BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP, WENT OVER THE EDGE:
WHO KILLED JFK, MLK & RFK

Let’s face it, not only is the map not the territory of most of the areas in life we end up exploring, but in the major conspiracies of the 20th century the shooters were more delivery boys than the actual killers, even if they pulled the triggers Which may or may not be why outside of brain-locked conspiracy freaks nobody seems to give a shit who killed JFK-MLK-RFK anymore. Be that as it may, it’s about time the poor unsung real shooters received their due... »

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GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTZ
23 SKIDOO
Renfreu Neff’s
(NAKED LAMBCHOPS FOR LUNCH)

A small dinner was set up for William Burroughs when he returned from England in 1974, at El Quixote, the funky Spanish restaurant in the Hotel Chelsea. . . My husband Gianfranco was invited, but instructed not to bring Renfreu... » »

Ernest Hemingway’s
THE KILLERS

Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Andreson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavyweight prize-fighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick. ... »

FUG YOU

Ed Sanders is some sort of parody of all the MC’s of history. He looks like James Jones, or a foul Bob Hope. Neither he nor his “slum goddess of the lower east side” is aphrodisiac, but they are wildly funny because he and his songs have trapped the infantilism of smutty little boys... »

“Now Dig This”
The Terry Southern Interview

John Calley, who was a very hip Producer at MGM - was sure it was time to do Blue Movie." He was convinced that the first studio to come out with a quality full length film showing erection and penetration, using stars, would go over the top. "It'll be like Gone With The Wind" » »

Mike Golden’s
“THERE ARE NO RULES,
SCUMBAG MAKES THE RULES!”

fiction excerpted from the novel
VIRTUALLY REALITY
At the end of the day, hombres, it ees all about ideas anyway, isn't it? I mean, it ees the transmission of ideas. Even the bad ones, the lies, the propaganda in the name of one bogus god or another. . .in order to sell the program and advance the cause, whatever it... »

Bukowski’s
WON’T YOU BE MY VALENTINE?

Norman clocked them doing 85 going north on the 405, a late model ivory Caddy, he switched on the red, they saw him and slowed. . . The driver was a woman. . . She was smoking a cigarillo. Her only attire was a pair of brown, scratched boots and dirty pink panties... »

• A Thanksgiving Prayer from William Burroughs
  
• Thanks for the wild turkey and passenger pigeons destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts... Thanks for vast herds of bisons... Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes...Thanks for a nation of finks. »

A WHITER SHADE OF PALE

“Unfortunately, this is not going to end well, Humbert,” the Woodman intoned as he buried his face in his hands just as Starsky & Hutch showed up and rushed me. By the looks on the cops’ faces as they cuffed me, if there hadn’t been witnesses there, they would’ve pounded me into ground round,... »

• Jim Harrison’s “Corruption”
  
• Like Afghanistan I’m full of corruption. My friend McGuane once said, ”I’d gladly commit a hundred acts of literary capitulation to keep my dog in Alpo. “ The little ones needed dental braces and flutes, cars and houses. Off and on I’ve had this dangerous golden touch like a key to a slot machine streaming 20-dollar gold pieces. It was so easy to buy expensive French wine that purges the grim melancholy of livelihood, the drudgery of concocting fibs. I know a man, happily married, who bought a girl a hundred-dollar pair of panties. I was stunned. For this price I buy a whole lamb each fall. Now the lamb and panties are gone though the panties might be on a card table at a yard sale. Right now a wind has come up and there’s a strange blizzard of yellow buds outside my studio. »

• TALES FROM THE OLD STASH
  Jack Wesley Hardin’s
  MEXICAN SWEAT (a smuggler’s memoir)
  #9 THE FINAL EPISODE
  
• Gordo ordered them on their knees. There were 24 men and women, all wearing the same type backpack. There were two dark-skinned Mexicans that Sangrita had disarmed. They were the “Coyotes”, the guides that took part of the thousand dollar per person ticket to ride that these poor people paid to have a risky »

• 
• 
  The Further Adventures of Bart Plantenga's
  Confessions of a Beer Mystic #36
  The Final Episode
  I breathe into my palms. They are swollen by beer and excitement. But I am afraid that the he that is him is now me. I remember my fear of heights. But it wasn’t a fear of heights as much as a fear I might be compelled to jump. I Wonder how it will feel to die. Wonder if I should do it in public, if there’s a quick way to write a will. Times Square perhaps. Quickly and slowly. »



• FAMOUS LONG AGO REDUX:
  Raymond Mungo’s
  SILK ROAD MAHABHARATA #21
  (The Final Episode)
  
• Travel is broadening, as they say, and also flattening – we were elevated and also humbled. Every day on the Silk Road had seemed like a week, every week like a month, in the sense that travel extends your life, buys you time. And time, dear friend, is running out. »

• Maureen Owen’s
  ON A POEM ABOUT ELVIS PRESLEY
  but for Ted Berrigan who understands momentum
  
•     I thought she said “There’s a bullet hole in my skull the size of Detroit” He got older but what he really lost was the energy of life he had this energy      then he lost it because what happens is you start to see the outcome see where it’s all headed & So you don’t want to go there anymore but there’s already nowhere else to go so Fuck it is all you can think it stops making any sense then & confusion sets in & you don’t want to lose everything you’ve worked your ass off for but there’s no real reason to try to maintain it either Then you start getting fat which he did...»

Welcome to Times Square

Happy New Year

WHY AREN’T YOU LAUGHING?

Michael Simmons on
THE ONE, THE ONLY, BUDGE THRELKELD Funny man Budge Threlkeld’s death in 2005 was heartbreaking but historically appropriate. Few could match his charisma, innate kindness, and epic wit. He could endear himself to Republican tourists at a Disney World comedy club as effortlessly as if they were a gang of stoned malcontents in a smoke-filled basement in New York City. more...

Listen to Al Franken's Personal Reminiscence of Budge

Michael Sullivan's
THE SEX LIFE OF ROBOTS

Sex, Death & Other People’s Money Sex, Death
& Other People’s Money

This here excursion of three stray dogs lookin' to hide out of the holy night is something else: Silent, clandestine, completely indulgent, yet valid, unlike flogging your hype. . .Last night, blessed be His name, I thought I might find a miracle out there among the trees and one hundred percent Vermont maple syrup...»

Bob Holman reads d. a. levy

Columns

• Bukowski’s (all new)NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN
  What about fame? They ask me. Will fame destroy you? Well now, if I am famous and if it destroys me (meaning my talent) then sixty one years of my life will have gone by without my having sense any of the traps... »
• Jim Harrison’s THE DEAD FOOD SCROLLS #5
  One wonders, doesn't one, why historically we are insufficiently wily in foreign affairs. Without question it is because we do not eat vividly. more... »
• Mike Golden’s APOCALYPSE WHEN?
  He would always notice the spiderwebs.“We’re smoking them now,” he cackled. Which was when I realized the right half of my body was totally paralyzed. “Mine too,” he whispered. more... »

WHOSE CONSPIRACY IS THIS, ANYWAY? Oliver Stone, Lisa Pease and James Douglass

• ART RAVES ON about JFK conspiracy books, films, etc...


• ASSASSINATION BY OMISSION: GERALD POSNER
• 
  Courtesy of The Exiled
  
• The 49th Anniversary of having to ask
  WHO KILLED JFK, MLK & RFK Though they probably don't have the balls to do it, the best opportunity Trump will ever have to be trusted by the great majority of Americans would be by using MLK's 86th birthday to name who’s really responsible for the assassinations of JFK-MLK- RFK, before bad-politics-as-usual buries the truth again forever… »
• 
• Dave Hill’s LOVE REPORT with Venus & Serena
• 
• Victor Harwood Interviews Regis Debray


• HATE MAIL: ASK DR. FAUSTROLL, PATAPHYSICIAN
  If you’ve got the balls to ask our resident psycho-genius “How much more meaningless has life become during the Obaminable age of Social Networking?” do so at your own risk, you pussies more... »
• 
• Darius James' FREE BROTHER BOBBY
  Sometime between the ages of eight and nine, traumatized by The Story of Dr. Doolittle, and his adventures in Hugh Loftig's whimsical Africa, wherein a cannibal the color of coal, and suited in an armor of rusty mop-buckets, was bleached by the titular hero to aid said cannibal in his quest for the heart of a fairyland lass, I forsooked the insidious charms of children's literature, embarking on an investigation of works consigned to disreputable -- nay, lunatic -- realms of public inquiry. more... »
• Renfreu Neff’s SLEEPING AT THE MOVIES
  As William Burroughs starts to explain why he always orders lamb chops in restaurants, Allen Ginsberg leaned over and confided to me that he & Bill (he eschews the deferential “William”) have had sex since the latter’s recent return. more... »

CLUB 86'ed Presents
Mikhail Horowitz & Paul Austin
in SECOND COMING

• Trailer of the 1987 East Village Film about the return of you know who to the lower east side. more... »
  
  

• Jane King’s NURSE JANE
  Two years ago I went to the hospital to visit a sick friend who just so happens to edit this mag, only to find he was being tortured by a sadistic nurse. At the time I had already developed an elaborate theory about nursing as an apt profession for sadists, so I put the booga-booga on the booga-booga she had put on my friend more... »
• Nancy Cohen’s MY DINNER WITH ABBIE
  
• 

• Rudy Wurlitzer’s The Drop Edge Of Yonder
  The Captain and the Portuguese crew were afraid to set foot on land, convinced that the entire West Coast had been seized by a biblical conflagration; a disaster brought on, they had no doubt, by the godless scum of the earth »


• Buddy Godox’s REGULAR JOB
  Buddy Godox’s moving and pathetic performance of “Regular Job” from Mike Golden’s 1987 East Village film, “Second Coming.” Would you hire this guy?»


• Bob Zmuda's Mr X Chronicles #3
  “Anyway, so we’re in Jersey, drivin’ along in the limo, and Mr. X sees this bakery, and says, ‘Driver stop over here, I want a glazed donut. Okay, so inside, it’s midday and there’s a few people in line, so X just blurts out, ‘I want a glazed donut,’ real loud, like they’re all just hard of hearing, and this woman behind the counter, her name badge said ‘Flo’ »


• The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle
  Who killed d.a. levy? The last poet in America put of trial for the language of his art »


• Sparrow & Foamola @ St. Marks Church
  
• Foamola has been described as "the best band since the Crimean War" by the Milwaukee Courier-Dispatcher. Since 1990, their frequent melodies have cheered the Lower East Side, and occasionally Soho.

• The Ballad of WHO KILLED MLK
  
• Obviously, politics breeds strange bedfellows, and those bedfellows have been known to breed more than a few conspiracies hiding behind generic government cover-ups, i.e., such as the blatant cronyism behind war profiteering and the oil companies’ windfall profits at the expense of the rest of the economy. And while we’re at it, let’s not... »

• 
  
  
• MODERN (You Call This) LIVING
  Joey Amdahl’s TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART
  
• She woke up before noon, which is something she had not done for two or three years. Before she showered, she went for a jog. She came home, turned up her music, and practiced yoga for an hour. After her shower, she stood on the couch and pulled down the poster of George Clooney »

Shameless Gratuities?

• An excerpt from the novel SLOW FADE
  by Rudolph Wurlitzer
  
• He was up fourteen grand. He decided to keep four for himself and give the rest to Walker as payment for the next installment of the script, making himself the producer. He would have Walker sign a paper saying all three of them owned the script equally. This was his move. … »

Ok, given what’s been happening in this country, who better to serenade us than our dear Abbie, with this first time online oldie but goldie from the middle of the Chicago 7 (8) trial… »

Terry Southern's
The Blood Of A Wig

Stories From Around the Web

Who Killed MLK?

Grün Wasser diversify their apocalyptic EBM on the new Not OK With Things Gentrification pains ‘The Last Judgment’ brings catharsis to Little Village Little-known Chicago blues-rock wizard Zach Prather has found his crowd in Europe [PRESS RELEASE] Yes We Cann: Cannabis market and symposium

Quark Theatre Gets Daring (Again) With 'Wakey, Wakey,' GCT goes 'Barefoot,' 'Pond' at POTS 30 Days of Opera Popping Up for the Eighth Year Dramatis Personae: Observations from the Ostranders Theater Honors Its Own at the Annual Ostrander Awards Tony Isbell: Discovering The Humans

At last a Smoke Signals NO BRAINER
MACACA SPEAKS
MAKE FRAGMERICA GREAT AGAIN
THE BRAND ON TRUMP’S BIG FUCKING WALL
Truly, we’re fucked if we can’t call off and reschedule this whole lose-lose election the failed two-party-system has stuck us with in order to keep control of the country. In order to change things it's going to take a plan that bars anyone who ran for POTUS in this election and replaces them with... »

Jack Wesley Hardin’s
THE ONE THAT GET AWAY
If you unlucky enough to be out in the soup tonight, baby, you don’t have to be told this toxic brew of critics and crucifiers alike is not pissin’ chicken soup for the soul down on us. All you gotta do is watch the waves of rage exploding out over the high bluffs above... »

an Octoberfest hors d’oeuvre
I AM FIFI
I am FiFi (not my real name), the French maid sex slave of two beautiful, brilliant, strong Amazon Lesbians. And though they tell me I am badly flunking the French part of my maid, What, Dear Vibrator, I must ask, is the correlation between pain and sexual excitement? Am I a sickness? »

A SHORT UPDATED HISTORY OF THE EVER POPULAR BELIEF IN MAGIC
As she obliviously barked on, I looked out the corner of my eye to see if everyone was staring at us. But they were totally frozen in time. I mean, they were all completely stuck in mid chew, or suck, as they case may be -- trapped in the unconscious flytrap of our... »

Joey Amdahl’s
The Big Dumb Nothing
fiction from MODERN (you call this) LIVING
See my thirty-five-year-old boss Betty Allen standing at the door of the club. She scratches at an itch that’s under her tight black skirt and her hand yanks up her fish net stocking at the knee. . A tattoo of a zombie geisha fills up her entire upper arm. The tattoo goes against..... »

The 49th Anniversary of having to ask
WHO KILLED JFK, MLK & RFK
Though they probably don't have the balls to do it, the best opportunity Trump will ever have to be trusted by the great majority of Americans would be by using MLK's 86th birthday to name who’s really responsible for the assassinations of JFK-MLK- RFK, before bad-politics-as-usual buries the truth again forever… »

Charles Bukowski's
Six Inches
Sarah picked me up and placed me down between her legs, which she spread open just a bit. Then I was facing a forest of hair. I hardened my back and neck muscles, sensing what was to come. I was jammed into darkness and stench. I heard Sarah moan. Then Sarah began to move me slowly back and forth. As I said, the stench was unbearable, and it was difficult to breathe, but somehow there was air in there—various side-pockets and drafts of oxygen. Now and then my head, the top of my head bumped The Man in the Boat and then Sarah would let out an extra-illuminated moan. Sarah began moving me faster and faster »

an excerpt from John Goodman’s
MINGUS SPEAKS
Avant-Garde and Tradition
Photograph by Robert Frank
I don't want to be so junglish that I can't climb a stairway. I got to climb mountains all day long? We're going to the moon, right? Well, I'm with the guys that wrote music that got us to the moon. Not the guys who dreamed about it. Bach built the buildings, we didn't... »

Excerpts from
THE LAST INTERVIEW WITH JAMES EARL RAY
A Counter Myth
from Mike Golden’s
BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP, WENT OVER THE EDGE
Sad to Say, if you ask any graduating class today who James Earl Ray was, less than 10% of those over-priced diplomas would know the confessed, then-unconfessed, alleged-assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King was indisputably one of the three biggest hand-picked-stooges in history, along with Curly Larry Sirhan and Mo Harvey Oswald... »

A Thanksgiving Prayer from William Burroughs
Thanks for the wild turkey and passenger pigeons destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts... Thanks for vast herds of bisons... Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes...Thanks for a nation of finks... »

Victor Harwood’s
THE WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
excerpted from his novel
TO DIE IN MADRID
That Saturday night Malraux and I sat side-by-side, facing the room, watching the crowd flow in and out in waves as it passed through the Dingo, quick to find out what was doing in the Quarter, savor a Jimmy Charters Gin Fizz and head off for dinner at the Brassarie Lipp or the Dôme... »

Now entering the 50th year of having to ask
WHO KILLED MLK
HERE’S A CONVERSATION
WITH PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR WILD BILLY HICKS

“I’d rather be dead than afraid,” the spirit said to Hicks It was Dr. King’s mantra, but all Wild Billy saw was a poor lost soul who didn’t know he was dead. “I never felt so small as when I realized it was my job to inform Dr. King’s spirit his body was gone »

DARIUS JAMES
DR. SNAKESKIN SPEAKS

Dick Lit
Missionary Positions
fiction by Joe Maynard
Painting by Peter Cross

"dick lit" is here to acknowledge the good, bad and ugly that goes with it, as it celebrates every young boy's quest to get off the next time, and every old man's quest to get off one more time, before there is no time left to get off on... »