Essay
Why Drunken Poets Need to Procreate
Jose Padua
If it were somehow obligatory that I sum up my existence with a single sentence—or perhaps with just a phrase and a simple image—I’d be at a loss. I would, in fact, feel quite helpless, as if I were trapped in some h...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #4: A Weird, Bloody Barroom Ritual Remembered
bart plantenga
Beer Mystic Burp 4: A Weird, Bloody Barroom Ritual Remembered
Imagine this, you walk into your local bar, a place where you know where to hang your truss, and upon entering you instantly sense something is amiss, awry –...
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Journal Entry- Mexico, 1970's
Jonathan Shaw
Mexico–
A song of the Caribbean fading and a rusted burned out car shell laying under the sun in a lot of weeds behind the house. A fly buzzing around my head but too lazy to bother me much. A fly will meet his spid...
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Story
Late Night Phone Call from the Used to Be
Carl Watson
An excerpt from backwards the drowned go dreaming
People like to blame things—they like to pretend life is an accident, that it’s not their fault. But accidents can be intentional. We make ourselves magnets by o...
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Essay
Sex, God and Violence
S. A. Emmons
The stars must have been aligned when, entirely by chance, I happened upon The Spitters way back in 1994. I had caught a short blurb on them while flipping through some metal magazine or another in a grocery store. It was ac...
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Poem
Ice T Spit on My Foot & other poems
Sean Flaherty
Ice-T Spit on my Foot
I have been going
to night school
after work
so I can learn
some new things,
to broaden myself
at forty-three,
I met this roofer
at school
who told me that
all the roofers and electrician...
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Music
Elliott Sharp – Rare, Unreleased and Out-of-Print
Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, playing mainly guitar, saxophone and bass clarinet, is one of the major figures in the New York downtown and experimental music scene. Sharp has led many ensembles over th...
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Story
On the Customs of Whey-Guts
Patricia Eakins
An excerpt from The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last
Now the DEROGATIONS by means of which the whites belittle the honor and dignity of blacks are very well known, among them as a...
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Art
John Griffin – New Paintings
John Griffin
My dad, John Griffin Morrissey, was raised in Bay Ridge, Coney Island, and Sunset Park; a Brooklyn boy through and through. He is the eldest, (and craziest) of seven in an Irish Catholic family. His formal education only we...
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Art
David West – New Paintings
David West
Paris Cat, or, the Art of David West.
I first met David West in New York. West, now as then, documents the musicians of the avant-garde, the people of the underground milieu and his experiences of urban life. His...
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Film
Blood in the Face
Anne Bohlen, Kevin Rafferty, and James Ridgeway
Excerpt from a film by Anne Bohlen, Kevin Rafferty, and James Ridgeway, with interviews by Michael Moore, from 1991.
Bohlen, Rafferty (The Atomic Cafe) and Ridgeway simply turn on their cameras cinema and let their subjec...
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Story
Botanical Man
Bonny Finberg
I'm sure there was a moment when I realized it was about to happen. But I can't remember it. It snuck up on me, like snake bite—sending you into a delirium, and just when you realize what's happening you’re dead. It was...
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Essay
Love
Mike DeCapite
I went to St. Louis and stayed with Ted and Kit for the weekend. They’d been there a couple of years, I guess. Ted had bottomed out in Brooklyn and they’d moved home to St. Louis for him to get straightened out. Their...
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Story
The Best Night of His Life
Max Blagg
an excerpt from 101 Nights
Every two weeks the exterminator came by the bar to suppress the vermin that swarmed beneath the sinks, behind the kitchen walls and in the basement. There were no rats, but the place had a fluc...
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NEW
Self-Portrait as Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth from Blue Velvet
Jose Padua
After turning on the television one sleepless early
summer night, I realized that many of the sounds
I make, as a re...
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