South Park season 15 premiere – The HUMAN CENTiPAD
Sir Andre Bemler
I haven't watched South Park on any kind of regular basis for years. But Matt and Trey still got it - the ability to create cogent and acerbic social commentary that at the same time is revolting and juvenile. Yay! So - how ...
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Essay
Letter From Santee
City Of Strangers
If we ever colonize Mars, our settlements will look a lot like Santee Town Center.
The heart of Santee, CA, on San Diego’s eastern edge, is a series of interlocking strip malls, the big box monster kind, abutted with...
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Billy Bang, R.I.P.
Bernard Meisler
Billy Bang, the great jazz violinist, moved on to the next plane, April 11, 2011.
When I first came to New York, in the early 80s, Bang was the man in the LES jazz scene. Bang was born in Alabama as Billy Walker, but as a...
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Essay
Dock Ellis and the LSD No-Hitter
Bernard Meisler
On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, accomplished what is perhaps the single greatest achievement in the history of sports - he pitched a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. Apparently ...
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NEW
The Beer Mystic’s Last Day on the Planet
bart plantenga
previous Beer Mystic Excerpt #43: BLACK BILE PRESS [Ottowa]
Furman Pivo believes he [plus beer] may be the cause of a rash of streetlight outages. This sense of empowerment transforms him into the Beer Mystic. He has ...
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Essay
Words for My Mother’s Funeral
Robert C. Hardin
Her loveliness grew to encompass her gentleness as the span of Heaven is multiplied by the depth of its city of souls.
Leah Hardin was a woman who treasured her family above all else. Long after desire and ambition had be...
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Essay
Introduction to The Bricklyn Project
Tim Hall
Abstract: A funding proposal to photograph all the bricks in Brooklyn.
Introduction: Do you know many bricks were used to build your house, your neighborhood, your city? Does anybody know? If not, why not? These are some ...
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NEW
A Tale of an Affair
Carl Watson
An excerpt from Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming now available at Amazon
Sometimes the speed works for you. Sometimes you’re left behind. The latter is my usual state. It was the early 1980s, West Lakeview. Subtle ...
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The Bucket O’ Crabs
Jill Rapaport
I was scrunched up tight against Mike and Elvin; we made a gaping trinity off the noses of which Esmee purveyed her shining but misguided Wagnerian fantasies. Her father, like the fathers of more socially assured characters,...
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Art
Guns and Ohm
Don Rock
This is a scan of the rear cover of Sensitive Skin #2, from the summer of 1994, by Don Rock. We'll be publishing PDF versions of the original magazine in the near future.
Click the image to see the full-sized version - yo...
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The Collector
Ron Kolm
I’m a collector. I hunt down runs of literary magazines and signed first editions of tricky prose, and place them in university library archives. I collect comic books and the Jokers from decks of playing cards. I also ...
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Classics
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
JG Ballard
(At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of the Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was distributed by some puckish pro-situationists...
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NEW
MAYDAY, MAYDAY
Rebecca Weiner Tompkins
The white rain of petals that fell for a week is done.
What catches now in my hair
are the dried blossoms of the Callery Pear,
startling and crackly, as they float and scatter,
rattling through the trees to the street l...
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Art
Witness, 1992
Tom McGlynn
Witness, an insert from the original print version of Sensitive Skin, from 1992, by Tom McGlynn. Witness, Tom McGlynn
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Story
Bully ’72
Michael Gonzales
It was the fall of 1972 when I transferred to St. Catherine of Genoa in Washington Heights. On the first day of class a bugged wild boy named Tom Lowe, a short cat skin the color of a Hershey bar and a perfect Afro, served a...
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