Fresh Raw Cuts

Guilty of Everything: Herbert Huncke in Amsterdam — review by Mark McCawley

Posted on April 27, 2013 by urbangraffito Posted in Audio, Compact Discs, Ephemera, Fresh Raw Cuts, Review | Leave a comment

Guilty of Everything: Herbert Huncke in Amsterdam

 

Reading at Ins & Outs Press

 

review by Mark McCawley

 

Guilty of Everything- Herbert Huncke in Amsterdam“Hunke, whom you’ll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert, sadsweet, dark, beat, just out of jail, martyred, tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce new worlds with a shrug.”

~ Jack Kerouac, “Now it’s Jazz”, Desolation Angels, Chapter 77.

Hobo, narcotics addict, merchant marine, gay hustler, petty thief, convict, storyteller, writer — Herbert Huncke began living an underground life after dropping out of high school in his sophomore year in Chicago, drawn to the underbelly of city life, and quickly began learning how to support himself as a professional drifter and small time grifter.

An autodidact, and primarily anti-academic, Herbert Huncke, whose lifestyle and easy manner of speaking influenced so many, (eventually famous authors and poets, e.g. Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg) coined the term “beat” to name a generation.
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Mosquitoes & Whisky by Chris Walter — review by Mark McCawley

Posted on April 15, 2013 by urbangraffito Posted in eBooks, Fresh Raw Cuts, Review | Leave a comment

Mosquitoes & Whisky by Chris Walter

 

review by Mark McCawley

 

mosquitoes & whisky coverMosquitoes & Whisky
by Chris Walter
GFY Press, 223pp, June 27 2012
Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
ASIN: B008XP5XLU
Literary Memoir

Chris Walter is an underground literary diamond in the rough, unapologetic, unpolished, hitherto uncut by the Canadian literary establishment. Laced with booze, sex, drug abuse, poverty, despair, low income labour, violence, deviance, criminality, and dark humour — Mosquitoes & Whisky is both Walter’s first title published by his aptly and sardonically named Gofuckyerself Press, in 2001, as well as his first coming-of-age literary memoir (or his initial “autobiographical punkalogue”).

What shocks the reader even more than the absolute urban desolation of circa 1970s Winnipeg — which acts as a microcosm for any small urban prairie city (Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina) — is the post-sixties conservative zeitgeist that pervades Walter’s memoir. It details the author’s struggles to escape his own liberal parents deteriorating marriage that mirrored so many other children’s parents surrounding them. Mosquitoes & Whisky gives candid snapshots of implied or impending physical, emotional, and verbal violence. One review I came across could not imagine how Walter could possibly become so angry.
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The Plastic Factory by Ron Kolm — review by Mark McCawley

Posted on March 31, 2013 by urbangraffito Posted in Chapbooks, Fresh Raw Cuts, Review | 1 Comment

The Plastic Factory by Ron Kolm

 

review by Mark McCawley

 

Plastic-Factory-front-coverThe Plastic Factory
by Ron Kolm
ISBN: 978-1-57027-236-3
Autonomedia, $5.00 US
32 pp, 8.5 x 5.5, saddle-stitched
Fiction

“I try to remember in the course of my day-to-day life that there are people out there doing things that are not very healthy… I try to keep that in mind that there are people dying out there; that the very things that make our lives easier are making other people’s lives worse… I use to have this whole equation that for every so called “plus” there was a “minus” — if you were a well to do family that had all these things, that somebody somewhere was sacrificing something…” ~Ron Kolm, commenting on ‘The Plastic Factory’, The Idiom Magazine Podcast #2

Originally published in five parts and as a 1989 Red Dust Pamphlet — In The Plastic Factory, Ron Kolm draws from his own experiences working in a plastic factory in his work of post-realist fiction.
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Smash the Sun Alight & Iranian Doom by Sterbus — review by Mark McCawley

Posted on March 9, 2013 by urbangraffito Posted in Audio, Compact Discs, Fresh Raw Cuts, Review | Leave a comment

Smash the Sun Alight & Iranian Doom

by Sterbus

 

review by Mark McCawley

 
Smash the Sun AlightBorn on August 14, 1979, in Rome, Italy, Sterbus — who also goes by the name Emanuele Sterbini — is a contemporary DIY musician whose work is heavily influenced by the RIO Movement (Rock In Opposition), progressive rock, avant-prog, avant-garde and experimental music. Sterbus makes regular use of dissonance and atonality in his songs, along with complex and unpredictable song arrangements and the inclusion of disparate musical genres. His use of polyrhythms, highly complex time signatures, free and experimental improvisation make such influences as Zappa, Cardiacs, Henry Cow quite easy to identify in the music of Sterbus. On tracks such as “Gay Cruise”, “Wooden Spheres + Heartquakes”, and “A Sigh of Relief”, Sterbus combines playful elements of progressive rock and alt rock with pop rock sensibilities in new and exciting variations.
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NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor by bart plantenga — a review by Mark McCawley

Posted on February 25, 2013 by urbangraffito Posted in eBooks, Fresh Raw Cuts, Review | Leave a comment

NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor

by bart plantenga

 

review by Mark McCawley

 
Nysin1NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor
by bart plantenga
Barncott Press, 140pp, December 5, 2012
Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
ASIN: B00AJ5SDFK
Fiction, Travel

“NY in spring is backtalk & edgy. Attitudes leaking from cooped-up psyches.” – Guy Trebay

NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor combines elements and techniques of the novella, the travel diary, flash fiction, and the prose poem in an insightful and intriguing work of metafiction which renders and revisits New York City as only someone who has lived there possibly can — through the memories and imagination of an inhabitant:”I, like other New Yorkers, became “inured to the ravages,” as Flora Lewis described it, “around them they scarcely notice anymore.” This deadening of senses & morality allows us to believe we’re outwitting our environment.” This is how plantenga describes the Unloaded Camera Snapshot idea in the introduction, documenting “snapshots” of everyday life at a rate of 1 per day: “zen blinks, pop flashes, heated moments, & satori-sloshed sidewalk haikus re-pollinated my existence with the fecund details of the quotidian…using my third eye as a macro lens & suddenly noticing things again.” Ghosts of one New York mingling with another like passing pedestrians playing hopscotch in phenomenological detail amid urban decay while battling violently for the permanence and dominance of vision and memory — a blend of the real and the imaginary:
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