May Issue
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.
Pinhole Photographs: Harvey Mills
“I find that one has to take an almost Zen-like approach to image making with pinholes – you can’t rush the process! Your subject matter and compositional decisions need to be very carefully considered – although framing is usually imprecise. The simplicity is perfect as you can concentrate on the creative aspects of photography rather than being bogged down with technicalities.”
Poets Love Bruegel (and so do I)
This is written not as an art historian, a poetry professor, or an academic or expert of any kind. This is written as a lover not a scholar. Though I’ve probably said too much, there’s so much more to say.
Flash Fiction: Pond
Cars wait at the light. You are at the breakfast table in bare feet, wearing Jillian’s robe. A woman in a heavy coat labors onto the bus carrying all her things, a line of riders shuffle behind. Brakes release.
An Interview With Suzy Birstein
I felt the need to create beautiful images, nurturing, reflecting, mentoring. The Tsiporas became pregnant – pregnant with life, pregnant with hope and appreciation for all we have had and need to continue to create – To heal our beautiful world…
La Chinoise
“They talk about class struggle, they talk about the workers, but they never work. Except for Yvonne, one of two women in the group, who is constantly cleaning, and tells of her part-time work as a prostitute so that she can afford things.”
Fortunes in Apples: Photo Essay by Mark Ludak
“Photographing places particularly hard hit by the transition from an industrial and agrarian economy to an economy of unfettered consumption on the margins of mainstream society is a story I feel compelled to tell.”
Why I love gesture as a language, and a Recipe for a Bright Spring Hand Pie
I have long been fascinated with the motion of human hands. Gesture is one of my favorite languages. It’s oddly both universal and specific to one place at the same time.
Mark Cohen/Vivian Maier/Thierry Guetta
Work that lies dormant and unseen is like the art we create in our dreams, so perfectly full of potential and possibility- glimpses into the memories of others and the collective memory of all of us.
My Pop Life: Don’t You Take It Too Bad – Guy Clark
And the idea of living a pure heroic life dedicated to your art is naturally selfish and few attempt it without collateral emotional damage to their nearest and dearest. I get it and maybe that is why the songs move me so much.
Character Study: The Pencil Collector
Someday he’d write the most perfectly beautiful story ever written, and he’d use one pencil for each word, and then he’d put each pencil back in its chipped plastic drawer until the next time. Some day.
Letter from the Editor: May
At the end of Voltaire’s Candide, Candide famously meets a character known only as “the Turk,” who tells him that he doesn’t concern himself with the affairs of the world, rather he contents himself with tending his garden. He has twenty acres, and he cultivates them with his children, “work keeps away three great evils: […]
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APRIL
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.
Interview with filmmaker Ana Maria Vallejo
I think there is a rather subversive character of animation that can be used … as a strategy to take a reality, maybe an oppressive one, and show a different perspective over it, by the creation of other realities
My Pop Life: ‘The Emperor’ – Haydn
They are works that make you feel happy. There is a level of complexity in the music that your brain can grasp immediately.
The Two of Us
It’s so simple, in the end, it’s so raw and so sweet: to know one another and to love one another, this is what will wake us from the hypnosis.
Magpies Mix Tape: Big Ears
I wanted to put together a playlist that was a bit of what you might hear if you had tuned into one of my broadcasts. I hope you find a few things you’ve not heard before – maybe a surprise or two.
A Recipe for Remy’s Soup, (and why I love the movie Ratatouille)
But this film is about more than food, it’s about the desire to create, and food just happens to be Remy’s medium
Film: The Mill Where Time Stood Still
This mill is not only the last standing Klotz mill, it is the last of its kind. Its doors were closed in 1957, and today it stands remarkably intact: 48,000 square feet of mill floor, 360 twisting, winding, and spinning machines, steam and drying chambers, and tons of parts and accessories – left exactly as they stood 56 years ago.
This is a Bird Dog: Flash Fiction
I have been alone, I have been afraid. I have had few moments of love and warmth, but I have poured myself into them completely. There is no wise love.
My Pop Life: A Salty Dog – Procol Harum
Following the death of Gary Brooker at the age of 74 last week, I feel compelled to pay tribute to his finest song, or perhaps his second finest song. Obituaries have been full of praise for the songwriter and lead vocalist of Procol Harum, concentrating on his first celebrated hit single A Whiter Shade Of Pale which reached Number One in the UK singles charts in the Summer of Love, July 1967. This piece shines a spotlight on a lesser -known song which is nonetheless full of power and emotion.
What is the use of talking? (Letter from the editor, April.)
What is the use of talking? I’ve been thinking about this so much, though in my head it’s not just talking, it’s any manner of creating. Any manner of recording what you see and feel, of capturing moments of your lives and dreams, or the lives and dreams of the people in your head.
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MARCH
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.
Kevin Specht: Strangers
The recurring faceless figures that can be found across his paintings attest to the felt anonymity of the system we are all a part of.
The ANEW Artists’ Alliance, a Group Show
“If all the people in the world did art, a lot of the problems would be solved…”
The Industrial Art of Krupp Stahlwerks, 1912
Two days later he called me and told me he had something I would like to see, so I arranged to meet him. He had a large brown envelope with only a date on it: 1912.
My Pop Life: The Right Thing to Do – Carly Simon
I’ve often wondered in subsequent years whether a career in acting was The Right Thing To Do. I have a complex relationship with my ghost career as a barrister, and often peek over to see how he’s doing.
Gordon Parks’ The Restraints, Open and Hidden
The way Parks presents his subjects, with so much affection and clarity, we feel that we love them, and this brings home the realities of fear and injustice in a new and powerful manner.
Happy Birthday, Nina Simone
“I feel what they feel. And people who listen to me know that, and it makes them feel like they’re not alone.”
Movies of Local People
The footage is beautifully relentless, streams of people in different cities leaving work and school, streams of people smiling at the camera. You wonder about all the thoughts in their head. The fears and loves and worries. You wonder about their lives before and after this moment.
Why I Love: Re-reading Books. And a recipe for Jane Austen’s White Soup
To me, re-reading a story you’ve loved, after a distance of a few years or even decades, is delicious. (And so is this soup!)
Truffaut & Bazin & Renoir (why I love their love for one another)
In his introduction, Truffaut warns, “No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution, detachment, or equanimity. André Bazin and Jean Renoir have meant too much to me for me to be able to speak of them dispassionately.”
Letter from the Editor: March
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of creating something important. Been thinking about what it means to create, and how we define important. During the pandemic our definition of “essential” underwent constant revision, and I think the revision is ongoing.
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FEBRUARY
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.
Peter Ydeen: Easton Nights
The night has its own visual rules, its own color wheel, and its own ethereal presence. Here, in the small hours, the world we see as mundane, cascades into dream.
Short Film: Coal’s Kingdom
In our last issue we posted a tribute to artist Harry Sternberg, by Marc Reed. In the essay, Reed wrote, “Seventy years after Sternberg marveled at the industrial might of Bethlehem Steel, I was there marveling at its decay.” Sternberg also chronicled the power of “King Coal,” and Reed visited coal country decades later to record the depths of the industry’s decline. The result is a moving examination of the history of coal and of the lives of coal miners–promise and power turned to decay, captured in this short film.
Island of Star-Crossed Lovers
“They would only need a little bread to eat; and even if there was only enough for one of them, he would give her the whole piece. What was the point of wanting anything else? Was there anything in life worth more than that?”
Ikiru (and why I love it)
In English “Ikiru” means “to live,” and for the rest of the film Watanbe examines what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, and what makes being alive valuable to him.
My Pop Life: Do What You Gotta Do – Nina Simone
Daunting, difficult, mysterious and magnificent, she defies easy category or glib biography, but she has touched me over and over since 1976 when I first heard her.
Magpie Mix Tape: Songs of Freedom
“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: NO FEAR! I mean really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life. No fear. Lots of children have no fear. That’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it, but it something to really, really feel. Like a new way of seeing. Like a new way of seeing something.”
Burns Night (and vegetarian haggis)
Some very brief thoughts on the poetry of Robert Burns, and a recipe for vegetarian haggis
Letter From the Editor: February
My insomnia thoughts turned to the idea of making the world by creating, and of all the ways we make worlds, continually and subconsciously, in our waking lives as well as in our dreams.
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JANUARY
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.
Paintings Found Through Painting
“I like the pictures to push and pull at their perimeters, the ghostly presences within them bound in a landscape I could not have imagined when I first began the painting.”
Things Were Never Normal
This exhibition highlights “third spaces”: components of an area’s social infrastructure, communal spaces outside of home and work such as taverns, church picnics, diners, restaurants, and movie theaters—sites where we might gather, if we could agree.
Chicken Castle
These observations and the pictures taken from them don’t speak in specifics, but when you are in a place where people, over time, have been able to imprint parts of themselves on the built environment, you can feel the city speaking to you in some way, though the language is only partly translatable or transferable.
Harry Sternberg: Coal and Steel
This post is a tribute to the work and passion of an artist I almost missed…Seventy years after Sternberg marveled at the industrial might of Bethlehem Steel, I was there marveling at its decay
My Pop Life: The Night – Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
“I think I then immediately boxed my heart away and tightened the great padlock over my chest so that I couldn’t feel anything that would undermine or dissolve me…”
Francis Bacon: The Essays
“I doe now publish my Essayes; which, of all my other works, have been most Currant: For that, as it seems, they come home, to Mens Businesse, and Bosomes.”
Gleaning: Wasteland & The Gleaners and I
Both films are about excess and waste, beauty and love. They are about the strength and fragility of people – in body and spirit.
Letter from the Editor: January
We’re all gleaners, finding beauty and meaning and sustenance in the unlikely, the odd, the overlooked. We’re all magpies, lining our nests with beauty where we find it.
A New Business Plan
And “business as usual” will be benevolence, cheer, and generosity of spirit the whole year long.
Syllabub Cookies
Suffice to say that Syllabub, sometimes a drink, sometimes a desssert, is a very very old recipe. It’s the sort of thing Old Fezziwig would serve at his holiday party in A Christmas Carol. It’s the sort of thing David Copperfield would serve at his bachelors’ dinner party, the party which resulted in the best description of being drunk in all of literature.
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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.
As ever, submit, support, subscribe. And have a look at Tidings of Magpies on Instagram.
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!
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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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