Big Hands 6

Just a quick post on a funny, free publication I picked up while in San Francisco, Big Hands 6. Weighing in at just about ten pages, this chapbook by Aaron L. Smith offers a frenetic set of musings on everything from the Moravians who settled Greensboro, NC, in the 1750s to breaking up, drunk uncles and sharing the gun collection one has inherited from one's father with the man with whom one's mother wishes she were in love. (Needless to say, the Freudian implications of this last issue alone are reason enough to give the author's work a second look.) Throughout the proceedings, Smith demonstrates a refined sense of self-deprecating wit and sophistication, as when he observes that reason he admires the Moravians is that they "fully grasped the indisputable suckiness of life here on Earth in ways that modern Americans simply cannot." Overall, a wild, clever read with a punk-rock, do-it-yourself, underground aesthetic -- well worth picking up if you can find a copy.