
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.
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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.
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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.
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Cristina Finotto: Poems and Photographs
Poetry and photography by Cristina Finotto, of the Po delta.
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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.
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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.
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Featured Artist: Marjorie Thompson
“The images for these paintings weave and intermingle in my mind and present themselves as a mélange of overlapping histories.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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June 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.
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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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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.
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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.
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An Interview With Simon Quadrat
I am beyond grateful for the chance to discuss the beautifully mysterious paintings of Simon Quadrat.
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Alternative Process Photography – Amy Marie Gladding
“I am driven to document my surroundings to try to find a sense of place in the world.”
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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 hush a heap. Love is just like a vein in a spring: Keeps you with supplements to cherish up what you have.”
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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 suspect, like all truths.
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The Lost Art Exhibit
An art exhibit comes to rest in an abandoned New Jersey Neighborhood
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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April 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.
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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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