jazz

“Why are you going to Morocco?” my sister had asked. It was March of 2004. Americans had only recently become aware there were such things as Muslims and were scared. I had stammered in response, using the usual four-letter words I resorted to when I didn’t know where or how to begin, though, since I’d met Daoud – a despotic Mauritanian who spent most of our time together giving immigration advice in Fulani by cell phone to friends and family – I’d stopped believing that swearing was the highest form of honesty.

“You shouldn’t speak that way!” he scolded one night with such contempt I was ashamed. Months after I’d stopped taking his calls – something told me to quit while I was ahead – I still swore, but hadn’t started drinking all the dark beer and Beaujolais or eating bacon again.

David West

The Best Night of His Life

Max Blagg

Every two weeks the exterminator came by the bar to suppress the vermin that swarmed beneath the sinks, behind the kitchen walls and in the basement. There were no rats, but the place had a fluctuating population of mice and roaches. The exterminator, known only as ‘Bill’, was a strange looking guy of about forty-five, who gave the impression that he had drunk too much bug juice. A Vietnam vet with a stare as cold as starlight, someone who had witnessed things too terrible for a civilian to comprehend. In a curious flat monotone he would regale the bar staff with rat tales, sympathetic stories of their extreme intelligence, their various moods. Rats were his obsession.

Love

Mike DeCapite

I went to St. Louis and stayed with Ted and Kit for the weekend. They’d been there a couple of years, I guess. Ted had bottomed out in Brooklyn and they’d moved home to St. Louis for him to get straightened out. Their son was only about a year old when I went. Kit was painting, getting press, and Ted was clean, busy in the darkroom. He was printing ten years of negatives from New York.

One afternoon Ted brought out the boxes of these black-and-white prints. There were street scenes and bar scenes, people in kitchens and bedrooms, burned-out cars and waterfront shots, parties and performances, public moments and private ones, moments I didn’t remember even while looking at them, even though I’d been there, even though I was in them, because they’d been seen by someone else. I wasn’t in most of them, of course, and Ted wasn’t in any of them. But turning through them was like watching a movie of our past lives played out by others.

Sex, God and Violence

The Spitters

Elliot Sharp, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, playing mainly guitar, saxophone and bass clarinet, is one of the major figures in the New York downtown and experimental music scene. Sharp has led many ensembles over the years, including Orchestra Carbon and more recently the blues-oriented Terraplane. Since the 1970s, he's released over 85 recordings, ranging from contemporary classical to free jazz, no-wave, ambient and sophisticated rock. He has collaborated with John Zorn, Butch Morris, Zeena Parkins, Vernon Reid, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Hubert Sumlin, Jack DeJohnette, Sonny Sharrock, and the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Late Night Phone Call from the Used to Be

Carl Watson

People like to blame things—they like to pretend life is an accident, that it’s not their fault. But accidents can be intentional. We make ourselves magnets by our aggressive apathy. On top of that we are fascinated by the idea of contingency—it suggests a value to individual existence. But there is none really. And so I was working on the Papa Sri Frank Payne path to nirvana—drink like a fish, speak to no one, indulge regret—alcohol, asceticism, hindsight. It was my old apartment, across the street from the graveyard of St. Boniface. The tombstones glowed softly in the moon, mocking my mortality. Stability was good, I told myself.

I was on the far end of a six pack of Drewery’s with kindly Mr. Beam waiting in the wings. I was randomly severing emotional ties to inanimate objects—a favorite pass time of mine. As they say, a rolling stone gathers no moss. The Honeymooners was on TV. Ralph and Alice were going at it. I was half asleep, using my old brown leather jacket for a pillow and a beer-can for an ashtray. Question marks of smoke peeled off the cigarette tip. The scene was classic down-market noir, so at least some goal in my life had been achieved.

Blood in the Face

Anne Bohlen, Kevin Rafferty, and James Ridgeway

White supremacists! Michael Moore! The Nazi Coppertone Girl! All this and more from this chilling documentary.

The Botanical Man

Bonny Finberg

I'm sure there was a moment when I realized it was about to happen. But I can't remember it. It snuck up on me, like snake bite—sending you into a delirium, and just when you realize what's happening you’re dead. It was epiphanous, if that's a word. Anyway, I had an epiphany. It killed me and I'm reborn. I thought I was finished with all that self-examination Woman Speak shit. But there it lives, in the Oprah of my brain. I'm no longer Generic Man. I've developed a swagger, a dusty odor of salt.

I'm looking up epiphany in the dictionary. I'm lost in it. Maybe I should be reading pornography. I’m entitled. That's what men do, men with no immediate prospects. Well anyway, I've got my taste buds.