• 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...»

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... »

• 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... »

• 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 »

• 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. … »