Volume III, Issue 6

There a difference between a town with great music and a town with a great music scene. This might be overstating it a bit, and I’m no musicologist, but it seems that the difference is that a “music scene” is more than just half a dozen great bands with options on where to dance… »

Fucking And Wank – Sister Cities!

I’ll admit it. I still giggle when someone farts. If someone farts at a funeral, I lose my mind completely in paroxysms of laughter that are completely inappropriate and tend to piss of the surviving relatives. I don’t know what it is. In many ways, I’m a mature, thoughtful… »

While Congressman Joe Wilson’s, “You lie!” distracted public attention from President Obama’s September 9  health reform speech to the Congress, the President’s real fib that evening went almost unnoticed.

“I’m not the first President to take up this cause” (without a doubt), “but I am determined to be the last.”  No way!  Whatever happens this… »

When the rain comes down in Bangkok the grit and filth of Kho San Road isn’t washed away but pushed around. You wade through it as slur-pee cups and used condoms swirl around your ankles. Rats make for the high ground of dumpsters. The T-shirt sellers, trinket hawkers, prostitutes and tourists are pushed off… »

For some of us back in the day – or maybe just the über-alienated twenty-something nihilist pop-culture junkies like me – the movie Taxi Driver was our Wizard Of Oz. And if Travis Bickle was our gun-toting, whore-saving Dorothy, then the piss-yellow brick road that led to the Emerald City was New York City’s… »

If you were in Guatemala on June 28th of this year, you likely heard a rather loud bump in the night coming from our South Eastern border. That evening the Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was rousted from his bedchambers, still in his jammies, and hustled off to Costa Rica on a one-way flight, courtesy… »

I graduated from Syracuse University in 1988. The following year a bunch of us made our way back to visit, and get very drunk with, friends who were still tangled in those ivied halls. I don’t recall much of the weekend which was sort of the plan. But I recall Sunday afternoon clearly.

There were… »

Freedom comes in many forms in America, and new forms are constantly being created. The latest has been freedom from basic financial security. The weakened economy has given corporatists an excuse to, as they say, “let workers go.” Which sounds as if companies are granting employees some sort of freedom: “Go on George, twenty… »

The pain ripped through my chest like a dozen steak-knives, snapping me over at the waist, leaving me staring and grimacing at the floor. I was on a PATH train headed back into the city after a night of house sitting in Hoboken.

Well, this is it, I thought, I’m going to die right here…. »

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Cobbling together La Cuadra has always been like a drunken acrobat doing a high wire act over a blazing fire. There is a good chance things will get messy, but in all likelihood the end result will be oddly entertaining.

We begin the process in hermetically sealed rooms, insulated from the outside world, with the… »