[Setting: Williamsburg Waterfront]Enter Hipstocrates and PitchforkusPitchforkus: Hipstocrates! Would you like to walk with me along the waterfront and discuss philosophy?Hipstocrates: Why of course, my beautiful Pitchforkus. You know that I cannot resist your slender boy legs in those cut-off jean shorts.Pitchforkus: Hipstocrates, I was wondering if we could inquire into the nature of art?Hipstocrates: You mean art like a shoemaker or horsetrainer or barista?Pitchforkus: No, I meant the kind of art that comes from the soul.Hipstocrates: Ah, my boy, you must mean making Tumblr gifts.Pitchforkus: No... No, that is not what I meant... I was thinking about the high arts, you know, painting, literature, and music. Especially music.Hipstocrates: Oh the classical arts. Yes, yes. I had forgotten they existed. I thought nowadays that art meant photoshopping photographs of cats you reappropriated from google images- people really still paint?Pitchforkus: Oh, well mostly they just paint ironic pictures of their cat... photographs... But there are still some real artists.Hipstocrates: Real artists?Pitchforkus: I mean artists who make things from the soul.Hipstocrates: And you’re sure you don’t mean Tumblr gifts based on screenshots of the new Harry Potter movie?Pitchforkus: Absolutely I don’t mean that.Hipstocrates: Well, perhaps we should investigate what it means to make art that comes from the soul. You said you were interested in music. Would you like to take the musician as an example?Pitchforkus: Yes, Hipstrocrates, I would like to do that.Hipstocrates: Well, first we must have a definition of the musician.Pitchforkus: Well, I would say a musician is anyone who makes music.Hipstocrates: So if I whistle, I am a musician.Pitchforkus: In a sense... yes.Hipstocrates: And if I reverse a track I made on Garage Band of my neighbor verbally abusing his child in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood while slowly playing the zither... then I am a musician.Pitchforkus: I guess...Hipstocrates: You don’t seem happy with your own definition.Pitchforkus: It just seems like anyone who makes a noise can be called a musician. And... I don’t think that’s what I want to say.Hipstocrates: So what do you want to say?Pitchforkus: I want to say that... A musician... Is someone who is able to transform the deepest movement of ideas in his soul into the most radiant splendor of sound!Hipstocrates: That is a very poetic definition Pitchforkus, but how do you know which sounds come from the movement of ideas in the soul, and which do not.Pitchforkus: Whenever someone gets Best New Music on Pitchfork or gets on a few of the biggest blogs, then it follows that their music comes from the soul. Hipstocrates: So you’re saying that internet gatekeepers understand the souls of the artists they write about?Pitchforkus: Yes! Of course. How else could they give such accurate ratings?

HOW TO BE A MISCREANT #5by mister matt gasda

2

Hipstocrates: How do you know they give such accurate ratings?Pitchforkus: Well, after I read their reviews and reblogs- I find that I like the music they recommend! And, whenever I go into coffeeshops in here in Williamsburg, I hear the music I read about. So they must be right!Hipstocrates: What if you only like the music because you think that you are going to like it based on what you’ve read or heard about it?Pitchforkus: That’s impossible!Hipstocrates: Why?Pitchforkus: I don’t know... Because how could it be that everybody agrees that something is good if it isn’t?Hipstocrates: Have you ever seen lemmings Pitchforkus?Pitchforkus: You mean the yellow roundish fruit?Hipstocrates: Yes... Of course... Anyway, let’s get back to our definition. So what you’re saying is that a musician is someone who creates sonic patterns that are blog approved?Pitchforkus: Roughly, yes.Hipstocrates: What if the blogs decide to play a trick and approve a record that doesn’t actually exist. Would that nonexistent record come from a musician?Pitchforkus: Hypothetically, what is the Pitchfork Rating, and what did Cokemachineglow give it?Hipstocrates: 9.3 and 72% respectively.Pitchforkus: And how many tiny mix tapes?Hipstocrates: 4.Pitchforkus: Sounds like a musician to me...Hipstocrates: Even though the music doesn’t actually exist?Pitchforkus: Well according to my definition...Pitchforkus: But wasn’t your definition predicated on the belief that these blogs could see into the souls of the artists?Pitchforkus: Uh, yea.Hipstocrates: And if they don’t have souls, you know, because they don’t exist, what then?Pitchforkus: I’m not sure. You’ve really gotten me tied in knots Hipstocrates.Hipstocrates: I’m delighted to have you in knots my beloved Pitchforkus!Pitchforkus: Hipstrocrates, I’m blushing. But I’m still concerned with what it means to be a musician. If my definition is wrong, there must be a better definition.Hipstocrates: Yes, that must be true, for there is a true form for all things, is there not?Pitchforkus: I didn’t know you were a Neoplatonist-Hipstocrates: Well I mean-Pitchforkus: But yes, of course, true form yatta yatta.Hipstocrates: So, you must try to fix your mind on the eternal Pitchforkus, and tell me what you see.Pitchforkus: I see... secondhand, wool knit sweaters... unseasonably warm in the summer... Radio-head... artisan coffee... my trust fund... irony... and yes! I see something about music.Hipstocrates: And what do you see my dear?Pitchforkus: I see... that, to be a musician, means being so unblogged about that you become really cool until you’re eventually blogged about at which point... people... stop thinking you’re cool, but for that brief moment where you were known to only a few dudes who bought your 7” single in a recordshop made out of old hats in Portland and who thought you were a god! That, that is being a musician!Hipstocrates: Oh, we’ll never get anywhere!

To be continued... 3

4

I decided I would stitchmy life in lovers, croona salty saxophone screech in the steel face of my age, open widein defiant chomp at thepeach. I would be a full and frothing mouth,a fragile fingertiptracing the cracked tileon the subway wall. I would become an antelope.I would know my body,every ache and twitch and subtle palpitation.I would rise. I would jump and land on my feet at the foot of a gap-toothed grin. I would zip and unzip, feel hot breath, clutch and release. I would be happy.I would be grateful to lose as much as grateful to havegrasped.I would feel life,feel only flesh.

SEX SEKETCHpoetry by the lady, kate newman

5

Single of the

WeekThis week’s single will honor the late, great Amy Jade Winehouse. “Love Is A Losing Game” is one of the artist’s many heart-wrenching tracks off her classic, second album Back To Black. Rest in Peace, Amy.

This issue is brought to you by William the Bloody.

6

7by drew shields

We lived by the sea in a ramshackle old house on the shore; where, on the stormiest of days our visiting friends would swear blind they could feel the sea spray christening their foreheads with the sacred water that we then so foolishly took for granted.

Deceptive that seawater, tainted with salt and its invisible demons. Placid on the surface; inviting even. I know now what to be wary of when I’m at the sea-side. The carelessly stubbed out cigarette in the bottom of a favourite teacup can pose as much of a danger as the shadows of something ominous we think we might see lurking beneath the husk of the pier, not fifty yards from where we laid our heads at night.

It wasn’t long before I realised that there’s a very fine line between sink and swim. I think we both learnt that the hard way. Saying that. I know I will bathe in the sea again one day, just as he does now. I sometimes paddle in the rock pools near the shore, engulfed by the shrieks of children not a lifetime younger than myself; but with nothing but the weight of the sunlight upon their bony shoulders.

Swimming against the tide is easier than you’d think. Treading water on the other hand, your muscles will cramp and the cold will get you if the fatigue doesn’t first.

When I was swept out to see that very first time I snatched on for dear life to the nearest hand I felt. The bony fingers only slightly older than my own, yet the heart of their guardian broken and smashed like the debris we’d sometimes collect from the beach when the tide had gone out. I remember once we found an old pocket watch with a long silver chain. To look at, it was perfect, save a scratch or two. Perfect on the outside, but the mechanisms within had shat-tered and cracked. Stuck in the same moment forever, yet still getting things faultless twice a day.

I love those fleeting moments when Father Time, in an instant of madness, lumps us humans with the cogs and wheels and magnets of the jewelry and ornaments that govern our lives here on earth. Those perfect moments Him and Me had made that sea and its watery depths seem no bigger than the puddles we step in.

He swims freely now, strong and determined, slicing through the waves with ease and intent. I sometimes watched from the supposed safety of the band stand

WE LIVED BY THE SEA, HIM AND ME.by the british wonder, karen edith millar

8

near the shore; smoking a rolled up cigarette and drinking black tea from my favourite teacup, always keeping an eye out for freak waves and unexpected rip tides; always willing to jump in and rescue Him from those demons that are not always as invisible as we might think.

I warned Him before he dove off the pier that day in April, head first, eager and willing to grab the next delicate hand that finds his own; warned Him that time waits for no one and no matter how perfect that pocket watch looks, shiny and bright, it’s still useless to all but a magpie.

Summer came and we no longer lived by the sea; forced out by voracious landlords with their beady eyes on the inflated summer rent they could coin from easily hoodwinked foreigners. We knew better than to stay and went our separate ways under the illusion that it wasn’t what we wanted.

I was seduced by the bright lights and allure of a big city further north, ‘take your writing’ they said; ‘there’s plenty for you there’; you know, be-cause there’s always more room in the East End for another Beat kid born forty years too late.

Last I heard he, Him, had moved further inland, yet still within walking dis-tance from the shore if one is feeling particularly energetic. His career’s go-ing well, I sometimes read about him in those magazines he used to mock. I’ve been told he often comes to the city for his work, I wouldn’t know – I’ve never seen him and am not entirely sure I want to.

Life, I have learnt is simply one big game. One big game of ‘tag-you’re –it’ or even ‘hide-and-go-seek’, whichever floats your boat (please do excuse the pun) I should imagine. I know one day I will move back to the seaside, perhaps a different one, further away, I’ve heard there are lovely views way out on the west coast. I know I will jump in again, feet first this time and I will reach for a different set of digits, a different heart, or even just another fish in the deep, dark, watery sea.

The prize catch is already gone. I think I won it before I should have.

9

Coming home this summer has proven to be one of the weird-est trips of all time. Culture shock ensues once I set foot onto the flat lands of the Rio Grande Valley, and return back to my Tex Mex roots and back to parents and 2 AM curfew. It seems like after my parents sent me off to college, they still see the same high school senior they left in Syracuse when I come back. I’m sure this is what it felt like to be that girl whose boobs didn’t come in until she was 18.

Turntable.fm has taken over my life since I’ve been home, and has acted as my primary means of so-cializing. What started off as trolling rooms has ended up in new internet friends with the same tastes in music and the same itch to party. Ironically enough, we’re all just kind of sitting around at home on a website waiting patiently to play a song for each other.

Halfway through summer I was finally able to get over myself and interact with people in my town. I went to see this sweet local band called The Young Maths at a coffee bar. I ran into the old friends I had been avoiding, and met the new people I had been searching for. Some people made me laugh, others made me gag; but it was a night that I really needed. Seeing fresh faces and meeting vaguely interesting guys made for good practice in socializing, which I hadn’t really done since I had been at school. Instead I was playing hermit and moping around my room, feeling sorry for myself and wishing I was anywhere but here.

Opportunity knocked after the show when a bad-boy-gone-good-gone-back-to-bad-again persisted on “chillin one night” (whatever that means these days). So, after constant texts and IM’s, I proceeded to “chill” with him, I was unsurprisingly bored, but at least he bought me an iced coffee. He told me about his fuck the system tattoos and the entire arm piece devoted to his future wife and how he hadn’t been able to snag a girl like me before he had devoted his life to working out. I’ll admit I have a weakness for tattoos, but it was the muscles that were the deal breaker. I thought I had found the thug love I’ve been looking for, but was fooled by a straight up bro. This weekend, I have another vaguely interesting guy to hang out with (we also met at aforementioned show). Don’t worry; I’ve already tested his music taste on turntable.fm so he should be able to live up to my expectations better than the last scrub.

Talking to strangers is almost as thrilling as what I imagine Russian Roulette to be like. Talking to one fresh face after another is refreshing, and not just in the free iced coffee kind of way. It’s nice to talk to people you normally wouldn’t in real life. Working a crowd means light, but genuine conversation that could lead to common interests and new friendships. Talking to strangers in a town that makes no sound reminds me that I’ve still got it, and can get it wherever I go.

H0W 2 B A B0$$ L@DY#2: Talk to Strangersby the queen of ego candy, victoria pilar nava

10

photos of defiance, ohio by ray mcandrew11

When, to a time in civilization’s final hours, when the rainbow sherbet of cultural taxonomy melts into its checkerboard bowl, when the population’s cut short by war,famine, disease, and austerity, the sky fallaciously sympa-thetic, darkening at the wake of its woken sons and daughters, the bits of earth that can now speak and read and play and gambol and observe back onto themselves as so little matter can do—those bits of earth that are now mostly dead—when the huddled masses and scattered misses build wooden castles out of ticky-tacky and wooden swords out of airplane scrap, don armor from kitch-enware and fly flags with their own faces on them: Republic of Jaime,Kingdom Maxine, Union of the Soviet States of Dale, and, at the horror-that-ate yes-terday’s half-life, we develop horns and ESP, or else cancer and necrosis, cockshowing our nascent and partnerless race to the others: Afro-Cancerian, Leonine-American, Myco-Spheniscine-Oxonian, and in one generation they are never seen again, but the world dies when they do, so they carve messages in new-fab languages on elephant tusks, broken from the mouths of their friends, and cave-paint in subway stations, all to record themself and that alone, scribbling and graffitiing balls-out nonsense that years later when a seed finally catches and the post-zygotic barrier is broken like a marathon’s fin-ish line tape, and suddenly our grandchildren’s children stop fucking their siblings, the turbulence in the gene pool settles down, forming a society where archaeologists are needed, these archaeologists will scratch their heads at the artifacts and search frantically for a Rosetta stone amongst a thousand-thousand fragments of a thousand-thousand languages of an era when we could all be friends because we’re strange, all be kings because we’re strong, all be passionate because we’re beautiful, and all be wild because we were just born, the Miscreant looks forward and says, “Why wait?”

THE MISCREANT’S MANIFESTOa sentence by benjamin zuerlein

12

THE MISCREANT’S MANIFESTOa sentence by benjamin zuerlein

art by mirrah stoller13

Scaramouch runs sideways

Cobblestones eating at your spine

“Falling is easy,” they whisper

Never mind never more never forgotten

Shadow houses watch the plutonic platony of plantain shaped sorrowed men

They are lost

Awakened angrily agressing for at and from ours and theirs,

When clouds begin to love

Their nubile necromantics narrow knots of nancy bongs

Drafting the night near

“All along,” they sang

It was on the cobblestones.

THE RAIN A POEM OCCASIONALLY TITLED THE COBBLESTONESby jillian markowitz and david faes

“THE OVERTURE” EP IS AVALABLE NOW!

VISIThttp://squaresquaresquare.com/sirjove/download/theoverture/

FOR YOUR FREE DOWNLOD!

14

15

One of the first things you notice on antidepressants is that it’s impossible to cry. From the ages of eleven to fifteen, therefore, as my friends died around me and generally everything was terrible, I could not cry. I could only imitate crying, like a sort of spiritual dry-heaving. When I went off the meds (to go on different, better meds), I began to cry again. Like, a lot.

Nina Simone’s “Why (The King of Love Is Dead)” made me cry. Martin Luther King Day last year, I found myself staring into my bathroom mirror as midnight approached, my glasses stained with tears I had no time to consciously suppress.

Lil B’s “Real Life” (especially the verse about the mother who dies of cancer) made me cry. Without fail, this song makes me feel like a changed man in four minutes.

I cried, in a yelping outburst, listening to “Tears Dry on Their Own” driving to class two mornings after Amy Winehouse drank a bottle of vodka and lost herself on ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, and ketamine. Am I the only fool in the world who ever held out for her to fix herself? I remember my little sister discovering Amy through my music collection. I remember her knowing and loving Amy more than I even had. With all the distance fourteen years of co-existence has wedged between us (my fault), music is still the only sure place she and I can always meet. It took me two days and a hangover to listen to Amy again. I did listen to In Utero four or five times, though. Maybe Amy was the Kurt Cobain of soul. The twenty-seven club is such a cruel joke.

Basically every episode of Six Feet Under (especially anything with Nate) makes me crumple into a wet mass of tears. I think, during the three-week period where basically all I did was watch this show, I prob-ably turned off a cute co-worker or two with my ramblings about mortality. I won’t say it was worth it, but if felt pretty good.

Lost made me cry a lot. As a Korean American, I was too angry at J. J. Abrams to cry properly when he murdered Jin and Sun. (I could go into why I think Abrams is probably a racist, but I won’t.) For all its sentimentalism and pretension, I still experienced every new episode of Lost as if it were happening to me. I miss Charlie more than I miss most of my high school friends.

Listening to Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man the day after he died (I had only found out very late the night before) made me cry. I tried so hard to keep myself together, playing this album in the family car as we drove up to the lake with some friends. They should play “I Think I’ll Call It Morning” at my funeral.

Tupac Shakur makes me cry. Listening to Pac is a frightfully emotional experience for me. “So Many Tears” remains the only song the full lyrics of which I would be willing to tattoo on my body. Pac makes way more sense to me and seems so much more like me than any of these prep school indie jerks I have so much actually in common with. Kurt Vonnegut said that (paraphrasing) when he listened to music, he knew there must be a God. I’m inclined to agree.

There’s a certain scene in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter that I can hardly describe without the feeling like the breath is being sucked from my lungs. I cried myself stupid watching that movie on a date. I cried too, the next day, when a friend of mine swallowed two bottles of hydrocodone and barricaded her dorm room and we all piled into a car bound for the hospital. We all cried, and we prayed, and we had no idea what was next.

I find I don’t really know what I feel until I cry.

UNTITLED PIECEby colin brineman

WANT MORE MISCREANT?

Thank you all for reading this here 6TH issue of ‘The Miscreant.’ And a million thanks to all who submitted! With each issue, the magazine grows as more and more people send in their narratives, poems and artwork. And I hope to see more and more people join ‘The Miscreant’ ranks! Please never hesitate to come to Lizzy or I for ideas on what to submit, or to provide feedback on what we should add or what miscreants you’d like to see more from. Please visit the Facebook page for updates on what we have cookin’! See y’all next issue.

Send your cake recipes, limericks, short stories, pho-tography, etc to: themiscreantt@gmail.com.

Love,

the miscreant