Essays Archives - Page 9 of 12 - Sensitive Skin Magazine

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...