Art
Jessica Anne Schwartz: Instinctive Formalist
Alan Kaufman
Jessica Anne Schwartz, a purely Left Coast Cali artist, decided, last year, to up and plant herself in the very heart of New York's Chelsea art district where she maintains a large studio filled with her paintings, drawings ...
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Essay
Meet the Beats: Herbert Huncke
Hilary Halladay
When opportunity literally knocked not long after his return from sea, Herbert was ready for a new diversion. It was 1944, the war would soon end, and change was inevitable, even for an unemployed drug addict for whom change...
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Art
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 ...
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Essay
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...
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Essay
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...
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Comics
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...
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Classics
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...
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Art
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...
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Essay
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...
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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...
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Essay
Memory – New Translation of Pushkin’s Poem
Jenny Wade
Воспоминание
Когда для смертного умолкнет шумный день
И на немые стогны града
Полупрозрачная наляжет н...
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Essay
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 ...
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Music
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...
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Essay
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 ...
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