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.
August Issue, 2023
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 on this ‘Surviving the Fuckening Mixtape’ are carefully curated for listening on a bad day, or just about any day when things don’t seem to be going right.
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 speak to me with gentle soothing voices. I like the soft sounds they make when they all settle together. I like to watch people from my roof, to see them washing over the sidewalk in waves—coming together, breaking apart.
When the plague comes I don’t go into the city any more, because it’s all shut down. The crowds on the sidewalk below are sparse and their waves veer away from each other.
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 a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption.
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 reminded me of summer nights in Cape Town when the sun is so seductive you can’t bear the thought of going indoors.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Some thoughts on approaching art and life with curiosity and openness to change from artist Pia De Girolamo
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, celebrations, and even death.”
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 from the station it was. No contact name. No phone number. No coins for the payphone even if we had a number.’
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 life trajectories.
Marwencol
Hogancamp is a true American eccentric, just as the people who first came to America must have been, and the people who created our country, and forged a path out west, surely were. He’s a flawed, brilliant, pessimistically-hopeful, demon-haunted world-builder.
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