Slackjaw: The Purgatory War
Rolling corpses, hot glue and an endless James Brown song
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Author Archive
Be Seeing You
Keeping a low profile, on and off the grid.
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Sclerosis Neurosis: Having Squiggy on the brain during the MRI.
I don’t care who you are, you just don’t ever want to hear a doctor use a phrase like "degenerative neuromuscular disease" after you’ve explained the symptoms you’ve been experiencing lately. Even if it’s just an off-hand speculation on his part, it’s just not one you want to hear. I don’t want Jerry Lewis singing
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Strange Bookfellows: Literary sympathy from an accidental encounter
Back in the early 1980s, when I was living on the South Side of Chicago, I used to take long strolls through empty weekend early mornings whenever I could. Sometimes–given the weather and if my workload allowed it–I would walk for hours. I didn’t really have much else to do. Usually, I’d walk along 57th
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Windbags: QUack advice is bad for your health.
It was 1989, and the internist the insurance company assigned me to in Philly was flummoxed. I’d given her a list of the peculiar symptoms that had plagued me in the previous weeks–dizziness, blackouts, numbness, explosive anger–but she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. All these things, after all, were happening while I was
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Slackjaw: Spelling Cats and Dogs: Teaching special ed ain’t easy, but it beats gym class.
When I was in junior high, the guidance counselor–a tall, heavily cologned man with giant cartoonish bat ears–got it in his head that I would make a fine tutor. Not really understanding what I was getting into, I agreed with him. My first assignment, I was told, was to help some fellow students spruce up
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Rozz Williams: The Christian Death provocateur rises again.
TWO years before his suicide in 1998, former Christian Death front man Rozz Williams teamed up with Philly-based singer and composer David E. Williams for one show (and one show only). At the time, Rozz had a few solo albums out, and David’s brilliant, demented, heavily orchestrated sex-and-death ballads had won him acclaim the world
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The Prisoner: File ||1, 2, 3
While fans argue that it was cancelled for being too far ahead of its time, it’s always been pretty clear to me that The Prisoner only ran for 17 episodes in 1967 and ’68 because it tended to make viewers’ brains hurt. The show combined far-out psychedelic visuals–usually associated with stupid hippie crap–with a profound,
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Slackjaw: The Big Guy Has Left the Building
Not too many people ever met Guy in person, and that’s too bad. Even my upstairs neighbor, who’s been living there for the past 10 years, only met him for the first time a few weeks ago. And like everyone else who met that damn cat for the first time, as soon as Guy padded
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Slackjaw: Screaming Porch of Horror
A few days ago, while Morgan and I were sitting at a back table at the bar, I realized something for the first time. Something, to paraphrase the great Arte Johnson, both interesting and stupid. Now, a lot of things frighten me. More things than used to, actually. I hope I have the common sense,
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