Essay
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...
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Art
Matt and Mark Enger’s “Streets of Glory” at Christopher Henry Gallery.
Marguerite Van Cook
I first met the identical Enger twins, Mark and Matt at the well-known artist’s bar Max Fish, on the Lower East Side of New York. They were wearing civil war dress that shocked the Northern sensibility, but their rebelliou...
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Essay
Matthew Firth — My Kinda Suburban Pornographer
Mark McCawley
"A guided tour through an urban menagerie peopled by society's outcasts, truants, and misfits -- adrift in a sea of humanity, putting in time, but cursed from the start. Their only solace found in booze, casual sex, myster...
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Essay
BEER MYSTIC Burp #9: Beernuts are People Too
bart plantenga
You can make a lot of friends on social networks if you’re into beer. You can do that quite adequately in bars as well. You buy a few elbow jockeys a round of canned goat urine and you might have friends for life, the kind...
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Essay
BEER MYSTIC Burp #8: Eddie Don’t Do Beer
bart plantenga
No, Eddie Woods don’t do beer, he does white wine, anything above 3 euros is just fine. Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay is more than OK by him. Not before 5 and thereafter, he switches to red – Merlot [EW correction] or Beau...
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Essay
Gil Scott Heron RIP
City of Strangers
I discovered Gil Scott Heron the summer of 1991, after I returned to Montreal following a riotous five months in NYC. It was the first time I'd lived in the city, and I felt like I'd caught the tail end of an era. In one s...
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Essay
BEER MYSTIC Burp #7: Beer = Liquid Cartoonist
bart plantenga
BEER MYSTIC Burp #7
X-Large I see is the new large in clothing sizes. Size matters, so now a medium cup is like a trough of soda at McSubWenNuggests. They even try to super-size you when you rent a car, from an obese sedan ...
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Essay
BEER MYSTIC Burp #6: Plagiarism and Unpaid-for Beer in a Paris Swamp
bart plantenga
BEER MYSTIC Burp #6
We made a toast. “To he who casts the first kidney stone.” Clink of beer glasses, tink-tink, small amber waves sloshing over the sides, beer-head mustaches as our only disguise in the Pik-Clops in th...
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Essay
BEER MYSTIC Burp #5: A Mental Jersey Leads to Spirited Beer Consumption
bart plantenga
BEER MYSTIC Burp #5
Before Jersey Shore was a TV show, it was already a socio-anthropological phenomenon of some steroidal bonehead beach bum magnitude. Summers were and still are an excuse for so-called [or seemingly] norma...
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Essay
Why Drunken Poets Need to Procreate
Jose Padua
If it were somehow obligatory that I sum up my existence with a single sentence—or perhaps with just a phrase and a simple image—I’d be at a loss. I would, in fact, feel quite helpless, as if I were trapped in some h...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #4: A Weird, Bloody Barroom Ritual Remembered
bart plantenga
Beer Mystic Burp 4: A Weird, Bloody Barroom Ritual Remembered
Imagine this, you walk into your local bar, a place where you know where to hang your truss, and upon entering you instantly sense something is amiss, awry –...
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Essay
Sex, God and Violence
S. A. Emmons
The stars must have been aligned when, entirely by chance, I happened upon The Spitters way back in 1994. I had caught a short blurb on them while flipping through some metal magazine or another in a grocery store. It was ac...
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Essay
Love
Mike DeCapite
I went to St. Louis and stayed with Ted and Kit for the weekend. They’d been there a couple of years, I guess. Ted had bottomed out in Brooklyn and they’d moved home to St. Louis for him to get straightened out. Their...
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Art
Toward Reasoned Promiscuity: Chester Brown’s "Paying For It"
Jane Does
Review
Chester Brown’s new book, “Paying for It” (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011) will be found among the graphic novels at your nearest bookstore, but it merits cross-shelving in literature, sociology, and gender studie...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #3: Pivo is Czech for Beer
bart plantenga
Pivo Is Czech for Beer But Also An Alter-Ego
In 1993, you could live like a bastard prince in Prague – if you had dollars to spend – on a pauper’s wages. Beer was 15 US cents – and we would repeat the names ... Pi...
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