Sensitive Skin features art, writing and music, without rules or boundaries, by both famous and emerging artists, writers, and musicians from around the globe.
The Unloaded Camera Snapshots were initiated as a response to the condition that occurs when we’ve lived somewhere for a while; live anywhere long enough & we begin to show signs of sensory overload. In order to survive we learn to ignore, deaden our senses to become “inured to the ravages” so that we “scarcely notice anymore” [Flora Lewis]. This jadedness lets us believe we’re outwitting our environment.
In order to reinvent everyday life, plantenga applied a strategy of documenting the “snapshots” of daily life in Paris. He wrote down one incident or observation per day for a year. This continued upon his return to NYC & then, with AM✫STAR✫DAM, recommenced when he moved to Amsterdam.
This second book features 365 zen blinks, pop flashes, heated moments, & satori-sloshed sidewalk haikus that re-pollinate existence with the fecund details of the quotidian.
A.E. Housman once observed: “Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon, I would go out for a walk. As I went along, there would flow into my mind, with sudden & unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza.”
“Evokes a similar magic to Baudelaire’s Paris and Kafka’s Prague.
NY Sin Phoney is not only well worth the price, it’s a steal.”
—Mark McCawley, editor of Urban Grafitti
“Look carefully at these written snapshots to see what lurks below the surface & don’t be surprised if you feel a bit self-conscious, frightened, even nauseous at times.”
—steve dalachinsky, PEN Award author of The Final Nite & Other Poems
Sensitive Skin began as a print venture from New York’s Lower East Side in the 1990s, and published such literary luminaries as Richard Hell, Steve Cannon, Jack Micheline, Penny Arcade, John Farris, Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman, Patrick McGrath, Bob Holman, Maggie Estep, Emily XYZ, Herbert Huncke and Joel Rose, with art by Andres Serrano, Ari Marcopolis, Andrew Castrucci and James Romberger, to name but a few….
Sensitive Skin was reborn in the summer of 2010, and has since presented original work by such esteemed writers, artists and musicians as Samuel R. Delaney, John Lurie, Gary Indiana, Sharon Mesmer, Charles Gatewood, Gretchen Faust, Alex Katz, Peter Blauner, Hal Sirowitz, Arthur Nersesian, Maggie Estep, Fred Frith, Evelyn Bencicova, Thurston Moore, Iggy Pop, Winston Smith, Sue Rynski, Steve Dalachinsky, Marty Thau, Justine Frischmann, Craig Clevenger, Darius James, Stewart Home, Michael A. Gonzales, Drew Hubner, Jonathan Shaw, Melissa Febos, Stephen Lack, Max Blagg, Patricia Eakins, Díre McCain, Rob Roberge, Kurt Wolf, Erika Schickel, John S. Hall, Kevin Rafferty, Elliott Sharp, Mike Hudson, James Greer, Ruby Ray, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.