Michael Ventura
- Aug 1, 2019
- 6 min
“Can’t You Get It Through Your Thick Head!” In Memoriam – Summer 2019
1. Mikey! – Guido – or was it Marco? – What were my other pet names for you And yours for me, Michael Irving Berger, Who could never say...
James BigBoy Medlin
- Jul 26, 2019
- 16 min
Vietnam: Getting In / Getting Out
A Three-Part Account of My Experience PART I: Dreams, Schemes and the End of Innocence 1969 was a year of contrasts and contradictions....
Bob Brown
- Jun 16, 2019
- 11 min
The Rent Horse Kid
At some point during my fourteenth year I decided I wanted a life on the range; riding a horse, chasing dogies, strumming lonesome cowboy...
Bill Bentley / Photos by Ken Hoge (top) and Bob
- Jun 13, 2019
- 6 min
Never Another / Roky Erickson, R.I.P.
Every 15-year-old needs a hero. It's a year when the world really starts turning at a faster rate: a lot of the old toys of childhood...
James Medlin / Art: Dan Hubig
- May 15, 2019
- 8 min
'WHY NOT?' / The Path to the Florida Years
From the Writer Formerly Known as "BigBoy" Yes, I was born on a mountaintop (no longer there) in Santa Anna, Texas. No, I was not ridden...
Elizabeth Nelson, Oxford American magazine
- Feb 26, 2019
- 1 min
Outside Sources / A Night with Lou Reed
Part 1: Northport Forty-two minutes northeast of Lou Reed’s hometown of Freeport, New York, I am in my childhood bedroom, curiously...
George Rains
- Oct 18, 2018
- 14 min
Life by the Beat / Stories from the Road, Vol. 1
George Rains has had a life fuller than most, as exemplified both by his great musical reputation and by the following stories, each told...
Peter Chapa
- Oct 16, 2018
- 12 min
El Casino
Peter Chapa wrote this childhood reminiscence of Hebbronville’s El Casino Theatre in 1973 El Casino was the Mexican cine or “el mono,” as...
Clay Coppedge
- Aug 27, 2018
- 9 min
Hub City Hip
The first time most of the wider world ever heard of Lubbock was after several people saw a group of bright lights zooming across the...
Michael Ventura
- Aug 20, 2018
- 7 min
Ventura at 4am / Naunie, 1935 - 2018
I’ll fly away, Oh Glory! I’ll fly away! In the mornin’! When the shadows of this life have gone I’ll fly away! One of her Gospel...
Clay Coppedge
- Jul 25, 2018
- 9 min
Unsafe at Any Rate or How I Moved To Austin
The first car I bought after I left home was a 1961 Corvair station wagon, the car that Ralph Nader wrote about in Unsafe at Any Speed....
Frank Browning
- Jul 24, 2018
- 6 min
Sartre, Spinoza ... and Cruising at the Café de Flore
I was 21 and eager to experience the Paris of my intellectual heroes. In some ways, I got more than I asked for. May '69. Hardly a year...
Clay Coppedge
- May 31, 2018
- 8 min
Fool’s Gold
My own experience verifies what cops have told me — that 10 percent of the criminal population commits 90 percent of all the crimes they...