Essays Archives - Sensitive Skin Magazine

The National Guard Have Been Deployed

Patrick O'Neil

Sirens fill the warm night air. A helicopter hovers. Then disappears behind a plume of black smoke—its spotlight strafing the crowded streets of downtown Los Angeles. “Protestors are being removed from Whole Foods.” Th...

Russians in Milan

Genna Rivieccio

The Russians have taken over Milan. They of the hearty stock and with their unflappable physical and emotional essence. It didn’t take them long to infiltrate in clusters and then droves. Now that no one else is left to vi...

John Giorno, RIP

B. Kold

The great poet/performer John Giorno has left this earthly plane. Here's a piece we published by him way back in 1994, an excerpt from his book, You've Got To Burn To Shine. John Giorno The Movie of Andy Warhol's Sleep ...

Mike Golden: The Unbearable Beatnik of Lite – & Dark

bart plantenga

I come from a long line of people who drank rat poison. They got headaches every time because they thought the skull & crossbones over the instructions was just a cool logo. Mike Golden [RIP], bless and rest his littl...

First Thought, Best Thought

Richard Modiano

The expression “first thought, best thought” is usually attributed to Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg indeed popularized the phrase but it was actually coined by his Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Further, there is ...

Now light, now shadow

Naum Korzhavin

Naum Korzhavin was born in the Ukraine in 1925 and as a child witnessed the horrors of collectivization: “I remember the Kiev of 1933. People died right in the streets. . . We survived not only hunger. We got used to think...

Blood and Soil, Trump and Incest

James Reich

Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933/1943) poses a question familiar to many Americans bewildered by the presidency of Donald Trump and the igneous qualities of his base. That the question was answered so l...

Matty Jankowski, RIP

Ron Kolm

There was a posting on Facebook on Saturday, January 12th, by Joe Maynard, an old friend, saying that a buddy of ours, Matty Jankowski, had just passed away in Florida. It was a very moving tribute, and it also contained a l...

Sensitive Skin Best of 2018

The Editors

Welcome to the fourth (fifth?) annual Sensitive Skin Stuff We Liked From Last Year! Remember, it's not limited to items that were released in 2018, just thangs we dug the most in 2018. Of course, there will be disagreemen...

Review

After the Ash-White Wind

Robert C. Hardin

9/11/01: 8:54 a.m. My shift has ended and I’m sitting at my computer, finessing a letter to Swedish musician, Tomas Pettersson. Looking out of an eighteenth-story window off Maiden Lane, I notice what might have passed ...

Gerard Petrus Fieret: Lurid and Exalted Photographs

Greg Masters

The women are posing, yes. But they are not engaged in a casual flirtation with a man who has persuaded them to return to his studio with him. I am supposing that the ordinariness of their day in a small town in Holland has ...

Photographs

RMX

Jürgen Schneider

Amy Winehouse staggers in shortly before midnight. It doesn’t go without notice how unwell she is. Amy will be DJ’ing. There is a yellow shimmer to her skin and her skinny body looks more fragile than ever, her hands ...

John Ashbery – an Oblique Remembrance

Max Blagg

I was introduced to John Ashbery's poetry in the summer of 1971, by a beautiful young American poet living in London. We met at a church jumble sale in Belsize Square. Her flat was across the street. I woke up on her couch l...

Sixty

Patrick O'Neil

There is nothing easy about turning sixty. The days whip by in a whirlwind, kids look younger, and you can’t understand what they’re even talking about. Cops, bosses, and doctors could be your daughters and sons. Films a...

Tom Wolfe – Requiem for a Writer

Vincent Zangrillo

Tom Wolfe liked to match. When I saw him on the cross trainer at the gym in Southampton, pumping away, vigorously chewing a chiclet, his head bent over his Ichabod Crane frame, tall but exceedingly lank, his blonde bob part...