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Reviews

Sensitive Skin reviews movies, books, television, gallery openings, live performances and records.

Review

TRIPPING WITH A VIPER – by Anne Marie Maxwell – review

Marc Olmsted

Tripping with a Viper By Anne Marie Maxwell Mystic Boxing Commission $29.99 available at: www.sparringartists.com Reviewed by Marc Olmsted Much has evolved around Neal’s long lost Joan Anderson letter as the key to Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody. Rediscovered, the big surprise is that it has nothing to do with Kerouac’s streamlined stream-of-consciousness experimental prose. Instead, it moved Jack into writing first person and about actual events with the mad energy of the multiple pages Neal had produced with blazing enthusiasm. Tripping with a Viper fills in some first-person Beat history that explains some more of the legend that is Neal Cassady. The viper of the title is actually also a “pot-head” as referenced in the song “When You’re a Viper,” written by Stuff Smith and first recorded by Rosetta Howard. Still, the ambiguity of this title can’t be merely shaken off. Anne Mar...
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Review

THE BOOKSTORE BOOK, KARL MARX PRIVATE EYE & NAMING A HURRICANE – 3 Books Reviewed

Lehman Weichselbaum

The Bookstore Book Ron Kolm Pink Trees Press, 2023 Karl Marx Private Eye Jim Feast PM Press, 2023 Naming a Hurricane Madeline Artenberg Pink Trees Press, 2023 THE BOOKSTORE BOOK In The Bookstore Book: A Memoir, prolific poet and prosaist Ron Kolm submits his own version of looking back. For Kolm, speaking through prose essays and "poems" (really prose essays in chopped-up lines), the life of a bookseller was both a career choice and a special window to the world. As always, if you're a writer, you don't have to look for experience, experience will find you. From early adulthood, Kolm would hit town, and, like the rest of us needing a job, went shopping for one. And like many people of letters, he knew that a job in a bookstore would make the best personal fit. More often than not, Kolm's quest was rewarded. He found his jobs with often ridiculous ease, earning him a not overly strenuous workload, a sustenance paychec...
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Review

On Barbara O’Brien’s OPERATORS AND THINGS

Neil Martinson

In the early ’60s, Ace Books, a publisher known primarily for science fiction, released a small paperbound edition of a 1958 book called Operators and Things by a woman writing under the name Barbara O’Brien. Although ostensibly a work of non-fiction, it reads a bit like a missing Philip K. Dick novel; its subtitle “The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic,” while no doubt enticing to some readers, does no justice to this mystifying, true-life initiatory tale. The author starts out by describing her experiences in the competitive, male-dominated business world of 1950s New York, detailing the various “hook operating” methods by which her aggressive coworkers would ascend the corporate ladder: vicious techniques redolent of Cold War paranoia that ranged from simple slander to complex, backstabbing daisychains of Machiavellian proportions. The institutional sociopathy she details hinges on adroit, covert manipulation and contr...
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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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Review

THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX by Richard Modiano – REVIEW

Marc Olmsted

THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX By Richard Modiano Punk Hostage Press $20.00 (Available on Amazon) How can I review a book that reviews itself so elegantly in Richard Modiano’s own preface and Pam Ward’s introduction? Then there are remarks by Viggo Mortenson and Ronne Blakely. The list goes on. THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX is, unsurprisingly, a very good, even great book. It is also Richard’s first, at age 71. Not even a prior chapbook of his own, ladies and gentlemen. What took him so long? The answer may be found first in his recent 10 years as Executive Director of Beyond Baroque, the Venice Beach, California literary center equivalent of NYC’s Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. Like any true Platonic philosopher-king, he did not ask for it, let alone want it. Like the Roman Empire’s Marcus Aurelius, he ran BB with wisdom, dignity and humbleness. Alec Guinness played Marcus Aurelius in Anthony Ma...
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Review

The Menace of the Minotaur – a review of David Harrison Horton’s MAZE POEMS

John Greiner

MAZE POEMS David Harrison Horton Arteidolia Press Daedalus, with his genius, was barely able to escape from the labyrinth of his own creation which was built to contain the Minotaur. Theseus, with the aid of Ariadne and her ball of twine was able to defeat the Minotaur and free the Athenians from the Cretian sacrifice of their young men and women in the labyrinth. David Harrison Horton, in his most recent book MAZE POEMS, has made use of Daedalus’s labyrinth, Theseus’s cleverness and Ariadne's practical skill to take on the Minotaur of language. Language has taken on monstrous proportions in our modern era being used to propagate misinformation in the political realm. In contemporary culture language has too often taken on the lumbering weight of a didacticism that longs for fulfillment in the advent of a social realist hierarchy in a Year Zero horror utopia. Mr. Horton in MAZE POEMS has achieved the admirable end ...
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Review

HIGH WHITE NOTES—The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism—Review

Marc Olmsted

HIGH WHITE NOTES The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism By David S. Wills Beatdom Books $17.99 High White Notes takes a phrase from F. Scott Fitzgerald that was of prime importance to Hunter S. Thompson (or any serious writer) - being in the zone while creating. It is of course important to all artists to be in that zone, and thus David Wills uses Thompson’s writing exclusively (rather than a more conventional biography) to get to the man and his self-created myth, one far more invented than I previously realized. Most of us enthusiastic about Thompson agree that Hell’s Angels, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 are his “high white notes” - and anyone attempting to follow and understand him can see that there is a deterioration in his work from that point - relatively slow enough to entice us back momentarily (I used to regularly pick up the San Francisco Examiner ju...
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Review

Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite – Review

Greg Masters

JACKET WEATHER Mike DeCapite Soft Skull Press, New York City, 2021, 258 pages, $16.95 Senses attuned walking through the city: the crispness of the sounds, the grittiness of the incongruous assembly of buildings and storefronts, the light effects, the pedestrians mired in their moment, even the smells; plugged into the cacophony for the solo passage through the grid, each element contributing to a choral totality that in Mike DeCapite's hand streams forth like clear whitewater, without decoration, without a superfluous syllable. In fact, a strong, residual effect of this novel comes from what is not present. Not to give away too much, but the narrative is on its own track, so far away from mainstream formula. The delight of not being absorbed into what most art douses us with every day results in a therapeutic wash. How can a book be so full of love without irony or conflict? He does it. While there is story-telling going...
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Review

TAXI NIGHT — Poetry by Cliff Fyman — Review

Marc Olmsted

TAXI NIGHT Poetry by Cliff Fyman Long News Books $15.00 I connected with Cliff Fyman some years after his association with Naropa University (then Institute) and its 1977 Summer Writing Program - a heyday-hosting of teachers like William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I met him through then-fellow student writers Peter Marti and Vincent Zangrillo. Although late in the book, there is this poetic statement from Fyman, and it sums up his view: I see every object alive and luminous and at the same time I see the decay and death inherent in it’s very shining. Cliff Fyman is essentially influenced by William Carlos Williams and his school of Objectvism, something Allen Ginsberg returned full circle to in his teaching at Naropa. Cliff learned to sit in the Buddhist style of “calm abiding,” shamatha. Add to that - he is also a vegetarian as we...
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Review

The Brothers Silver: A Poet’s Novel – Review

Sparrow

The Brothers Silver: A Poet’s Novel by Marc Jampole Poets write novels invertedly; the language comes first, then the plot ‒ if there even is a plot. In his Acknowledgments, Marc Jampole mentions a number of poems that have been transformed into prose in The Brothers Silver. My favorite poet-novels are by Beat luminary-turned-Zen Buddhist monk Philip Whalen: Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head and You Didn’t Even Try. Both are gentle, sad, inconclusive portraits of San Francisco in the mid-1960s. The writing is deceptively simple, but there is a poet’s languor; a sense of the narrator watching patiently, from a great distance. Jampole writes tempestuously, with rising and flipping wordplay: Desire to play Oberon in the school play claws at me. This hunger doesn’t rest, to say out loud in front of everyone, “At a fair vestal thronèd by the west….” To a mirror twin, I exclaim my lines for hours. Audition day I ...
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