Mastodon Sensitive Skin Magazine - Page 3 of 65 - art, stories, poetry, essays, reviews and music

The Absence of Angels

Christian X. Hunter

Sensitive Skin Books is proud to present THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS, Christian X. Hunter's three-decade tramp through the evolution of ‘60s East Village counter culture in a kaleidoscope of freaks, to the '70s and playing with bar bands and living in Vermont communes, to the '80s with Warhol Superstars, with encounters all along the way with Times Square grifters, junkie poets, rock stars, revolutionaries, in the back rooms of the Fillmore East, Max's Kansas City and The Mudd Club. THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS is a synesthetic expedition through late 20th Century Manhattan. It’s a love story between a city and its denizens. Every page is permeated with poetic frenzy, grace and verve. Hunter captures the magical decay of the 70s and 80s like few other writers have. I LOVE THIS BOOK! —Gillian McCain, co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Christian X. Hunter lets us ride shotgun to his life in the turbulent 1...
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THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX by Richard Modiano – REVIEW

Marc Olmsted

THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX By Richard Modiano Punk Hostage Press $20.00 (Available on Amazon) How can I review a book that reviews itself so elegantly in Richard Modiano’s own preface and Pam Ward’s introduction? Then there are remarks by Viggo Mortenson and Ronne Blakely. The list goes on. THE FORBIDDEN LUNCHBOX is, unsurprisingly, a very good, even great book. It is also Richard’s first, at age 71. Not even a prior chapbook of his own, ladies and gentlemen. What took him so long? The answer may be found first in his recent 10 years as Executive Director of Beyond Baroque, the Venice Beach, California literary center equivalent of NYC’s Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. Like any true Platonic philosopher-king, he did not ask for it, let alone want it. Like the Roman Empire’s Marcus Aurelius, he ran BB with wisdom, dignity and humbleness. Alec Guinness played Marcus Aurelius in Anthony Ma...
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The Menace of the Minotaur – a review of David Harrison Horton’s MAZE POEMS

John Greiner

MAZE POEMS David Harrison Horton Arteidolia Press Daedalus, with his genius, was barely able to escape from the labyrinth of his own creation which was built to contain the Minotaur. Theseus, with the aid of Ariadne and her ball of twine was able to defeat the Minotaur and free the Athenians from the Cretian sacrifice of their young men and women in the labyrinth. David Harrison Horton, in his most recent book MAZE POEMS, has made use of Daedalus’s labyrinth, Theseus’s cleverness and Ariadne's practical skill to take on the Minotaur of language. Language has taken on monstrous proportions in our modern era being used to propagate misinformation in the political realm. In contemporary culture language has too often taken on the lumbering weight of a didacticism that longs for fulfillment in the advent of a social realist hierarchy in a Year Zero horror utopia. Mr. Horton in MAZE POEMS has achieved the admirable end ...
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