John Yohe

The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously by Slavoj Zizek Melville House, 2018 336 pages / Amazon / Melville House     Although the subtitle of Slavoj Zizek’s…

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist: And Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth Graywolf Press, 2017 296 pages / Amazon / Graywolf   Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist is a…

At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell Other Press, 2017 448 pages / Amazon / Other Press   By a weird coincidence, I picked up,…

In the middle of his live solo “7718(3A17)” on the Talas album Live Speed On Ice, after some tapping and scale-running pyrotechnics, Billy Sheehan cuts the distortion and, still tapping…

The Ukrainian band JINJER are a bit of a mash-up of metal sub-genres: they have the cookie monster growl, and sometimes can sound death metal-y, but especially with this third…

The Troubadour was the only club in the West LA area that featured metal bands, versus the Sunset Strip glam metal scene of 87/88—the only place my friends and I…

At their best, monsters are metaphors for ideas, or cultural phenomena, in real life that scare us, from the most basic ‘Other’/foreigner to, say, sex/desire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Zombies…

The comics They got it all wrong. The old ones depicted me as this always smiling happy-go-fucking-lucky masked crimefighter, shooting arrows with boxing gloves on the end. I mean, please.…

Let’s not ask each other anything Not have to explain anything Not tell Not confess   Let’s not talk about ex-partners Let’s not talk about our therapists Let’s not talk…

Certain Magical Acts by Alice Notley Penguin Books, 2016 160 pages – Penguin / Amazon   In the first few lines of her book, Certain Magical Acts, Alice Notley gives us…

Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born by Anne Waldman Coffee House Press, 2016 160 pages – Coffee House / Amazon   Anne Waldman is one of the…

Pretentiousness: Why It Matters by Dan Fox Coffee House Press, 2016 144 pages – Coffee House / Amazon   Some might take a book about pretentiousness as a bit, well, pretentious—especially if…

A Woman of Property by Robyn Schiff Penguin, 2016 96 pages – Penguin / Amazon   I made the mistake of glancing at the Penguin press release for Robyn Schiff’s A Woman…

They And We Will Get Into Trouble For This by Anna Moschovakis Coffee House Press, 2016 100 pages – Coffee House / Amazon   They And We Will Get Into Trouble…