Story
If You’re So Special, Why Aren’t You Dead?
Jim Greer
Alphonse samson stood before the mirror in his bathroom for a long time before deciding to. The mirror had no frame but its edges were beveled and the soft light from the neighbor’s bright room shining through a small squa...
More...
Story
Pardon My French
Thaddeus Rutkowski
When i arrived in paris by train, I tried to place a call to a friend, someone I knew from my home city. Surprisingly, there was a phone service with a human attendant in the train station. I gave the phone woman the numb...
More...
Story
Medium
Jennifer Adams
The notice was small, a half-sheet of paper tucked, unauthorized, into the frame of the subway map.
“Mrs. Taylor and she says DON’T GIVE UP.”
Elizabeth leaned closer, oblivious to the discomfort she was ...
More...
Classics
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
I
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called Th...
More...
Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #17: Beer Party Trumps Tea Party Any Day
bart plantenga
A discussion with activist cartoonist and BEER MYSTIC host, Ken Avidor [here posed as Greek God of Mini-Golf, Nkolfus, in Asbury Park, c. 1984].
I knew Ken [aka Weiner] for many years in NYC, during its – or was it jus...
More...
Meaning of the Dance
Mark McCawley
Fortunately, not everyone has to experience the daily life of madness and insanity of a spouse with a severe mental illness. It's akin to watching a portrait you adore manifest into something you no longer know or even recog...
More...
The Stabbing Game
Sean Flaherty
They switched the time of day
but every day for one year,
Monday through Friday
we had seventh grade science
with Mr. Stern,
after school,
Neil Brown and I
would tear over to Friendly’s or
Burger King
in his mom’s Camar...
More...
Essay
In-depth observations on eye floaters – a challenge to ophthalmology
Floco Tausin
For centuries, scholars try to find an explanation for the mobile, scattered and transparent spheres and strings in our visual field. Early on in ophthalmological tradition, the origin was thought to be in the eye. The pheno...
More...
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 ...
More...
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...
More...
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...
More...
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...
More...
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 [...
More...
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 ...
More...
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...
More...