Issues Archives - Page 16 of 28

Bones: On ‘Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,’ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Meg Whiteford

Cecily Brown. ‘Selfie,’ 2020. Oil on linen, 43 × 47 in. The Swartz Family Collection. © Cecily Brown. Can a painting be its own opposite? The works in Cecily Brown’s mid-career survey Death and the Maid are both abstract and figurative, canonically referential and hedonistically maximal, their carnivalesque palettes slashed with monotone grays. They are, at once, both surface and core. The show greets you with a large canvas titled Selfie (2020), which depicts a

Ring

Laurie Stone

The other night, we visited the South Street Seaport, where a branch of the McNally Jackson bookstore is located. On the pier, regular water cost six dollars and everyone was the age of the horizon. They looked beautiful in Bermuda shorts, walking dogs. At the event, I read a little from my new book and talked about freedom in front of the assembled group with the writer Vince Passaro. A man I had not seen

Travel Channel

Laurie Stone

Anthony Bourdain (far left), c. 1980. This year, the ticks in Hudson are the size of the head of a pin. You look at them with amazement they can be that small. The man I live with examines a tiny black dot I show him, and we go upstairs to get tweezers. He holds my arm under a bright light and grabs the critter, pulling up firmly but not too fast. I can see the

Food

Laurie Stone

Julia Child on the set of The French Chef, c. 1965. Photo by Paul Child I WANT TO tell you about the drive to NYC early Sunday morning, the car packed with items for a party I’d agreed to cater. The man I live with was driving, and in my passenger seat I fell into a sleep that was deep and uncomfortable and thrilling as a cloud that swallows you. Pure sensation is a thing

Three Things I Have Been Thinking About

Laurie Stone

Photo by Edenpictures, via Flickr 1. When I was nineteen and living uptown near Columbia University, my boyfriend and I would go to a small bakery. The man who owned the shop worked unassisted, selling napoleons, linzer tarts with current jam, chocolate brownies, milk, and homemade matzohs. His clothes were well worn and pressed. When he wasn’t behind the counter, he sat on a chair, talking to whomever took the seat beside him. The

What We Remember is Not the Past

Laurie Stone

Laurie Stone at the Morton Street Pier in New York City, c. 1970. Photo courtesy of author. Yesterday, I received a check for the security deposit on my apartment in New York City. It’s done. I lived there for forty-three years. I have visions of the open road, except we can’t go anywhere. In unpacking from the move, I found notebooks I wrote in the 1970s. The particulars of my life are news to me—who

Rock-a-bye

Sarah Dougher

The original 2001 “Rockin’ Road Map,” a guide for campers, volunteers, and parents, created by Misty McElroy. BETWEEN COVID AND kids, parties had fallen off my must-do list. It was an exotic feat that I, en famille, managed to travel across town this past Christmas Eve to a Hanukkah party where, noshing on smoked fish and sugar cookies, I learned that the original Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls was kaput. I was shocked. Misty

(Some Notes On) Confession

Charis Caputo

Sam Levy, Double Figure, 64″ x 47″, Charcoal on Paper, 2021. I wonder if there might not be . . . another human essence than self. —Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound” ONE OF THE earliest books I can remember reading was a yellowed collection of children’s prayers, possibly something my Protestant-farmer grandparents had read to my mother in the 1950s. I don’t know the title; I only remember one line: Lord, if you find that

Forgiveness

LaToya Council

In the fall of 2021, I ran into my ex-best friend at Trader Joe’s. I was surprised to see her; I had moved back to Los Angeles and she still lived on the East Coast. We’d met as undergrads at Spelman College and, while I was in graduate school, I’d lived briefly with her and her husband, but we hadn’t spoken for more than a year. I was pushing my cart through the dairy section,

A Conversation with My Mother

Anna Godbersen

That year, I asked only one question and spent a lot of time looking out my apartment’s kitchen window. The view was mostly a three-story ailanthus, its leaves orange and lavender at the end of the day. The phone rang. It was my mother. That year, I didn’t like talking to my mother, and I asked questions to avoid having to talk about myself. But really, I was only asking one question: Will I have

Issues

Bones: On ‘Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,’ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ring

Travel Channel

Food

Three Things I Have Been Thinking About

What We Remember is Not the Past

Rock-a-bye

(Some Notes On) Confession

Forgiveness

A Conversation with My Mother

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