Writing
The World of Wrestling
Roland Barthes
The grandiloquent truth of gestures
on life's great occasions.
--Baudelaire
The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient th...
More...
Classics
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Chapter One
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
His father told him t...
More...
Essay
The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved
Hunter S. Thompson
Welcome to Derbytown
I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and sho...
More...
Comics
The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick
R. Crumb
Shortly before his death, Philip K. Dick has what can only be described as a religious experience, which he described in, among other places, his novel Valis. In Weirdo #17, R. Crumb adapted Dick's story.
Click the image ...
More...
Classics
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see ...
More...
Classics
The Veldt
Ray Bradbury
"George, I wish you'd look at the nursery.""What's wrong with it?""I don't know.""Well, then.""I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to
look at it.""What would a psychologist want with a nurser...
More...
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...
More...
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...
More...
Music
Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson
Bernard Meisler
Here's a Friday night treat for you all - the complete concept film of Serge Gainsbourg's classic "rock opera", Histoire de Melody Nelson.
There's little doubt that Melody Nelson, a short (27 minute) album release...
More...
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...
More...
Classics
Georges Bataille : Literature And Evil
The Editors
This is a fascinating interview with Georges Batailles from 1958, regarding his essay, La Littérature et le Mal (hat tip, Rob Hardin). Some of the high points include the statements that all literature is essentially evil, ...
More...
Classics
Charles Bukowski – The Night I Killed Tommy
Charles Bukowski
Everyone in NY is dying of heat; everyone in SF is complaining that it's too damn cold. I don't know, it just feels like one of those Charles Bukowski days...
This one's called, "The Night I Killed Tommy". The video's old...
More...
Classics
Jack Kerouac explains what "Beat" means – in French
Jack Kerouac
I love this interview with Jack Kerouac, conducted in French, from a Canadian chat show. I was always surprised, whenever anybody asked Kerouac what the "Beat" generation meant, that nobody ever took into account the fact th...
More...