Sensitive Skin Books
Music: Drawing Down the Muse
David West
The new book by David West, Music: Drawing Down the Muse, is a survey of drawings done in situ (usually in rehearsal or soundcheck) with various musicians or groups, over the last 20 years. The idea of the series was to defi...
More...
Sensitive Skin Books
East of Bowery
Drew Hubner
Not too long ago, though it's hard to imagine now, New York City was a very different place. There were vast swaths of Manhattan where folks from the right side of the tracks were warned not to venture. East of Bowery was wh...
More...
Sensitive Skin Books
Barefoot In The Heart: Remembering Neem Karoli Baba
Keshav Das
Barefoot in the Heart: Remembering Neem Karoli Baba is a collection of transcribed oral stories of the Indian saint Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaji). It includes many anecdotes and first-person retellings of stories collected in...
More...
Story
Narcisa – An Excerpt
Jonathan Shaw
I was seeing double with fatigue. But Narcisa was just getting started.
She hopped along, from subject to subject, like a cocaine-crazed, hyperactive little fairy, flittering between realms of thought I could barely fatho...
More...
Poem
Holiday
D. James Smith
My Rose of Sharon has gone dormant,
Thin and spindly as
The many masts of sailing ships
Gone to port in winter
That I’ve seen in paintings,
So I’ll be a long time waiting
In the black flowers of my days
For summ...
More...
Poem
Marine 1–10
Max Blagg
A collaboration between Max Blagg and Alex Katz for the Marine Series’ Exhibition Catalogue, Jablonka Gallery, Berlin, 2008. This piece is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Slow Dazzle: Poems & Prose For 23 Artists, pu...
More...
Story
The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones
Stewart Home
I’m a face. My breakout from Pentonville in 1958 has been praised as one of the greatest prison escapes of all time by the likes of south London gangster Mad Frankie Fraser. The details differ somewhat in the various accou...
More...
Poem
Beaches in Cornwall, Apples in Devon, A Foot in London
Christopher Romero
draped Kelp and no lullaby thick sound from deep wonder ritual unconformed
to sea sutra canters
the silver egg’s path from studio
to rocks
near shore
to ocean soaked tidal pools lady lay day
heat mapped exposure turn...
More...
Story
Santa Barbara–1980 / San Francisco–1982
Matt McLaren
Santa Barbara–1980
I didn’t have a mattress yet. it had been three months, but I still lay in my room on my dirty clothes, arranged under a fitted sheet. Ron stood in my doorway, leaning against the jamb. He stared at...
More...
Review
The Other Paris by Luc Sante – Review
Bernard Meisler
You're about the read what may be the strangest book review you've ever come across, because I'm going to admit up front that I haven't read the book I'm about to review. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm sure that ha...
More...
Photographs
Fairies – Photographs by Julia Kissina
Julia Kissina
Photographs by Julia Kissina from the "Fairies" project, from 1997-98. Julia Kissina is a photographer and writer born in Kiev, Ukraine. She graduated from the Academy of Arts in Munich in 1998 and now lives in Berlin. Her w...
More...
Art
Love and Strangulation
Carl Watson
The philosophers of the old romances say, and many specialists today concur, that desire is nothing more than the result of a necessary and continuous projection of the self into others; an unattainable wholeness is represen...
More...
Poem
The Calf
D. James Smith
Child of a dying wind it lay
In the muck and hot, blond grass
Below the dam and its strangled creek
That my boyhood friend and I
Crossed that morning, determined
To flee the nun’s black habits and ink,
To claim ...
More...
Story
Welcome to All the Pleasures
Robert C. Hardin
My father liked to say that I’d always been impossible to find. During birth, he recalled, I couldn’t be extracted with forceps. No one could see me, so I made my own way out of my mother. The midwife only located me aft...
More...
Art
Contours of the Irreal: Paintings by David de Biasio
Erik Noonan
Although it may strike a theorist as paradoxical, the artist’s sole response to a moment such as ours—with its ideological cowardice, its reflexive violence, its prurient spectatorship—is always to exult in using the m...
More...