Essays Archives - Page 3 of 9 - Sensitive Skin Magazine

Sensitive Skin 13

The Editors

Presenting Sensitive Skin 13, the Crime Special, featuring a multitude of criminally insane artists and writers. Sensitive Skin 13 features original fiction from Peter Blauner (Slow Motion Riot, The Intruder), Thaddeus ...

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...

Unfinished – A New Translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Poem Fragment

Jenny Wade

Unfinished, a poem fragment by Vladimir Mayakovsky, discovered in M’s papers after his suicide in 1930. Любит? не любит? Я руки ломаю и пальцы разбрасываю разломавши т�...

You – New Translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Poem

Jenny Wade

Ты Пришла— деловито, за рыком, за ростом, взглянув, разглядела просто мальчика. Взяла, отобрала сердце и просто пошла ...

Essay

William S. Burroughs, Nancy Comics and the Cut-Up Method

Bernard Meisler

Nancy, the iconic series of graphic tone poems by the legendary Ernie Bushmiller, achieved landmark status not for its dada-esque art, its stark depiction of a near-barren (yet strangely psychedelic) landscape populated by p...

William S. Burroughs Fan Letter to Truman Capote, 1970

William S. Burroughs

Truman Capote once famously said of the work of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." A decade or so later, William S. Burroughs returned the favor with this epistolary riposte. July 23, 1970 My Dear Mr. T...

Sensitive Skin Most Best of 2014 More Favorites or Whenever

The Editors

I thought it would be fun to ask some Sensitive Skin editors and contributors what they thought was the best of 2014 - not necessarily the "best of" the year—what they liked best during the year, whenever it came out. So I...

Vladislav Khodasevich: Midlife Meltdown in Paris

Jenny Wade

During the unusually hot Parisian summer of 1924, 38-year-old Vladislav Khodasevich—regarded by Nabokov as the finest Russian poet since Blok—was suffering from an identity crisis. One of 3 million exiled from Soviet Rus...

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...

Memory – New Translation of Pushkin’s Poem

Jenny Wade

Воспоминание Когда для смертного умолкнет шумный день И на немые стогны града Полупрозрачная наляжет н�...

America as Afterimage in True Detective

Marian St. Laurent

The moral righteousness of the Western genre with its clear definitions of good vs. evil looks quaint from where we find ourselves in 2014. If heroes are symbols of evolving cultural values, the fact that our pantheon ...

Suicide Tour

Marty Thau

Suicide, the seminally important and confrontational duo consisting of vocalist Alan Vega and electronic musician Martin Rev, formed in 1970 and have been active intermittently since that time. Marty Thau, founder of Red Sta...

Excerpt From Lollapalooza Tour Diaries

Maggie Estep

Wed. August 24th, 1994, Phoenix, AZ. It's 120 degrees here and the sky is huge. In spite of the heat they seem to be big on poetry in Phoenix. I read 4 poems then almost passed out from the heat. My t shirt was soaked ...

William S. Burroughs: Interview

Allen Ginsberg

Editor’s Note: Circa 1995, one of the editors of the original Sensitive Skin, Mr. E. Oso, handed me the following manuscript, an interview with William S. Burroughs, in turn given to him by an assistant to Allen Ginsberg, ...

Mayakovsky – New Translations

Jenny Wade

Маяковский в 1913 году Я тебя в твоей не знала славе, Помню только бурный твой рассвет, Но, быть может, я сегодня впра...