Essays Archives - Page 6 of 9 - Sensitive Skin Magazine

Beer Mystic Burp #13: Without the Voodoo of Hope

bart plantenga

Hitching through mid-1970s Canada usually meant Canadian Border Services stopping you, inquiring how much money you had on your person. If it was under $25 they’d refuse you entry, which meant hitching the long way round ...

Unsupervised: My Life as a Bad Girl

Erika Schikel

I recently watched a “reality” show called “The Bad Girls Club” and was saddened to see what has lately become of the Bad Girl brand. The show devotes itself to a lot of scantily clad, cranky harlots who do nothing b...

Beer Mystic Burp #12: Stroh’s Cans to the Head

bart plantenga

I suddenly have vivid memories of survival in Flint, Michigan, Motor City Jr., birthplace of GM. I was a stranger here because I rode a bike with books of poetry in my back pocket and some locals could smell this alienness ...

Where the Exiles Go — The Canadian Literary Outlaw in a Conformist Culture

Mark McCawley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkoByHco_Ig&feature=related For as long as I've been writing and publishing in Canada, the concept of a Canadian Literary Outlaw has always been something of a contradiction. Not that ...

What I Did Today, Carl Watson's Issue

Ron Kolm

After contributing to an earlier issue of What I Did Today, Carl Watson collected three two-thousand word essays to go along with his already published one, to complete his own follow-up issue. Here’s Michael Randall’s ...

Sadie and Della

Michael Aanavi

"What do these children do without storybooks?" Naftali asked. And Reb Zebulun replied: "They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them." I couldn't live without them." Naftali said. —Isaac Bas...

Beer Burp #11: Obsolete Drunken Nirvana

bart plantenga

Rich Dana, is not just the editor of the retro-future activist aesthetics journal Obsolete but also a guy doing battle – and making his own peace – with the various seemingly overwhelming forces of displacement, corpo...

Five years in Fleischmanns

Carl Watson

As some of you may or may not know, I have been trying to restore an old barn in the Catskills for several years. I had thought of writing funny little stories about my experiences but never produced anything. This year th...

Beer Mystic Burp #10: The Amble, The Ale

bart plantenga

The Amble, The Ale: Walking Nowhere Into the Pale “Freedom knows no propaganda more effective than people calmly enjoying themselves.” • Raoul Vaneigm, The Revolution of Everyday Life I was pointed to a youtu...

A Rabelaisian Alphabet

Ron Kolm

Doing book reviews is not really my thing. Years ago I wrote some for Jeff Wright’s Cover magazine, and though it was a chance to tickle the keyboard, and probably gain a few brownie points with the folks I reviewed, it wa...

Looking Back On KISS

City of Strangers

I hadn’t thought about Kiss for years, until I saw the 1979 Tomorrow Show Interview with Tom Snyder. Like most of the kids of my generation, I came to Kiss young, at eleven or twelve, in my case through the Destroyer al...

Memories of Jones — Subject Matter

Mark McCawley

The very first time I encountered the writings of Daniel Jones was in the Fall of 1989. I was accepting submissions for a small chapbook anthology of social/political poetry. Jones submission was the highlight of the lot (r...

Rich

Michael Aanavi

I’m an old time smugglin’ man, I know just what to do. I sell guns to the Arabs, I sell dynamite to the Jews. —Tim Hardin I first met Rich soon after he and my mother started seeing each other. My mother had come f...

Fake Shemp vs. Real Shemp

Sir Andre Bemler

The Real Shemp Born Samuel Horwitz, he was nicknamed Shemp because that's what Sam sounded like with his mother's thick Latvian accent. He was one of the original 3 Stooges on vaudeville, along with his younger brothe...

A Life of Uncontrollable Urges (or Tourette’s and the Writing Life)

Jose Padua

On a recent Sunday afternoon, as I pushed a cart in the aisle between the checkout counters and the racks of men’s shirts at Walmart, the song that went though my head was Brian Eno’s “Here Come the Warm Jets.” Eve...