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 complete PARIS SCRATCH is now available from Sensitive Skin. bart plantenga spent years wandering the haunted streets of NYC & Paris, cluttered with ghosts & memory, rich in phenomenological detail, friends & foes, encounters & coincidence & the enticing scent of decay, which allows the old to ignite the new. This sensory wealth tends to overpower a city’s residents &, to survive, they must learn to ignore it all.
One day, bart wakes up wondering why he’s living in Paris; he must now either put up or shut up; it’s either reinvent his relation to his surroundings or get a divorce from Paris. & rather than do the easy thing – taking snapshots – plantenga began recording what the 5 senses registered; scribbling down a “snapshot” per day for a year with the writing-while-walking strategy producing a unique form of dérive as well as countless notepads of barely legible scribbles. The Unloaded Camera Snapshots series began as an exercise to document everyday life. These eidetic, epigrammatic, not-quite prose poems, not-quite journal entries, served as meta-factual attempts to re-pollinate existence with the fecund, oft-neglected details of the everyday, la vie quotidienne. Think of it this way: Brassai & Doisneau meet Cartiér-Bresson in a Montmartre cafe &, over Pastis, decide to smash their cameras & triumphantly take up pens instead.
Jean Luc Godard once said: “There is just a moment when things cease to be a mere spectacle, a moment when a man is lost and when he shows that he is lost.”
WARNING: The depictions of friends & acquaintances contained herein are more than mere coincidence.
NY SIN PHONEY IN FACE FLAT MINOR, the companion book to PARIS SCRATCH, will be available through Sensitive Skin Books in November, 2016.
“Don’t look for La Ville Lumière in PARIS SCRATCH because one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
—William Levy, author of Natural Jewboy
“A marvelous book – imagine Baudelaire taking a camera and throwing out his pens and precious inks in a rebellious anti-anti-Dadaist manner, then taking snapshots of everything that comes his way … the author’s camera moves very fast, the ‘center cannot hold’ and we live only twice!”
—Nina Zivancevic author of Death of NYC
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.