This wave caught down the Gulf Coast near South Padre Island.
This wave caught down the Gulf Coast near South Padre Island.
Mikala Jones photo
You’d have to go out in the Gulf and sometimes tie up to a platform and wait until further instructions came in. Many of the platforms were (and are) caps on existing wells. They have no crew. The captain backs the boat in close to one of the legs that has ladder rungs welded onto […]
Video of two friends and I skating on a makeshift skateboard ramp in the parking lot of Boxcar Billy’s and Pat Magee’s Surf Shop. The surf museum says it’s 1976, Boxcar Billy’s is there, it had to be at least 1979 (it was a new bar and attracted a lot of people’s attention and business). […]
Abwesenheit: Gedichte by Wolfgang Hilbig My rating: 5 of 5 stars The poems in abwesenheit (translated: absence) range from what appear to be straight forward denunciations of the socialist police state Wolfgang Hilbig was living in when he wrote them (1965 to 1977), to very lyrical metaphors with image densities approaching that of the poetry […]
Wolfgang Hilbig’s first collected volume of poetry, published by S. Fischer, was titled abwesenheit — in English absence. Hilbig grew up in East Germany, where writing and individual expression of any kind was subject to review and control by state functionaries. Michael Opitz, of one of Wolfgang Hilbig’s biographers, went digging through East German Stasi […]
Thanks to Tim Stegall for writing some pretty awesome music articles, many of which show up on Alternative Press. It takes me hours to read articles like this. Hours. I read. I listen to a song. I listen to the song again. I think about how the song affected my life (or not). Here some […]
Recently browsing the New Direction’s author list, I saw a title by Nathanial Tarn, The Hölderliniae. There is deep image density in Hölderlin’s poetry, the meter unregulated, and no particular dedication to rhyme; his syntactic playfulness upsets expectation when reading. I quote Tarn: It took a hundred years for Hölderlin to be recognized not only […]
How the mistakes and missteps of two men, one nearly 60 years old and the other 30, contributed to — or even caused — the English language debut of one of the most renowned and powerful German writers in recent history to be delayed by a quarter of a century: In the fall of 1989 […]
The first thing I ever read by Buk (as he was called by his crazed fans) was his book Factotum. There are some scenes in Factotum that I alluded to in One Punk Summer. Also influential in OPS was the basic idea of the factotum: One who does any and all things to earn a […]