Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #16: Books – Increasingly Illegal Intoxicants?
bart plantenga
An interview with Karen Lillis
When I was just beginning high school I was one scared, miffed, gawky, pimply kid, unlike the rest of the kids somehow. But what kid of 13 didn’t feel that way? (photo: Karen in the ...
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Essay
Barefoot in the Heart
Keshav Das
"Drugs," an excerpt from Barefoot in the Heart
“Muktananda, Shirdi Sai Baba and Hari Das Baba would never take LSD.”
A certain pattern had evolved wherein Maharajji frequently called upon myself and a couple of oth...
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Essay
Online Magazines Versus Status Quo
Mark McCawley
The dilemma with writing anything edgy or transgressive in Canada, isn't that it is all too often written from the margins, or by choice or circumstance — it comes down to the harsh reality that edgy, transgressive writing...
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Events
Old Friends Festival
Fluffy Schwartz
The Berkeley Arts Festival 2011 presents
Friday, December 9th, and Saturday, December 10th
OFF highlights the best of the 1990's Bay Area creative music scene with a power packed line-up featuring: the Rova Saxophone Quar...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #15: Beer as Therapy
bart plantenga
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners
• Albert Camus
You gotta chortle in your beerhead at the maxim “Beer Is Cheaper Than Therapy,” a tongue-in-cheek saying fraught [...
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Music
The Spitters – Live at The Cooler, 1-24-98
Sir Andre Bemler
Just dug up this nugget - an entire Spitters show (almost 21 minutes long!) filmed live at The Cooler, a great 1990s downtown NYC rock club. This performance is from 1998 and features the post "boy-band" Spitters; Bill, Tim ...
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Essay
Original Beats: Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke
City of Strangers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbY6KXPg6wY&feature=player_embedded
Often overshadowed by the Beat triumvurate of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso were nonetheless integral to the Beat f...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #14: Beer = Food = Books
bart plantenga
Apparently I said “In NY the louder and crazier you sound, the more attention you seem to get,” and this was quoted in the Sunday Boston Globe about our Cambridge gig. Luckily they used a photo of Judy Nylon and not me.
...
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NEW
Jerry Rio’s Urban Eye: Times Square
City of Strangers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ome6yVU2fTE
Over the holidays, reader Jerry Rio sent me this charming doc about changing mid-90's New York: The Urban Eye. This 'video time-capsule' was made in 1995, when market forces, an...
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Subway Pome #57: Most Girls Wear Too Much Makeup
Sean Flaherty
“Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don’t need no other lover” – from Something by George Harrison
Around eight
Saturday morning
the chilly wet October fog
makes it feel earlier than it is,
the bus depot
...
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NEW
Dong of the Dead
Jose Padua
The name of this poem is Dong of the Dead.
It is my attempt to cash in quickly
on the literary zombie craze by
writing the first literary zombie
porn novel in verse. I am writing it
while sitting in the back of a pickup
...
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Music
The Evening News!
Fluffy Schwartz
So, If you happen to be in Texas near Angelo State University this Tuesday night, you really should go hear the amazing Mr. Bonenfant. The concert is going to be fantastic & it will include him playing my solo clarinet ...
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Looking back: New York in the ’70s
City of Strangers
What always interested me about NY when I first came here in the late '80s was how, like London, it was essentially a working class city. The working classes lived in the heart of the city, and constituted a great deal of it...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #13: Without the Voodoo of Hope
bart plantenga
Hitching through mid-1970s Canada usually meant Canadian Border Services stopping you, inquiring how much money you had on your person. If it was under $25 they’d refuse you entry, which meant hitching the long way round ...
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Music
Mike Fink – Six Compositions
Michael Jon Fink
Michael Jon Fink is a composer/performer who resides in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles.
For the last thirty years he has served on the faculty of the Herb Albert School of Music at the California Instit...
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