Essay
Drone Loops and the Signature of Bliss
Robert C. Hardin
The experience of bliss means different things to different people. For this frustratingly former arranger and studio keyboard player, euphoria is conditioned by the search for perfect sounds.
To me, bliss means the slow...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #20: Eddie Woods Has Been Around the Block – With & Without Tennessee
bart plantenga
“If Tennessee Williams doesn’t know what to do with his life, why should I worry?”
~ Eddie Woods, Tennessee Williams in Bangkok
Eddie Woods and I go back to October 1978. It was in Amsterdam at the Ins & Out...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #19: Beer in Times of Distillation
bart plantenga
“glory wreathes, flutes” • Karen Garthe, “Buckle Up, Sweetie”
bart plantenga
I buy beer when other purchasing behavior fails. I drink beer to slow down the ridiculous spin of this earth & defuse those who...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #18: The Long Windy Road to a Closed Bar
bart plantenga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqEeL1QzGsc
BEER MYSTIC: Read Beer Drink Novel: I thought by serving words in the name of beer & side effect mysticism would be repaid in not only the enchantment of words & the jo...
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Story
The Nose
Nikolai Gogol
Part I
On 25 March an unusually strange event occurred in St. Petersburg. For that morning Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch, a dweller on the Voznesensky Prospekt (his family name is lost now—it no longer figures on a signbo...
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Essay
THE THIRLWELL EFFECT
Díre McCain
Genuine virtuosos are a rare breed. They defy categorization simply by existing. Their visionary ingenuity radiates from their work in spades, and effortlessly so. It can come at a price, in terms of their creations being lo...
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Classics
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
I
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called Th...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #17: Beer Party Trumps Tea Party Any Day
bart plantenga
A discussion with activist cartoonist and BEER MYSTIC host, Ken Avidor [here posed as Greek God of Mini-Golf, Nkolfus, in Asbury Park, c. 1984].
I knew Ken [aka Weiner] for many years in NYC, during its – or was it jus...
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Meaning of the Dance
Mark McCawley
Fortunately, not everyone has to experience the daily life of madness and insanity of a spouse with a severe mental illness. It's akin to watching a portrait you adore manifest into something you no longer know or even recog...
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The Stabbing Game
Sean Flaherty
They switched the time of day
but every day for one year,
Monday through Friday
we had seventh grade science
with Mr. Stern,
after school,
Neil Brown and I
would tear over to Friendly’s or
Burger King
in his mom’s Camar...
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Essay
In-depth observations on eye floaters – a challenge to ophthalmology
Floco Tausin
For centuries, scholars try to find an explanation for the mobile, scattered and transparent spheres and strings in our visual field. Early on in ophthalmological tradition, the origin was thought to be in the eye. The pheno...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #16: Books – Increasingly Illegal Intoxicants?
bart plantenga
An interview with Karen Lillis
When I was just beginning high school I was one scared, miffed, gawky, pimply kid, unlike the rest of the kids somehow. But what kid of 13 didn’t feel that way? (photo: Karen in the ...
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Essay
Barefoot in the Heart
Keshav Das
"Drugs," an excerpt from Barefoot in the Heart
“Muktananda, Shirdi Sai Baba and Hari Das Baba would never take LSD.”
A certain pattern had evolved wherein Maharajji frequently called upon myself and a couple of oth...
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Essay
Online Magazines Versus Status Quo
Mark McCawley
The dilemma with writing anything edgy or transgressive in Canada, isn't that it is all too often written from the margins, or by choice or circumstance — it comes down to the harsh reality that edgy, transgressive writing...
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Events
Old Friends Festival
Fluffy Schwartz
The Berkeley Arts Festival 2011 presents
Friday, December 9th, and Saturday, December 10th
OFF highlights the best of the 1990's Bay Area creative music scene with a power packed line-up featuring: the Rova Saxophone Quar...
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