A Studio Visit With Kari Gatzke When I visit Kari Gatzke’s studio, which I have done a couple of times now, there’s coffee waiting, very good coffee, and cookies. This is, outwardly, a reunion of friends. Yet at the same time, this encounter features an underlying atmosphere of ritual observance…

Some People Talking in a Bar We were sitting in a bar and the song playing was “Keep Hope Alive” by The Crystal Method and Keith said “Wasn’t this song in that John Woo movie The Replacement Killers?” and Sarah said “No, it’s the theme song from Third Watch,” and…

Teenage Employments in Pre-AIDS New York (Note: this is the third of a series of three posts. Here’s the first. Here’s the second. There’s an important context for these reminiscences, one I’ve written of elsewhere: my parents were bohemians, artists, leftist refuseniks against the mainstream — and this was New…

An Afternoon in Cementerio de la Chacarita The strange thing about the city of the dead, my companion was telling me, is that there is only one way into it — well, there’s really two ways, if you want to be exact, but there’s only one way to do it…

A. A Poem, and a Book of Poems First, the poem.

Lyrics, Zines, Comics & Other Termite Collaborations Someone recently asked me to supply a complete bibliography of my writing. I couldn’t. It was too much to think about or organize. A simple list of my published books wouldn’t be hard to generate. Those stories and essays I’ve judged worth reprinting…