Story
Looking Back: Anxiety’s Greatest Hits
Patrick O'Neil
San Francisco, June 24, 1997
I’m in a dark, trash-filled alley between tall brick buildings. Two men stand in shadows. I can’t see their faces. I hand one of them money and he gives me a balloon of dope. I look up, th...
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Poem
The Hurricane
Ron Kolm
My Sister is a pastor
For a hospice
In New Jersey—
She’s part of a team
That drives up and down
The length of the state
Helping the dying die.
She spends her nights
In motels and keeps her files
In her car; her...
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Story
Road Kill
Drew Hubner
In an alley on the fringes of the march, Glory stuffed toilet paper bits in her ears and got out of danger, whispering to the baby in her tummy, running deeper into the alley for safety.
Text me, she'd said to the fath...
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Story
Dear Satan
Tony DuShane
My prayer was answered. I found a Hustler magazine.
I often prayed to Satan for a Playboy to appear under my mattress. When the urge was strong and the need to see a naked woman was important for a decent pubescent sessio...
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Essay
We Are All Alice B. Toklas
James Reich
Toklasization, being the condition of failing to materialize in one’s autobiography, or of being ghostwritten out by a biographer with more vanity than ours, has become the most significant cause of suicide and psychopatho...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #20: Ron Kolm: No Longer Chugging Rank Cologne
bart plantenga
Ron Kolm: No Longer Chugging Rank Cologne
One of the perils of the fast life is that if you’re not synchronized with the prevailing velocity you lose focus, things get blurry, imprecise, or you end up getting dragged a...
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Music
In Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich
Jenny Wade
Today is the anniversary of the death of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (Sept 29, 1906 - April 9, 1975).
Shostakovich struggled under a hostile and perilous political environment for his entire working life. Af...
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Essay
Alexander Blok – The Stranger
Jenny Wade
Alexander Blok, the supreme poet of the Russian Symbolist movement, died this day in the year 1921 in St. Petersburg, at the age of 40.
Blok broke from the tradition of Russian realism with its emphasis on social respo...
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Essay
Zoning, by Spencer Kansa – review by Marc Olmsted
Marc Olmsted
Zoning, by Spencer Kansa, Beatdom Books, 2011 - $12.00 - paper
Spencer Kansa’s debut novella Zoning is terrifying, page-turning fun. If this seems contradictory, consider that he was an acolyte of William Burroughs, so...
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Essay
TAYLOR MEAD IS DEAD. A PISS-POOR OBITUARY IF EVER THERE WAS ONE.
Norman Douglas
In light of the fact that the guys doing my old job at The New York Times dropped the ball on this one, I suppose I must accept that I wouldn't have gotten much more out of any obit they published than this:
Ten years ago...
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Essay
Taylor Mead, RIP
Nick Zedd
I met Taylor Mead in 1989 when we both acted together in a science fiction movie shot in the Hall of Science at the World's Fair Grounds in Queens. I'd seen his acting in the seventies when I moved to NYC and saw Nude Restau...
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Essay
The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved
Hunter S. Thompson
Welcome to Derbytown
I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and sho...
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Essay
Happy Birthday Terry Southern
Sir Andre Bemler
Earlier today I was watching one of the funniest - and scariest - movies ever made, Dr. Strangelove, directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written with Terry Southern. (Though who wrote what is controversial, Southern is suppos...
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Essay
Stewart Home’s “Mandy Charlie & Mary Jane” – an Anti-Novel Review
Barbara Adair
Mandy Charlie & Mary Jane: A Novel by Stewart Home (Penny Ante Editions, Los Angeles, 2013)
Read an excerpt from Mandy Charlie & Mary Jane.
Who reads Stewart Home? Home will say “very few, people are cowed by the male...
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Poem
John S. Hall at the Bowery Poetry Club
John S. Hall
April 30, 2012 (or thereabouts), Sensitive Skin celebrated the release of its 8th issue with a mondo reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. Essentially everybody who'd been in the magazine so far was invited, which was too many ...
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