February, 2024
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.
Inside the Camera Obscura: An Interview with Michele FariNelly
“It’s art to cook, garden, dance, sing, play an instrument, and compose music. It’s art to create clothes from a piece of fabric or to “see” a piece of furniture within a…
Vietnam Travelogue
Pia De Girolamo shares a travelogue recounting observations and art from her trip to Vietnam.
Alexandria, The End of the Affair
“I sit on the wall and watch a fisherman wrangle his net; the sea is dark and a little choppy, and I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.”
An Anchored Friendship
Listen to this neo-noir short story that features the Iowa State Police, a displaced bounty hunter, a broken farmer, and his local cop acquaintance caught in a Mexican stand-off in a gasoline-soaked…
My Shadow is Freezing: Winter Poems from Matsuo Basho
these cold winter days on horseback — my shadow is frozen
My Afro-kwea diary: #2
My Afro-kwea Journal, entry #2: The Death of Vivek Oji By Akwaeke Emezi
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January, 2024
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.
To Be a Part of This World: An Interview With Toby Rosenbloom
“Every little painting is just an attempt to capture a feeling.” An interview with Toby Rosenbloom
Drawing with Light: An Interview with Ralf Jacobs
There are patterns all around us that we recognize in Jacobs’ work. Similarly, with music, we respond to sound waves, we can’t see them but they affect our emotions. Looking at Jacobs’…
Una Giornata Particolare
Everyone should see this film. Some thoughts on Una Giornata Particolare, a film about the day Hitler took a train to Rome to visit Mussolini.
Rotten Luck
Objets trouvés in various stages of decomposition are transformed — by design, by vision, by respect — into objects of great beauty.
My Afro-kwea diary: #1
My goal is to read solely Afro-kwea books for at least the next year. Aside from my anger at the dismissal of African lives elsewhere, this ambition was also motivated by a…
Magpies’ Mix Tape: Magpies’ Best Songs of 2023
Here is some joyful music to help you usher in the new year, with fondness and best wishes from the Mapgies. May you all have a year full of creativity, kindness, happiness,…
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December, 2023
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.
All I Had to Do Was Listen: An Interview with Torsten Richter
“Sometimes I’m following the light. Sometimes I’m following the clouds. And sometimes I’m looking for something I do not know beforehand.” An interview with Torsten Richter
I Am Because You Are: An Interview with Tracy Jackson
Tracy Jackson’s work is full of questions: asked, pondered, answered, and asked again. A fine teeming network of ideas and philosophy ties the images together: ideas about what it means to interact…
Musical X-Rays: A Story of Improvisation and Rebellion
A brief history of bootleg records printed on salvaged X-rays. “It’s easy to imagine a yearning, a dreaming and a longing for what you’ve been repressively denied. The forbidden often has an…
In Search of a Smile
I was in the partial state of not knowing if I was awake or still dreaming; it had been another fitful uncomfortable night, mostly involving a donkey braying and the snores and…
Flesh in all of its beauty: Zola’s Nana and Saint Phalle’s Nanas
“Don’t make her witty, which would be a mistake. She is nothing but flesh, but flesh in all of its beauty. And, I repeat, a good-natured girl.”
Magpies Mix Tape: Sweet Songs for Troubled Times
The backbone of this mix tape is songs on the subject of the love that makes us glow together with the light we all carry, so that we can keep out the…
Letter From the Editor, December: Museum of Lost Creations
A Magpies’ Museum of Lost Creations.
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November, 2023
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.
Gerald Slota: Frenzy
The impact of Gerald Slota’s vivid and teeming images is immediate and arresting. They stop you in your tracks with their bright seeming-chaos. But the more you take time with them, the…
Crow and Cricket: Two Autumn Poems from Matsuo Basho
Some thoughts on two autumn poems from Matsuo Basho
Featured Artist: Brian O’Leary
There is a tactile vibrance to the plein air paintings of Brian O’Leary: You can feel the layers of light and leaves and rock and water. You can feel the shadows moving,…
Ida Wells Stroud & Clara Stroud
Clara and Ida Stroud were mother and daughter artists who worked to create opportunities for all women to exhibit and promote their art.
The Eye of the Needle
The microminiatures of Hagp Sandaldijian, from The Museum of Jurassic Theology
Magpies Mix Tape: Undone in Sorrow
A sad and beautiful Mix Tape from artist Tracie Noles-Ross
I Hate to See the Evening Sun go Down
Memphis Minnie tells us that she hates to see the evening sun go down, and I feel that, too. Dusk always makes me feel a little melancholy, particularly this time of year…
We Shall Joyfully Tell Each Other Everything That has Happened
Some thoughts on Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus and Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha
Letter From the Editor November, 2023: Crickets
A cricket sings in my brambling dying herbs every autumn, tangled with the unruly thyme and the ever-flowering chives. I’ve never seen it but I look forward to its return every year…
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October, 2023
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.
Everything is Connected: An Interview with Anouk Rugueu
“My deepest self is connected to people and creatures that I will never meet or see. I think that each separate part knows and carries the whole in a way that is…
All that is Solid
“A starting point, for artists or for anyone else, might be simply learning to look around where you live now. – Lucy Lippard” Photographs and their stories from Michael Acker.
Moments of Anarchy: An Interview With Mark Tamer
“I embrace the accidents and errors as they not only remind us how vulnerable and delicate we are, they can often show us something new. It is at the point of breakdown…
Lauren Barnett’s Dream Restaurants
The stuff of sweet dreams or nightmares? Lauren Barnett presents the kind of establishments you can only visit in your dreams.
I Would Have Described the Rain
“There are big dogs and little dogs, but little dogs must not fret over the existence of the big ones. Everyone is obligated to howl in the voice that the Lord God…
Men, Whose Life is But a Day
And maybe Epimetheus wasn’t so slow or foolish, so backward. Because “epi” also means upon, beside, about. Maybe he was thinking of the world aside from the struggle of gods and mortals.…
Loves of a Blonde
“Loves of a Blonde begins and ends with a song.” Some thoughts on the sad and beautiful film from the Czech New Wave.
Letter From the Editor, 10/23. These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins.
If there was a theme to this month’s Tidings of Magpies, or any month’s, really, it’s patchwork. Making something new out of fragments, out of things discarded, disjointed, or cast aside.
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September, 2023
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.
The World of Pat Perry
But these people are working on something, they’re building something that defies understanding. In rusts and greys, the vast spaces of dried grass and gloomy sky are weighed down by small clusters…
East African Lockdown Drawings: Bamboo and Marigolds
There is a second sort of bamboo growing here, with beautiful varied dark green stripes on a yellow background. My friend tells me that in Vietnam this is special and a spirit…
Artists’ Communities in the Digital Age
Some thoughts on solitude, connection, and the Internet’s influence on artists’ communities.
Up Close and Everywhere
The human condition is ripe for contemplation, but it’s the kind of meditation that only yields results if undertaken honestly. Nature’s book is full of wisdom, but you can only get it…
An Obscure Field of Vision
A beautiful collaborative work of two photographers & poets, this haunting combination of film, words, and voice was created on a camera obscura made of recycled parts.
American Mythologies: Four out of Five Doctors Recommend
DO THEY THINK WE’RE MORONS? Do they think that if they slip the word “technology” into their advertisement we will believe that their product will miraculously turn back time? Yes, yes they…
Ripples on the Nile
The idea, a loose brief, of following the Nile to Aswan, close to where the river enters Egypt from Sudan, I would talk to farmers and fishermen and those whose livelihood depends…
Sense Making and Intuition
“We are privileged to live at a moment when a new story is being written about how we understand ourselves in the world. The old story said we were all separate from…
Le Gamin au Vélo
We’re given music. (And it does feel like a gift.) We’re given, specifically, a small, moving swell of music, like a warm gentle wave; a few notes from the second movement of…
Letter from the Editor, September 2023: Some sighs out their sentences, but some sings out their silences
I’m talking about creating something big together, working together on something, something good. Something money and cynicism can’t touch, because we have no use for any of that. Something we believe in,…
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August, 2023
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 Ellen Wallenstein
“For me, photographs are always about time, always about the past, as soon as they are made. So they are about preserving life, or an illusion thereof — people, places, parties, events,…
The Dream State of the Mundane as a Form of Activism: An Interview with Paul Ayihawu
I have discovered profound significance in the small moments that occur within our daily lives. These seemingly ordinary instances, filled with unplanned joy, introspection, and nostalgia, hold the power to shape our…
Bitter Boy
‘”What do we do now?” I asked, but Dirk obviously had no answer. We knew the name of the camp, but that was it. No idea where it was, how far…
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Some thoughts on approaching art and life with curiosity and openness to change from artist Pia De Girolamo
A Letter to My Apologist
The late afternoon light was too beautiful for that moment; out of place in the dreariness of that corner of Abidjan, tucked away among the drab offices of the business district. It…
Hardly a Day’s Journey
That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in…
Magpies Mix Tape: Surviving the Fuckening
Music continues to shape the collective consciousness of my people. Music binds us. It alters moods and speaks to us, and sometimes, it is the only healing for our aching hearts. The songs…
Fiction: Pandemons
I like the warm dusty tar soft on my feet. I like staring straight up into the vast reeling sky, into the fast wheeling birds. I like when the birds land and…
Letter From the Editor, August 2023: The Beauty of Dazed Ignorance
“There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this…
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July, 2023
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 Matt Roberts
So the sense of the ephemeral quality of life and the knowledge that the present and soon-to-be-gone can inhabit the same frame may come to play in my work.
In This Our Land
In this our land we have a term for suffering, shege. The proverbial phrase seeing shege is a present participle tense that describes the action of going through it — suffering. And there’s levels to…
The Allegorist’s Vision of Alchemy and Delusions (Mordancages)
In Appalachian folklore, there is a belief that through witchcraft one can shapeshift, changing one’s physical form … The photographs in this project, which also shapeshift, are evidence of my sorcery.
Was buying a house in Syria the brightest decision I ever made?
I am now forever connected to that city but not because of the house, because of the people and relationships that were forged over that time.
As Pretty as an Airport
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.’” – Douglas Adams
An Interview with Tidings of Magpies by Gershwin Wanneburg
Brilliant South African writer and editor Gershwin Wanneburg interviews Tidings of Magpies!
Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis
Masculin Feminin is a film about the culture of youth, the sincere, foolish, self-absorbed search for meaning and identity. Godard, who was thirty-five when the film was shot, approaches the subject as…
Abbott and Atget
“When one embarks on an uncertain venture, silence is often an ally,” Berenice Abbott’s philosophical tribute to Eugene Atget’s work
Magpies Mix Tape: Soul-selling Stories
A small selection of the haunting, plaintive, wild, human, soulful songs of Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, two blues musicians who sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads.
Ezra Jack Keats: The Joy of Being Alive
“My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along.”
Letter From the Editor, July 2023. Lessons From Clio in Clover
And it occurred to me that there’s nowhere else I needed to be, nowhere more important than this place at this time, standing on a cool and warming June morning with Clio…
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June, 2023
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.
Erosion 2023
Everywhere the surface was changing, crumbling to dust, washing away … Gradients of color, broken edges quickly softened. Never straight lines, only gravity pulling water on paths of least resistance.
Featured artist: Gigi Mills
My work is born out of my need and desire to simplify and/or reduce each moment to its absolute essential, by removing details from life that tend to obscure what is truly…
For a mother whose son was murdered
i was born again when he died with no language i had to learn a new tongue
Voutie-o-roony-mo
“Like, voutie-o-roony-mo means super extra happy and good. It means everything is voutie, like roony-o, you know.” – Slim Gaillard
Wabi-Sabi: Peter J. Ketchum
Wabi-sabi embraces the natural cycle of growth and decay. The life of an object and its impermanence are evidenced in patina and wear, including rips, any visible repairs (scotch tape or glue)…
Bootheel Blues
I wanted a come-to-Jesus-go-to-hell storm of biblical proportions to befall this God-soaked land. She didn’t want pennies from heaven. I wanted a cold, hard million-dollar blast to wipe out this so-called event.
Au Hasard Balthazar
We tend to make everything hold meaning for us as humans, but what the sheep and the donkey know feels deeper than allegories and metaphors and stories humans need to tell ourselves.…
Lemon Balm Ice Cream
This ice cream is small reflection of the glowing, balmy restorative days; a distillation of the bright coolness, the sharp scent of new green growth, and the creamy sweetness of perfect air.
Review: Northern Kin Festival 2023
He doesn’t have the resources of Glastonbury and pretty much runs the festival at a loss because he believes in doing it. The music was fabulous.
Better Things, Maybe
And suddenly we saw everything differently. The simplicity of the story seemed significant, even profound. The simplicity of the language seemed elemental, important. The repetition made beautiful, resonant little circles of words.…
Letter From the Editor, June 2023. The Wood Between the Worlds
At various times in your life you might find yourself back in the wood between the worlds.
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May, 2023
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.
Douglas Pierre Baulos: A Fragile Exultation
Although I work with the feelings of loss, mortality, and the power and delicate nature of memory, my work is a reflection of my attempt to live my life in fragile exultation.
Fiction: East of Kiowa
“That was Messing’s Horse at the water trough. Elijah recognized the blue pack roll on the back like the agent had described. Finally, he thought. The man moves fast for someone with…
Sitting in Silence with Strangers
In the course of my travels I have had many unforgettable conversations, many from dusk to till dawn, entire train and plane rides, fascinating people with incredible stories or theories on the…
After the Apocalypse (Or My Grandmother was a Landscape)
So what remains after you lose everything? When water or fire or clumsiness or meanness or a pandemic or cancer or war or ignorance and obsolescence changes everything–breaks everything, what do we…
Imaginary Jobs: Little-Known NYC Government Positions
Little-known NYC government positions/titles from Lauren Barnett
An Interview with Mark Oliver
Light, space, scale, shifting light, and a new way to look at buildings you pass every day: A discussion with artist Mark Oliver.
Magpies Mix Tape: The Originals
Here is a list of the (close to) original version of songs you might know better from more popular versions that you might not have known were covers.
The song of the white-throated sparrow
There is a pause, a thick electric hush, as we wait for the thunder. But in the yard the white-throated sparrow, seemingly unphased, sings and sings his wild and melancholy song.
Temporada de Patos
It all just clicks, softly and almost imperceptibly. And then you don’t want your time with it to end, you want to spend more time with it, and you think about it…
Letter From the Editor, May, 2023: Magpies Commons
In my insomnia thoughts, I imagined Tidings of Magpies as a sort of commons. A green space where we can walk and talk together, and work together on our allotment gardens.…
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April, 2023
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.
Surveillance Puppy
Late in the evenings we often go out for one last patrol. The are bats flying about and often one or two owls calling. The dog is very active, tracking the scents…
Cyanotypes & The Graves of Poets
There really is no explanation for the creative process, I can only say that from time to time I find myself crawling around graveyards… The Leaves of Poets had been a title…
An Interview With Charis Ioannou
“The delivery of a seasoned jazz musician is often clear and confident even if the actual musical content is very complicated. This can also be translated into street photography: a complex scene…
Living in the Past – An Interview With Kathy Toth
“I documented my work but also everything else I could find graffiti-wise, then the spaces where it always seemed to appear started piquing my interest. “
Imaginary Jobs: Lauren Barnett’s Dream Jobs
Eight jobs Lauren Barnett would like to have (and be paid handsomely for)
Peter J Ketchum – Lost Souls
My “Painted Pictures” are about loss. They are about lost souls. They are about a loss of innocence–nationally and individually. Most of all, they are about lost time–time past and time ended.
Anne Butler Yeats
But there’s such a strength to her work, such a depth of color and texture, such a sharp slicing perfection of composition, that these things become beautiful, notable, and important. They often…
Sundays and Cybele – I Have Dreamed Films
He doesn’t sound bitter. And he says, I have written films since, I have dreamed films, and maybe someday another little miracle will happen, and I will make another film.
Women’s Work
It’s hard to understand our place in the world if you shut yourself off from everything real in that world.
John Gerard’s Herball (& 2 colcannon-inspired recipes)
Basil is a “remedie for malancholicke people,” the scent of it good for the heart and head, and will make a man merry and glad. Anyone who has harvested fresh basil on…
Letter From the Editor: In defense of Foolishness
I could say something, but why? Do you want to know what’s in my heart? From the beginning of time: just this! just this!
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MARCH, 2023
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.
Of Life and Animosities: Paul Oyetunde Ogunlesi
Ogunlesi’s works call on life, Yoruba adages, faith, the mundane, the trivial, and past experiences, to explore themes such as humanity, romance, kindness and hope.
An Interview with Parent Teacher: Infrequently Asked Questions
New York City-based musician and pigeon-whisperer Parent Teacher discusses his newly released album Impending Doom. Articulate, timely, and beautifully observed, the album adroitly mixes humor with despair over the “complete breakdown of American society,” and remains addictively listenable throughout.
An Explanation of Sympathetic Magic: A Photo Essay
I too hope to raise the dead; only for me, it is symbolically through photography.
The ANEW Artists’ Alliance Second Annual Group Show
We are delighted to present the second annual group show of the ANEW Artists’ Alliance. This exuberant outpouring of talent and vision contains work that is profound, playful, vibrant, skillful, and endlessly surprising.
Jazz’n (Magpies MixTape)
Tell me what Jazz is and I’ll tell you who you are… please can you also tell me what Zen is!
Three Sisters Soup from Indigikitchen
Using foods native to their Americas, Indigikitchen gives viewers the important tools they need to find and prepare food in their own communities. Indigenous food systems support healthier ecosystems, bodies, and families.
Cinematic Paradise: Jean Vigo
Vigo has been called one of the early advocates of poetic realism. And it’s true that his films are a delightful combination of near-documentary prosody with beautiful flights of fancy and dream-like forays into characters’ imaginations. But he shows imagination and poetry as an essential part of reality, not a departure from it.
Sleepy John Estes
Sleepy John Estes is a poet of the ordinary: though the subject is quotidian, it is beautifully observed, and his language is resonant, his voice is plaintive, and the music is perfect.
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FEBRUARY, 2023
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.
The Representation of Absence: An Interview with Margarita Brum
“How do you represent that which is not there but which occupies an affective place, a place in our mind?” An interview with Uruguayan plastic and visual artist Margarita Brum
Pinhole Photography as an Emotion: Gianfranco Lunardo
“People live and mark their existence in the silent voice of their remains.”
January Thoughts: Why I Make Art
By Pia De Girolamo January is a transitional month of endings and beginnings. In art, the god Janus is depicted as having two faces, one looking ahead and one looking backwards. So it is fitting that in January people feel moved to take stock, review the old year, and make plans for the new. During…
Poesie del Silenzio/Poems of Silence: Michele Farinelli
Poems and photographs from Michele Farinelli
Grey Paper Lockdown Drawings
“We are still in Entebbe, the virus is still evolving and we are trying to keep track of the changes. The bamboo continues to grow, there is another generation of marigolds blooming.”
Expat Questionnaire: Peter Atkinson
I graduated and worked for a few years before deciding, in August 1980, to chuck it all in and travel around the world.
Jacques Tati: Magpie Collector of Foibles
Tati is a sort of magpie of human (and canine) foibles; a collector of gestures and moments of absurdity.
Flummery!
“I love making almond flummery by candlelight in the early morning hours, as the household still sleeps. The kitchen is quiet and dark. The scent of rosewater, almonds, and apricot kernels rising from the mortar and pestle transform the kitchen countertop to a magic carpet that carries me off to 18th century England.”
Magpies Mix Tape: Songs about Justice
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” – Martin Luther King
Imaginary Jobs: The Observer
In summation, I would like to share the words of Francis Bacon, “If men will intend to observe, they shall finde much worthy to observe.”
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JANUARY, 2023
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.
Night Drawings: James Feehan
Choreographed, the figures evolve from the efforts they make to define the precipice of engagement. The rhythms of awareness can lead to celebration or exploration.
Featured Photographer: Kevin Moraczewski
Whether we’re shutting out the light at close of day, or wandering the slick cool streets in a perfect moody urban nocturne, Kevin Moraczewski’s photographs create a portrait of slowly-shifting lonely hours.
Back in Kilifi
During the pandemic, Matt Cotten reflected on his time in Kilifi. He was finally able to return in September 2022. Here is the before and after.
Magpies Mix Tape: Cool Yule
A playlist you won’t mind listening to all year long, cause it’s just that good.
Desk Set- More Power to You!
Ostensibly Desk Set is about the fear of a new world in which machines will replace human connection and take human jobs. But there’s really something more elementally beautiful about the friendships in this film, something that staves off the fundamental loneliness of being alive, being human.
Some Thoughts on Resolutions and Biscuits with Lentil Gravy for New Year’s Eve
To me, “resolve” doesn’t mean to give something up, but to bring it into focus, to become harmonious, to be solved, or healed. To see things as clearly as we can, at the highest resolution.
Flash Fiction: June ’72
“I’m gonna kill you sons of a bitch,” he said, when he saw the torn sheet.
Imaginary Jobs: Institute for the Study of Time Passing
I’ve recently started a job at an institute entirely devoted to the study of time passing…
Letter From the Editor: January, ’23
The ability to appreciate something is just as valuable as the ability to create something. In fact, I believe appreciation is an important part of the creative process. To be moved by something, to see its beauty, to be excited by it, to be a fan–this is a valuable skill, a gift, as well as…
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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.
Featured Artist: Angie Renfro
It speaks to the things that aren’t said. There’s a story that’s not being told, which adds a layer of interest to the pieces
Juan Luis Payá Guitart: A Fragile Feeling of Life
Aren’t we surrounded by noise, loud music, excessive parties and gatherings, all so as not to listen to the silence, the inner silence of our loneliness?
Robert Beck: Tip-Top Shoes
You can tell that things happen in this place because it feels like you’ve been there, and that’s the bones of an engaging narrative. I call it a heartbeat.
Draw Your Breakfast
Suggestions to enhance your daily drawing experience–keep your notebook ready and your pen filled!
A Trio of Kitchen Sink Films
Know your place: Some thoughts on three beautiful “kitchen sink” films.
Flash Fiction: You Can’t Tell
“I found him on a cold day in a slow spring.” New flash fiction from Dez Walker
Imaginary Jobs: A Superhero Called “The Dictionary”
Do you ever find yourself thinking, “No, I don’t want to be part of a dynamic team in a fast-paced environment”? You’re not alone! But we are here to help! with an ongoing series of jobs you might not have realized existed.
On Having Enough, and a Recipe for Eggplant Wellington
Enough is just what we need, and all that we can ask. Enough money to live, enough food to eat, enough strength to carry on from day to day, and enough humor to enjoy it all. If nobody had too much, then everybody would have enough.
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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.
Gabriela Domville: Preserve Collection
Gabriela Dombille’s thought-provoking Preserve Collection asks questions about our relationship to nature and about our often-deadly fascination with the mechanics of beauty and of life itself.
Magpies Mix Tape: Soulin’
You will find every county in England has a different idea of the soulin’ song and what was served to the peasants who came knocking. A Mixtape for Halloween/All Hollows Eve/All Souls
Quick and Flupke (and why I love Tintin)
There’s a lovely lightness to the strips, a freedom, but as with all the best comic strips, (or all my favorite) underneath the lightness is a depth of honesty and humanity.
Sweet Soul Cakes
The cakes are called “souls” the singers are called “soulers,” and the practice is called “souling.” How beautiful is all of that?
American mythologies: The end is nigh.
And when you’re in a constant state of near-panic, a never-ending ferment of knotty anxiety, the last thing you want to hear is that this is your last chance! YOUR LAST CHANCE for an exclusive special offer!
My Pop Life: Pleasant Valley Sunday – The Monkees
The Monkees couldn’t put a foot wrong for this ten-year old boy, yet to worry about small parts and auditions … yet to discover that they weren’t in fact cool, because they were manufactured and didn’t write their own songs, yet to discover that despite all that they were still brilliant.
Imaginary jobs: Augur
Do you ever find yourself thinking, “No, I don’t want to be part of a dynamic team in a fast-paced environment”? You’re not alone!
Ghost Story
And then I knew, after sign upon sign upon sign, I knew as surely as I knew my own self, that I had a ghost living with me.
A Face in the Crowd
The film’s themes are startlingly relevant today: the intersection of commerce, politics and entertainment; the cynicism of the entertainment industry about the intelligence of their audience.
Necropolis, a film by Marc Reed
Most of my videos are of lost and forgotten places, and while visiting these places I have often pondered the people that once inhabited them. Who were they…where are they? To a large extent they are here. These are the inhabitants of my “drowned worlds.”
Letter from the editor: November 2022
I’ve been thinking about certain small acts of rebellion that I love, certain quiet ways that people have changed the rules. They change the world slowly, almost imperceptibly, but the change grows in widening waves. The personal becomes political and art becomes powerful.
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OCTOBER
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.
Piles of Time. Yasu Matsumoto
These works are the expression of such unusual phenomena that I think is created by the everlasting accumulation, or piles of time that are embedded in the process of forest growing.
Featured Artist: Kent Ambler
“I find myself working from a combination of observation, memory, and intuition.”
Sea Creatures Stared at Us and We Stared Back at Them
With its mix of musical styles, languages, accents, and voices, the album is a perfect tribute to the witty and self-deprecating, pretty and noisy, relatable and strange, hopefully despondent music of Jeffrey Lewis.
Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village
On one level, Bottle Village was, literally, a constructive approach to transforming discard and sorrow into something more.
Ozu’s Good Morning (why I love it)
The film is full of misunderstandings and half-spoken thoughts and desires….And yet, the real joy of the film is the moments of understanding between people.
Simple bread for the best toast
A recipe for simple bread for the best toast, and thoughts on toasting over the years.
Fiction: Every Valley Wide
Some things, when you didn’t understand them, you didn’t try to figure them out. Sometimes you just didn’t want to know.
Eris and her Apples of Discord
If you ignore these apples, they’re small and harmless. But the more attention you pay them, the more you try to get rid of them, the larger they get, until they block your way entirely, or destroy you.
American Mythologies: Get a Real Job
It strikes me as funny that many of the laborers in our workforce don’t actually get to call labor day a holiday. It’s part of our complicated history of attitudes about work, about people who work, and about the jobs they do.
Letter From the Editor: In Defense of Meandering
Ideas are born in the hollow of unknowing.
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SEPTEMBER
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.
You cannot see them anymore, They are not there
So I am content to draw, each drawing a provocation, another layer in an ongoing process of poking and prodding at notions of place and landscape and in that sense I am content to let things drift.
An Interview with Liz Johnson
“I like to introduce something remarkable into ordinary, everyday circumstances because I think that there are always interesting things happening all around us––and sometimes some very surreal things.”
The Valley of the Moon Main Stem Project
I want to capture the “ghosts” that inhabit this area and intertwine them with contemporary images.
Tom Titanic, A Cautionary Tale
Both living on their nerves, growing thinner as Tom grew fatter, they refused follow-up visits from the authorities. She missed her post-natal check-up, and they did not attend the vaccination clinic. The authorities became concerned.
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colors and Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium
There’s so much in life that we can’t capture in words or pictures: everything is shifting, changing, and with more hues, values and shades than our eyes can see, more notes than our ears can hear, more subtleties than our hearts can feel or our minds define. But I love that we still try.
Rag and Bone
He hasn’t lost the love or the language, he’s just brought them down to earth. He’s using them to make the ordinary beautiful–rags, bones, broken bottles. And things as extraordinarily ordinary as aging, as remembering.
Fiction: The Fallen Fighter
All night long they clung to each other, bobbing on a sea of whisky and memories and dreams, lashed to a floating spar that sank and rose and sank and rose again.
Everything fresh summer pizza with a cracker-thin crust, and Bicycle Thieves
The joy of sharing the fruits of our garden with my family in our wild and teeming summertime yard. Listening to music and talking, and feeling grateful for all of it.
Germaine Dulac: Listen in Silence to Our Own Song
“The time has come, I believe, to listen in silence to our own song, to try to express our own personal vision, to define our own sensibility, to make our own way. Let us learn to look, let us learn to see, let us learn to feel.”
Letter From the Editor: It might be our anniversary.
Thoughts on our first year. Our editorial calendar is serendipitous, and each month’s theme is make-the-road-by-walking.
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AUGUST
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.
Auto Anthropology
“I know that part of my attraction to a lone old car on some quiet urban street or sitting out in the desert is because it plays into a fantasy of a time after the car.”
Featured Artist: Lauren Mary Barnett
“Even if it’s just the way the light is hitting a glass or a strange assortment of items on a table or power lines swooped in front of a house. And really these moments of beauty can be fleeting so it feels nice to capture them somehow. “
The Dowry: Federica Armstrong
The dowry becomes a cathartic process of mourning, remembrance and consolation.
The Irony of “Fever Dream”
We quickly find ourselves in hypnagogic territory, sorting real, unreal, and surreal at the edges of a dream.
Wormley Hughes
The man who dug Jefferson’s grave was named Wormley Hughes. He was the principal gardener at Monticello. The garden at Monticello is a true thing of wonder. Beautiful, useful, inspiring – a perfect spot to sit and ponder questions of liberty and independence. Wormley Hughes was informally (not legally) freed after Jefferson’s death (famously, on…
La Noire de…
She doesn’t have a voice in their presence. What we get instead is the rich, intelligent voice of her thoughts and her memories.
Linden Tea Madeleines
But this magical madeleine and tea, which he accepts while full of adult cares and woes, brings him such joy that he no longer feels mediocre, accidental, mortal, which is what being an adult feels like, on a bad day.
American mythologies: Everybody in Khakis
Of course the truth is that despite the fact that advertising agencies are shaming us into looking alike on the outside and conservative politicians are trying to make sure we’re all the same race and religion, despite the fact that we haven’t always had the highest tolerance for difference, America has a splendid history of…
Flash Fiction: How skinny the leash, how thin the arms that hold me.
“Maybe this meant something, maybe it didn’t.”
Letter from the editor: August
Creation as an act of remembering and remembering as an act of creation is the unofficial theme of our August issue.
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JULY
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.
The Harnessed Rage of Paula Rego
To elaborate on the metaphor of harnessed rage: I don’t mean to say that she tamed it. Rego permitted her rancour a life of its own, a force of creativity to be exploited in the studio.
Cristina Finotto: Poems and Photographs
Poetry and photography by Cristina Finotto, of the Po delta.
Featured Artist: Marjorie Thompson
“The images for these paintings weave and intermingle in my mind and present themselves as a mélange of overlapping histories.”
Pierrot by Watteau at the Louvre
I recklessly mentioned that Watteau’s Pierrot is my favourite painting in the Louvre. I have been invited to explain why, and it has to do with the ability of some great paintings to convey hidden messages and intrigue us with their meaning as well as beauty.
Pennhurst: Abuse and Neglect
More and more, Pennhurst’s amazing true story is is becoming buried. I like to think my little film is helping keep it alive.
Maria Prymachenko: Finding a Subversive Voice
From Philomela to Prymachenko: Because this work is beneath the notice of the powerful men, not seen in the same lofty light as their manly ambitions and achievements, women find the freedom to tell their story as thoroughly, beautifully, and strangely they need.
James Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter at the National Gallery of Scotland
“You’d not want to mess with her. She’s got a knife. But you do wonder what her future will be.”
The Elegant Leftover Scheme
My proposal is to look back to the attitudes and methods people used during trying times in the past, and combine those with the epicurean skills and knowledge of the present, to plan our daily meals in a way that provides the most delicious food with the least amount of waste.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
He wasn’t scared of them, but he had a feeling of powerful things and deep things. He said that we need to find a way to look at the cave paintings. Where would he start to search for this new way of looking? Everywhere.
Fiction: Profile
“The suburban kids are the worst.” Joe Bird stands with his hands on his hips, disconcertingly unperturbed by the repeated crashing behind him. “Kids” aged roughly 12 to 18 years, of both sexes, throw themselves violently into a chain link fence.
Letter From the Editor July: Words and Silence
It seems more important now than ever to tell our stories and share our stories, and listen to the stories of others. To amplify the voices of anybody struggling to be heard, and to celebrate when the words or images or silences speak to us or bewilder us or transform us. To harness our anger…
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JUNE
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 Simon Quadrat
I am beyond grateful for the chance to discuss the beautifully mysterious paintings of Simon Quadrat.
Alternative Process Photography – Amy Marie Gladding
“I am driven to document my surroundings to try to find a sense of place in the world.”
Spirits and Demons
These phantasms are concocted from a little kernel of conscience, or guilt, or fear, or loneliness. Sometimes others see them, sometimes they don’t, they’re shifting and dreamlike, and they operate according to their own rules. They’re unreliable narrators. They’re wise or foolish, in turn; they speak in riddles, they speak a questionable truth, changing and…
Fiction: Exact Fare Please (The Hours)
When bells ring out the time, the time passes strangely. The space between tolls seems impossible, like it’s hanging, waiting for something. For me.
The Photography of Jack Delano
I feel I share a common interest in subject matter with Delano, and have traveled to many of the same places – just in very different times and circumstances.
I am the Light of this World: The Life and Music of Reverend Gary Davis
“I’m all the time studying what I can do for my people. You can’t do nothing for yourself unless you do it for somebody else first. You can’t bake a corncake for yourself unless you bake it for somebody else. It ain’t worth the effort. In this world we have to talk a little and…
Why I Love Hidden Fortress
Hidden Fortress was an inspiration for George Lucas in the making of Star Wars, and it is every bit as thrilling and swashbuckling, full of adventure and romance. But whereas Star Wars seems to operate on an almost mythological idea of good and evil, Hidden Fortress is more nuanced.
On Birdwatching
It boggled my mind that all of these birds had been here, all along, so vivid, so loud. They weren’t new. I’d never bothered to look at them, I’d never taken the time to look up, and discover the colorful teeming world in the tangled branches of the trees.
Letter From the Editor: June
Imagination is the dream of a house, familiar and yet entirely new. Behind every door is an unexpected room, or staircase, or garden, or folly.
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MAY
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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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.
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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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