January 31, 2012
It was a summer weeknight. Kiki and I were at Carl’s Jr., slurping down milkshakes, when in walked two men who had to be pushing thirty. Both were tall and moderately inked. The brawny bull had his head cleanly shaven, but it was rawboned cat who caught my dexter and sinister. He had a perfectly pronounced jaw line and cheekbones, and tangerine hair that stood up on end like a crown of dancing flames, complemented by a pair of strikingly beautiful cerulean eyes. Although the coif bore a disturbing resemblance to Heat Miser’s, he was attractive, in an ominous way. They swaggered over to our booth and sat down.
“Guten Abend,” the skinhead said, with a crooked smile, “I’m Kyle, this is Jake.”
Kiki and I introduced ourselves.
“We’re on our way to a block party,” he continued, “you gotta come along.”
Kiki and I had spent the entire day at the beach, drugging with the Locals, and were completely played out.
“Sounds like a blast,” Kiki yawned, “but we’ve been partying all day, we’re gonna have to pass.”
Clearly not what they wanted to hear. Jake was now practically sitting in my lap, cooing honeyed words into my ears. “You’re me” was his …read the rest…
Posted in NEW, Stories, Writing
| Tagged Díre McCain
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January 22, 2012
 A discussion with activist cartoonist and BEER MYSTIC host, Ken Avidor .
I knew Ken for many years in NYC, during its – or was it just our – heyday, the 1980s. This mad cartoonist worked a day job as art director of Screw where my first wife, Valerie, worked as assistant art director. Milky Way Prod. was a weirdly grungy no man’s land that still managed to forge a relation between sex, politics, liberation and humor – and profit, a kind of Mad Magazine with genitalia. But it was also an open place that offered those hanging on the margins of culture – writers, artists and illustrators who’d honed their skills on black humor and nothing’s-sacred iconoclasm – a paid gig for their artwork as long as the drawings exuberantly exhibited gruesomely disproportionate sexual apparatuses, took the piss out of its self-flagellating readership, at every turn of the page, and, not to forget, display a …read the rest…
Posted in Essays, NEW, Writing
| Tagged bart plantenga, beer, Beer Mystic, cartoonists, David Sandlin, JD King, Kaz, Ken Avidor, Michelle Bachman, Ron Kolm, Tea Party
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January 21, 2012
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 recognize. It was 1989, Lou Reed had just released ‘New York’ to critical acclaim, and I’d just taken a job as security guard during the graveyard shift. It was yet another one of those inane jobs that allowed me hours of free, uninterrupted time to compose the poems that were constantly streaming through me head. It was also the only job my then wife hadn’t gotten me fired from with her incessant, nearly hourly, calls that the voices in her head were growing louder, telling her to do things, terrible things. I don’t think I held down a job longer than three weeks that year. On one of the nights when she didn’t call, when her voices were held at bay, this was one poem I scribbled down between dusk and dawn…
Meaning of the Dance
It gnaws
like a wound
in my flesh.
I will find no deliverance
in the palms of men,
hands too soiled with silver,
their paper dynasties no not include me,
do not see …read the rest…
Posted in NEW, Poetry, Writing
| Tagged consumerism, insanity, madness, Mark McCawley, poetry, poverty, religious extremism
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January 15, 2012
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 Camaro
and then,
hopped up on burgers and milkshakes
we’d fly
a brakeless Schwinn
down the hill in his driveway
over a jump made from an old plank and a few cinder blocks
and we’d hover over
the green downward slope of his back yard,
mid-air,
spinning the handlebars as many times as we could,
posing on the bike,
pre-Superman,
making
deliciously uncertain landings,
we had other classes together
during the day
but
throughout C-period
science class
we sat next to each other
as lab partners
and, when the room got quiet for a moment,
one of us would stab the other guy
as hard as we could
and, if you kept quiet when you got jabbed in the leg,
you got to stab the other guy,
we went for the thigh
since the muscles there
seemed invincible
and there was never much blood,
it hurt but,
strangely, it was a matter of suppressing laughter
at this stupid secret game
more than holding back shouts of pain,
we started with pencils
but we got a little scared
after chunks of lead
broke off in our thighs
so we switched over
to metal compasses,
using the stainless steel points instead –
we figured the punctures would be cleaner –
we never ratted …read the rest…
Posted in NEW, Poetry, Writing
| Tagged poetry, Sean Flaherty
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January 5, 2012
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 phenomenon was considered a disorder or degeneration somewhere between cornea and retina. Today, eye floaters are believed to be an opacity of the vitreous. However, careful observation of floaters reveals properties that challenge this dominant view and call for a reconsideration of the ophthalmological explanation.
In ophthalmology, “eye floaters” is a collective term for vitreous opacities which are attributed to different causes. In most cases, however, the phenomenon is considered a non-pathological (idiopathic) age-related clouding of the vitreous. In this article, my statements on floaters refer to this idiopathic type. According to ophthalmologists, this wide-spread symptom occurs due to the liquefaction (synchysis) and collapse of the collagen-hyaluronic structure of the vitreous (syneresis), which at some stage causes the detachment of the vitreous from the retina (posterior vitreous detachment) (Sendrowski 2010). In daylight, degenerated vitreous structures which are clumped together cast shadows on the retina and become visible in the field of vision. Supposedly, this is what we see when we are looking at …read the rest…
Posted in Essays, NEW, Writing
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December 29, 2011
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 Minneapolis Public Library)
The older, wannabe bullies who needed to prove their cruelty credentials had a 6th sense for any style deviation, tic, or idiosyncrasy and would home in on home in on that and tease, spit, punch, trip, roughhouse, taunt, muss-up my homemade haircut, or play keep-away with your eyeglasses. I did not fully comprehend the ecstatic necessity of cruelty and did not know how to deal with it other than be confused and withdraw even further. And, man, you start balling, sniffling, runny nose, red eyes, the works, as a result of their well-honed efforts and you were like naked, bloody carrion to a pack of hyenas.
That the school bus was also hell was only mitigated by one cool chick – a “slinky bird” one would have called her in 60s Swingin’ London – who …read the rest…
Posted in Essays, NEW, Writing
| Tagged bart plantenga, beer, Beer Mystic, blogpost, books, Cooper Union, Hakim Bey, indie bookstore, Karen Lillis, libraries, literary outlaws, Obama, occupy, OWS, rightwing, socialism, St. Mark's Bookshop, TAZ
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December 20, 2011
“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 other foreign men whenever he required some enforcers. Sometimes it was to deliver bad news such as a Jao, other times just to get the group herded together for some purpose. It was not an enviable role, such as that enjoyed by a favorite singer or the one with the honored and coveted job of waving the towel to move the flies along. But any way in which one was called to serve was a blessing, and we all wanted his attention.
One morning in Kainchi we were sitting around Baba-ji on the verandah singing and laughing at his play. At some point every morning he would get up from the tucket and walk across to his office. This morning as he descended the three steps to the courtyard, with the whole group of us standing to accompany him, one young western man wrapped in a red shawl stumbled …read the rest…
Posted in Essays, NEW, Writing
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December 7, 2011
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 is an unwelcome commodity at Canadian magazines, journals, and ultimately, publishers. The number of Canadian magazines and publishers that publish relatively edgy and transgressive writings by Canadian authors can be numbered on one hand. Given that edgy, transgressive writing is at best a niche genre in Canada, the skewed writer to publisher ratio almost assures that edgy, transgressive writing never sees print. It also does not help that Canada has no celebrated transgressive history of its own.
~Fresh Raw Cuts
 The first of three online magazines presently pushing back against the literary status quo in Canada is ditch, an online literary periodical edited by the Canadian writer John C. Goodman. Launched in August 2007, ditch is designed to promote Canadian experimental poetry by celebrating the innovative, the non-conforming, the radical, the alternative, the surreal, the avant-garde, the non-linear, the abstract, and the experimental. Much as other new online magazines do, …read the rest…
Posted in Essays, NEW, Writing
| Tagged ditch, fresh raw cuts, john c. goodman, Michael Bryson, The Danforth Review, The Puritan
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December 3, 2011
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 Quartet playing a Tribute to Bay Area tenor saxophone great Glenn Spearman, local legend Ralph Carney, Pluto, Pamela Z, Gino Robair’s Improvcore Orchestra 3000, Dan Plonsey’s New Monsters, and a re-union of the avant jazz group The Manufacturing of Humidifiers, all in two action-packed nights.
Curated by Sensitive Skin music editor Steve Horowitz (“Super Size Me” and so much more) & part of the Berkeley Arts Festival, the OFF takes place on Friday, December 9th, and Saturday, December 10th, 8pm both nights. Admission is sliding scale, suggested donation $10-20. The Berkeley Arts Festival space is located at 2133 University Avenue, just off the corner of Shattuck, in beautiful Downtown Berkeley.
Friday December 9th, 8pm
Ralph Carney & Randy Odell Duo
Ralph Carney, perhaps the most hard to describe multi-genre, multi-talented, wacked out pop …read the rest…
Posted in Events, Music, NEW
| Tagged Berkeley Arts Festival, OFF
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December 2, 2011
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 with this better-you-than-me ambiguity, pride unraveling by the last syllable as you realize the joke’s on you…
 The film Beer Is Cheaper Than Therapy hinges on a cynical version of this saying that’s been wafting about US military bases for some time. It implies a cavalier attitude by staff toward the social, economic and . The brass suggests these young soldiers should go drink beer to kill whatever “imaginary” devils, pains and nightmares they may have. The cast-off discharges eventually managed to transform Beer Is Cheaper Than Therapy into their own bonding call in bars where they ironically revel in their shared despair, with one small consolation being that he or she is seldom the worst off among them.
The fact that over …read the rest…
Posted in Essays, NEW, Writing
| Tagged anti-war, bart plantenga, beer, Beer is Cheaper than Therapy, Beer Mystic, blogpost, Brecht, documentary, draft, film, Fort Hood, military, PTSD, suicide, texas, US Military, war
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