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.
Keep reading
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!
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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…
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.”
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.”
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
Pia De Girolamo: poems and paintings
Roma Trilogy: a poem and paintings from Pia De Girolamo
Keep reading
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”
October Issue
The eagle-eyed amongst you will recognize that these were all actually posts that we published over the course of September. As discussed at the beginning of the month, the reasons to post every couple of days (instead of all-at-once at the start of the month) outweighed, in my mind, the reasons to publish one big…
Keep reading
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…
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
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.
Keep reading
Food: Eggplant Tian and memories of Provence
Memories of a perfect summer solstice in Provence, and an unforgettable eggplant dish.
Keep reading
My Pop Life: Step, by Vampire Weekend
My look back at an eventful, dysfunctional, random musical life.
Keep reading
Featured Artist: Pia De Girolamo
Philadelphia painter Pia De Girolamo explores the Arctic.
Keep reading
Art: An Interview With Karen Clarkson
For Clarkson, art is a vehicle for empathy and a tool to draw attention to social injustice, and this particular series focuses on the plight of murdered and missing Native American women.
Keep reading
Film: Dreams and Dust
Owning a home is a fundamental part of The American Dream – yet it remains something that millions of Americans never attain. So then why, in practically every town in America, are homes abandoned and left to decay?
Keep reading
Featured Photographer – Paul Godier
Scenes of Dorset life from photographer Paul Godier.
Keep reading
Fiction: The Messenger
I Hermes stand here at the crossroads by the wind beaten orchard, near the hoary grey coast; and I keep a resting place for weary men. And the cool stainless spring gushes out.
Keep reading
Music/Film: A Band Called Death
The whole story is “…strange. It’s just…strange.” And it is, but in the beautiful way that some stories are so strange they make perfect sense.
Keep reading
Food: French lentil, roasted mushroom tart with savory almond topping
Further adventures in savory frangipane.
Keep readingLoading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
