Story
Tenth Between Fear & Trembling
Max Blagg
We lived one floor up from a woodworking shop from which the tools had long since been stolen. It was on East Tenth Street, way over almost to the river, a view of the smokestacks of Con Edison’s 14th Street plant painted ...
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Essay
Maria Yudina
Jenny Wade
The Russian concert pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina, little known in the West, died this day, November 19, in 1970. She had a fervent cult following in the Soviet Union, partly because of her resistance to the establishme...
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Poem
Evil Polish Boners & Other Flarf Poems
Sharon Mesmer
Evil Polish Boners
I don’t know what it is about spandex suits for wrestling and rowing,
but they always seem to create the most evil Polish boners.
The Polish boner is a boner that the Polish boner team created
...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #20: Eddie Woods Has Been Around the Block – With & Without Tennessee
bart plantenga
“If Tennessee Williams doesn’t know what to do with his life, why should I worry?”
~ Eddie Woods, Tennessee Williams in Bangkok
Eddie Woods and I go back to October 1978. It was in Amsterdam at the Ins & Out...
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Essay
Saving Johannes
Eddie Woods
Johannes van Dam (1946-2013). Journalist, walking encyclopedia, and culinary writer extraordinaire. And one of my dearest Amsterdam friends since we first met in 1980, which was still early Ins & Outs Press days. Johannes, w...
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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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