Michael Ventura
Aug 1, 20196 min read
“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, 201916 min read
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, 201911 min read
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, 20196 min read
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, 20198 min read
'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, 20191 min read
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, 201814 min read
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, 201812 min read
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, 20189 min read
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, 20187 min read
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, 20189 min read
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, 20186 min read
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, 20188 min read
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...
