DECEMBER
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue. We’re really honored this month to share photography from Paris, art from Ottawa, a brilliant article written in Tokyo about a Ugandan record label, along with beautiful poetry, memoir, and more.
Frédéric Carrayol: Lost Images From the Sink
This craftsman, as he likes to define himself, photographer and shooter, freezes a free and wild nature with the sandstone of his wanderings across the continents. Then he returned it on paper with coffee toning, complex emulsions and rare treatments.
Featured Artist: Sharon VanStarkenburg
My work is blasphemous: I take symbols of proper, normative femininity and make them transgressive within contexts in which the female protagonists resist and reinvent their meanings.
Decentering the electronic underground – The fearlessly experimental sound of Nyege Nyege Tapes
Pure dedication to putting out the most diverse, cutting edge, experimental music currently bubbling out of the African underground…or anywhere else for that matter
Fiction: Everybody Plays the Fool
The lights flicker and I fall to the ground in the tolling darkness.
My Pop Life: All Along The Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
“It was a terrifying record, an exhilarating record, it was everything I ever hoped to be, everything I feared, a prophet crying in the wilderness”
Breaking Away & Seamus Heaney
It’s deceptively spare and simple in a manner that hides a genius of elegance and grace, which places it in the tradition of Ozu or Rohmer.
Why I Love: Little Fugitive
Francois Truffaut: “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie The Little Fugitive.”
Thinking Makes it So: Platon Karataev and Epictetus
The harder his position became and the more terrible the future, the more independent of that position in which he found himself were the joyful and comforting thoughts, memories, and imaginings that came to him
Double-crusted Savory Pie (Vegetarian)
A perfect vegetarian holiday meal. It’s hearty and flavorful, and it has real center-of-the-plate, star-of-the-meal attention-grabbing qualities.
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NOVEMBER
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
An Interview with Carmen Cartiness Johnson
“I am concerned about getting the idea on canvas. So I just go with the flow.”
My Pop Life: Help! by The Beatles
They were at the height of their power, where they would stay for another 4 years. I was at the depths of my weakness, and forever afterward lived in fear of repeating it. I built my heart’s castle wall from the mud of Selmeston village. I wouldn’t start to unravel it until I was in my mid-fifties.
Katherine Minott: Finding My Scissors
With collage, all things are possible. In this surreal realm of juxtaposition and fantasy, new worlds are born.
Is 20th century “classical” music really that difficult?
(And Magpies Mix Tape) Firstly, a confession. I am not a musicologist and I cannot play any of those serious woodwind, brass or stringed orchestral instruments. However, I listen to a huge range of what always ends up being called Classical Music, even though that term really describes music written in the period from around […]
Chekhov’s Gooseberries & The Student
He went on eating greedily, and saying all the while: ‘How good they are! Do try one!’ It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
Wildflowers in the Fall
The scenes of fall wildflowers seem accidental, and because we’re often alone with them, more intimate.
Fiction: In the Weeds
They’re not meant to last very long, these votives, these penny candles.
My Pop Life: The Carnival is Over by The Seekers
“Most of my traumatic moments, my lonely moments, my brave moments have been hidden inside my personal soundtrack. The music made it all bearable.”
Why I Love: Melody
I could imagine the filmmakers watching the dailies and brimming over with gladness that they’d captured the shots they’d captured, and then adding just the right soundtrack, editing it perfectly, and sitting in the dark, full of joy, watching the finished movie.
Gateau chipolata
“L’intérieur du gateau doit rester moelleux.” Says my cook book. Oh yes, say I, the interior of the cake should stay soft!
As ever, submit, support, subscribe. And have a look at Tidings of Magpies on Instagram.
OCTOBER
Featured Artist: Julia Soboleva
Julia Soboleva’s images seem to come from another world, a world that lures you in, ominous and irresistible. The light is different here: eerie, but so beautiful, glowing through cracks in the darkness.
Homage to Manhatta
The rediscovery of an old film by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler inspired me to watch the view every morning with anticipation. Sometimes the old, dirty windows in the office further embellished the buildings with new and ethereal qualities of light. Each day, the weather and changing seasons brought a new discovery to what I was witnessing.
Starling Arcadia
“We cling to narratives of our association with a local ecosystem, and want to believe that we fight as hard as we can against that ecosystem’s eventual disappearance under a light-blotting alien invasion as if it were our own lives and works at stake. Part of that may be delusory – this ecosystem is not our own, has no love for us, and it is our own force that keeps it from eradicating our efforts and our lifeways.”
Why I Love: Diary of a Country Priest
Such a strange film, so beautifully full of questions and doubts. In the end “What does it matter? All is grace.”
An Artist Abroad: A Trip to Venice and Paris
Memories of a trip to the Venice Architecture Biennale and Parisian cafés and museums. And some thoughts on travel in a time of Covid.
Flash Fiction: Hallelujah
The sky on one side stayed bright as day, but along the other it was dark and purpling like a bad bruise. The trees were caught up in the glow, but their leaves were all turned upside down, stark and white against the dark sky. The weather was coming, it was coming fast.
Hip Hop Pop Art: Sari Lennick
Sari Lennick’s bright vibrant collages combine pages from art school aesthetic theory texts with iconic irreverent hip hop and pop song lyrics.
Why I Love: You (Letter to a Relative)
“I feel I’ve done so little to show you the way.
You’ve always been able to find it on your own”
Why I love: William Carlos Williams (on his birthday)
His work and his career as a writer seem to embody so much of what I value in art: a desire to shape the way you see the world around you through creativity, but always grounded in an appreciation of the ordinary, the every day. His writing and his thoughts on the writers of his time are full of generosity, sincerity, and a constant questioning examination of life and art.
SEPTEMBER
Featured Photographer: Patrick Joust: Inside/Outside Light.
Patrick Joust’s urban photography seems to capture a moment between night and day and a place between spaces humans have made.
Featured Artist: Raynard (Tawma) Lalo
Raynard Lalo (whose Hopi name is Tawma, meaning “singer”) has been creating traditional kachina carvings since the age of 15.
My Pop Life: Step, by Vampire Weekend
My look back at an eventful, dysfunctional, random musical life.
Fiction: Moving Day
The sixth trip up the stairs I see them. Sometimes you can go the whole day without seeing anyone, and I thought it was going to be like that. Little did I know.
Magpie Mix Tape: Lack of Knowledge About Birds
A selection of songs chosen with a lack of knowledge of birds, but a wealth of knowledge of music.
Food: Eggplant Tian and memories of Provence
Memories of a perfect summer solstice in Provence, and an unforgettable eggplant dish.
Film: Atget, Renoir, Rohmer as fan-boy, and watching through windows
Joyfully forming grand theories, talking about them with a friend, and building on them as the days go along.
American Mythologies, #4: The Catcher in the Rye is a sophomoric over-rated novel about teen angst
Over the years, our ideas of what the novel is about have taken on a life of their own, so that now they seem more real in some ways than the original story, and they bear little relation to it.
Letter from the Editor
Hello, fellow magpies! Thank you for taking the time to read our magazine. Here is the beautiful September issue of Tidings of Magpies. In some ways this is an apology, or at least an explanation. For this, our second issue, I contacted a lot of people I admire and asked if they would share their […]
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