WRITING THE LOWER EAST SIDE: It Might Change But It Won't Go Away

Sensitive Skin: Selected Writing, (2016-2018)

Sensitive Skin Books (2019)

 

A couple of years back, the newly resurrected Sensitive Magazine was feted at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, in a show described as a coming together on the Lower East Side (Loisada, or LES, depending on who's doing the talking).

 

'Ventilated veterans and legendary pink dot swallowers meeting fresh Midwestern émigrés,' reported The Spirit, a local paper for the Upper West Side of Manhattan:’ Old-timers…represented Loisaida in its glory days… more recent denizens brought the fly to the spry Everyone was on their best (if not soberest) behavior, old scores were settled and newer feuds begun.'

 

A blow against gentrification, the event was just one in a series of determined efforts to defy the forces of time and change, and make a stand for the netherworld of NYC’s downtown that has served as a platform for underground, alternative, boho-savant funk for over a century now.

 

Fast forward to 2019. The people at Sensitive Skin are at it again, with their first-ever print edition of selected writings from online postings.

 

Entitled ‘Sensitive Skin: Selected Writings 2016-2018,’ the collection is nearly 300 pages of prime cull, drawn from some of the best works published on line by the magazine's editors since going online exclusively in 2015.

 

"Up until 2015 we were producing hard copies of the magazine," says editor Bernard Meisler, "including art and written work. I would then post the articles online over the next six months or sow, with reviews, etc, sprinkled in."

 

That's when Meisler saw what he thought was a better way to go about his business. "I realized in this crazy modern world, I was doing it ass-backward -- I decided to just post an article of two every week, and then release an anthology of selected writing."

 

Aside from any possible marketing lesson to be had (Sensitive Skin online has reportedly doubled its monthly traffic), the publication of 'Selected Writing: 2016-18' is a safe-place for those who seek to hold in their hand a tangible product from what is proving to be a durable, linear continuum linking together the moveable feast known as the American avante garde.

 

One of the prize catches in the collection has got to be the publication of two letters from Timothy Leary to Ginsberg, one from Zinuatemejo Mexico (1963), the other a 1969 letter from Berkeley.

Reproduced by photograph the letters are fascinating enough for their content -- but take the communication beyond the informationally interesting to something far more palpable. (And reflective of what letters really looked like during the manual typewriter era -- old!).

 

While not strictly focused on the writers of the Lower East Side, among the 300 pages are many contributions from luminary poets whose names will be more than familiar to latter-day writers who continue to call LES spiritual home -- or even just a way station. Among them, find Ron Kolm, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Puma Perl, Valery Oisteanu. Chavisa Woods,Jeffrey Cyphers Wright. Eve Packer, Larissa Shmailo; Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky.

 

Hal Sirowitz. D. Nurske.

The now-legendary Emily XYZ.

 

John Farris, Max Blagg, Carl Watson, Thurston Moore, Wanda Phipps.

 

It should be said that Sensitive Skin is fearless at the deep end of the literature pool (Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein), yet not above wry epithet ('Prince died the day we got married/and though our love was strong//things got worse from there" -- Joel Landmine in The 

Second half of the Second Decade of the Twenty-first Century).

 

And the prose is particularly engaging. Powerful and wide-ranging fiction and non-fiction from the likes of Francine Witte, David Huberman and LA's Rich Ferguson. Frequently, we find a subversive LES counter-cultural infusion, indicative of the origins and editorial predelictions of the editors.

 

Some of it is American Jewish ghetto street talk, sweet and menacing as a dirty needle, as in Vincent Zangrillo's 'The End of the World': "Mark wanted to see how fast he could burn through the $10,000 inheritance from Grandpa Dave, who sold shmatta to Hendrix on St Marks, and who despite his gnomic wisdom -- Never eat at Katz' deli they serve horse meat! -- did a dry dive out of his 22nd floor co-op window, so Mark's plan was to burn through the $10,000 and get addicted."

 

Some of it lives on the edge between avante garde and Caribbean/Latinx societies (All the Dominican cooks and busboys are filled with amor writes Coree Spencer in 'Carmen Miranda on East 5th Street,' they try in vain to get all us white waitresses to move our his like hot-blooded Latinas).

 

And some of it is unabashedly choice Punk Nostalgia, blending gonzo journalism with Seinfeld 'show about nothing' -- as in Emily XYZ's 'meeting Joey Ramone' (Went down to Punk to return the raincoat. No one was there.); or Jurgen Schneider's RMX (Amy Winehouse staggers in shortly before midnight. It doesn't go without notice how unwell she is.).

 

Here’s Drew Hubner, in 'The Dance Band at the End of the World':

 

Texas is not a good place to run out of junk. This was the story (Jim) Gilroy was telling Rockets and dark Tim, who represented the Replacements who were playing after Sid. He wanted his band to open for Sid. He didn't think it was a good idea for them to try to follow the Pistols and he had a real good point.

 

The Pistols are an end not a beginning! He says very seriously then laughs at himself for sounding so absurd...

 

Sid Vicious comes by and says hello in his way which is to say hardly at all. Nancy Spungen does all the talking. There's a beautiful tapestry tablecloth Sid uses to wipe his hands and lighting a cigarette, burns it.

 

After a minute or two it's the irritated unfortunate Capote who smells the burning cloth and makes a noise, half porcine half rodent. Dramatically he rises to leave.

 

This is the last straw! I want to move to a new table at least! he says to Andy Warhol, who tries to assuage him with champagne.

 

Sensitive Skin itself has gone through a number of changes since it first came out in 1991, partnering with the Living Theatre to host release parties and benefits, while publishing key downtown New York writers. Over the years, it has moved from print to online, but remained true to its mission -- keeping its finger on the pulse of established contributors to the American avante garde (Herbert Hunke, Gary Indiana, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jack Micheline, Lawrence Ferlinghetti) and key international figures like Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova, who have informed their work.

 

I recommend this collection highly -- no deep dive into the asphalt, but full immersion into the latest iteration of an American aesthetic well worth savoring, one that may change but won't go away.