Writing
Waiting for the Quake
Marc Olmsted
I.
Oakland waiting for the quake
American poverty's blanket dirty
unwashed a shroud on the street
abandoned by wandering drug thirst,
while the sane sweep in front of their tents
(a new day John will watch it for her
...
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Writing
The World Is A Beautiful Place
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The World Is A Beautiful Place - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
jus...
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Art
Just A Little Bit
Puma Perl
I had to shit on someone to make this money! shrieked Lani, I need you to get me off! Now!
Lani had translucent skin and tiny, spidery veins. Usually, I could find a place to hit her but she’d done some serious damage o...
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Art
The DEAD MAN
Julius Klein
(Bus routes, train routes, walking patterns and thinking jags)
Riding the #22 Clark Street bus north on a fall evening in Chicago, 1978, getting off at the Armitage stop, descending the few stairs to the oval expanse of p...
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Poem
Foundations
steve dalachinsky
foundation 1 (morandi)
who will preserve space /
the fullness of emptiness –
valid question?
the flame of the shell / a warning of roses
a kind of soupy meld within
the intentional near unseen warp...
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Writing
October in the Railroad Earth
Jack Kerouac
October in the Railroad Earth is a long, flowing prose poem recounting Jack Kerouac’s memories of his experiences as a “student brakeman” on the Southern Pacific Railroad in California. In his interview with Paris Revi...
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Writing
Joined at the Hips
bart plantenga
When you hitchhiked back then, before it was redefined as criminal trespass – and dangerous – you could get around OK and once in a while catch a ride with someone you would never have met in your regular life. [Do not t...
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Art
Scab Vendor 39 – Sins of the Father
Jonathan Shaw
Jonathan Shaw is a world-traveling outlaw artist, novelist, anti-folk hero and underground philosopher, writing in the literary tradition of Celine, Bukowski, Henry Miller and The Beats. Once widely-known as a legendary tatt...
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Events
Three Times Bad Presents the Dirty String Summit
The Editors
Three Times Bad, an Oakland-based alt-roots sextet, aims to channel the powerful energy of dirty stringbands like Uncle Dave Macon, Blue Ridge Highballers, and Mississippi Sheiks who plucked, picked, popped, sawed, and thrum...
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Book
Duke and Jill – A Review
Jim Feast
Ron Kolm’s new collection of short stories, Duke and Jill, recounts the adventures of two woebegone, half countercultural, half drugstore-cowboy lowlifes, who shabbily inhabit the 1980s East Village, always one step ahead ...
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Video
cicatrix dreaming
David Graves, Justin Clifford Rhody and Jay Kreimer
cicatrix dreaming is video collaboration that began with the moldy & degraded, found 35mm photo slides color slides, restored and curated by Justin Rhody, shown in September of 2015 as a part of his Vernacular Visions series...
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Film
Embrace of the Serpent – A Review
Franklin Mount
There is something terribly mythic about journeys down rivers. A trip downriver takes us out of our quotidian life. It strips away the defenses of home, and of terra firma. Combine a journey downriver in the Amazonian jungle...
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Story
Babe Ruth’s Last Game
Drew Hubner
Snow is falling on Sedgwick Ave above the Major Deegan highway east of the Harlem River. Barely light with no sun. The snow blankets the sidewalk, slushes in the streets and gutters and swirls through the gray morning air. ...
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Art
Cabin
Francine Witte
Every night when the sun sets, I see her. Just over my shoulder like a blind spot in the rearview. Always. Been like this forever. I tell this to my best friend Al, and she laughs her giggly laugh, the one that makes me ...
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Essay
The First Surrealist Manifesto
André Breton
The First Surrealist Manifesto
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his des...
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