Story
Anus Horribilis
Jim Cory
One morning, in Week Five of a six-week treatment regimen, I stepped before a mirror to discover my pubic hair had absconded.
Gone. All of it. Along with 35 pounds of body weight.
A few months before, I’d ...
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Music
Praise & Lament – a new album by Steve Horowitz and Dan Plonsey
Steve Horowitz
Praise & Lament
Dan Plonsey: Tenor sax, Clarinet & Bass Clarinet
Steve Horowitz: Bass
Track Listing:
Lament for Planet Earth, Pt. 1
In Praise of the Bees
In Praise of the Common Ostrich
In Praise of the...
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Review
Very Serious Naches – review of A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Story
Ann Levin
The day started out promising enough—the Q got me from my apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in 15 minutes flat. But nothing, absolutely nothing—not the passage of time, billions...
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Drawings
Psych Ward Coloring Book
Anonymous
News flash: America has a mental health problem! So, how do you think the people who work in psychiatric hospitals feel? Here's an anonymous submission from a psych ward clinician; the coloring books and crayons are supplied...
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Book
The Absence of Angels – an excerpt
Christian X. Hunter
THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS, a novel/memoir by Christian X. Hunter, about his growing up in NYC, from the time of the Fillmore East to the AIDS era, was published by Sensitive Skin Books in April, 2023. You can find it on Amazon, or order it from your local trusted bookseller. Here's a brief excerpt:
I've always loved Manhattan in the hot weather. As a small kid I was sent away to stupid summer camps in the country. I hated them. While being forced to learn the breast stroke in ice-cold water in some mountain lake, I'd be wishing I was at the heavily chlorinated Twenty-third Street pool near the East River, surrounded by thousands of New Yorkers playing and shouting in dozens of languages. While sitting around the campfire with my eyes tearing from smoke and burning my mouth trying to suck some shitty marshmallow off a pointed stick, I'd be thinking about how I'd rather be on Manhattan Avenue hanging out on the hood of a car, downing a sl...
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Review
Between Good Men & No Man at All – poetry by Pam Ward – Review
Marc Olmsted
Between Good Men & No Man at All
By Pam Ward
World Stage Press
$20.00
Poet Richard Modiano first brought Pam Ward to my attention by telling me she was writing the introduction to his poetic collection, The Forbidden Lunchbox. I didn’t know her work, so he read her to me over the phone. I was instantly hooked by her images, candor and the gallows humor known only to those the System does not favor.
Still, as an old white man and apparently retro Post-Beat poet, I would not have had the temerity to review her new work Between Good Men & No Man at All, but I was asked, so here we are.
I already knew we weren’t going to get homogenized Hamilton rap or highbrow slam’s rhyming editorial language (i.e. non-imagistic). Instead I was surprised to be reminded of stumbling into an L.A. skid row grind house for the last half of Sweet Sweetback’s Bad Ass Song. Plus, like all grind house double- and triple-bills, t...
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Story
Santa Fe Three-Way
Stuart Watson
Ben leaned in, urged the others to scoot closer. When they had shrunk their triangle, he reached into the bag at his feet and removed a wooden box.
“Ooh, the evidence would suggest that you have been shopp...
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Sensitive Skin Books
The Absence of Angels
Christian X. Hunter
Sensitive Skin Books is proud to present THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS, Christian X. Hunter's three-decade tramp through the evolution of ‘60s East Village counter culture in a kaleidoscope of freaks, to the '70s and playing with bar bands and living in Vermont communes, to the '80s with Warhol Superstars, with encounters all along the way with Times Square grifters, junkie poets, rock stars, revolutionaries, in the back rooms of the Fillmore East, Max's Kansas City and The Mudd Club.
THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS is a synesthetic expedition through late 20th Century Manhattan. It’s a love story between a city and its denizens. Every page is permeated with poetic frenzy, grace and verve. Hunter captures the magical decay of the 70s and 80s like few other writers have. I LOVE THIS BOOK!
—Gillian McCain, co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Christian X. Hunter lets us ride shotgun to his life in the turbulent 1...
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Story
I’m 74 Years Old and Will Never Own a Driver’s License
David Halliday
On our first date it was quite windy
She told me she sneezed
1. The car was packed. Egg salad sandwiches had been prepared for the journey. There were lots of pickle jars. It was an expedition like the search f...
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Story
BECKETT REINVENTED: THE AGE OF A.I.
Jerry Patrick
(News item: Several of the leading tech companies have announced breakthroughs in the development of Chatbots, which hold promise of eliminating the profession of creative writing. And of course they would also eliminate t...
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Story
The Shadow Lifts Off Before You
bart plantenga
We were speeding at a rate some might consider reckless. But I’m a cabbie, so I know what I’m doing. The man was late and it’s just common courtesy to get him to his destination on time.
To quote fellow cabbie Aust...
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Story
Dog Days
Emily McNally
Though we’ve been treating my daughter’s anxiety for a while, I get fresh worry when I see the violet smudges under her eyes. There’s a weariness in the slump of her shoulders and the way she’s ignoring the cat weavi...
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Story
Glowing
Jared Dillian
Logan smiled awkwardly.
There were only so many economics books she could read during her summer break. She went to the library a few times, but it was filled with mostly children’s books—the economics books were amon...
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Poem
Starless Sky
Judith Lee Herbert
We played on our block––I couldn’t cross the street when I was four––
yellow caterpillars raining from trees in front of our red brick
building. My father told me don’t tell them the names of ou...
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Review
Matthew Wong: Transmissions From a More Perfect Cosmos – Review
Greg Masters
Precision is no longer necessary – nor aspired to – in the works of Matthew Wong. In his first museum retrospective in the U.S., fabrications of a parallel universe mirror our reality but offer an alternative representat...
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