She arms herself with the metal pipe of the Electrolux
with the precision of a marksman
Category: 20th Century
ONE POEM – Italo Ferrante
the sound of sliced cabbages
shadows painted on the floor
brick façades & blunt gables
a swarm of rats follow a lone woman
wherever she sleepwalks
all bedsheet ladders lead to you
Where Have All the People Gone? Lessons from Russia’s Longest War – Roman Cherevko
Introduction February 2014. Just as Russia was invading and annexing Crimea, the world was watching another case of Putin showing off, also in the Black Sea region: the Winter Olympics in Sochi. So far the most expensive Games on the record, they were meant to demonstrate Russia’s opulence and grandeur, and, of course, to highlight…
After Midnight: Nightclub Photographs from the ‘50s and ‘60s – David Ford
In boxes of old photographs, you sometimes come across nightclub pictures from the 1950s and 1960s. These images sit at the boundary between the public and private, the posed portrait and the casual snapshot. They were taken by ‘snappers’ who worked in the nightclubs, taking pictures of couples and groups of adults enjoying themselves which…
Anti-Concretism and Architectural Atheism: In Defence of Brutalism – Tom Jones
The pro- and anti-Brutalist building camps can be defined in two words apiece. There are those who believe such buildings are ‘concrete poetry’, and there are those who believe that each one is a ‘concrete monstrosity’. Like the battlefields of WW1, there is nothing living in between. Brutalism’s tenure at the forefront of architecture was…
Cures For The Common Cold — Sarah de Souza
Thinking about this, they grow wide-eyed and speak so fast that the windows become flecked with child spittle. How can they have made themselves so ridiculous by dreaming?
Favorite Recipes – Ann Levin
I can still see her today. Tall, blond, and statuesque, a platinum-haired goddess with perfect teeth and a year-round tan. She was standing in the middle of the dance floor at my parents’ annual Christmas party – except it wasn’t really a dance floor. It was the dining room of our house, but with all…
Radio Music Magic – Paul Sasges
Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio Turn it up, that’s enough, so you know it’s got soul. ‘Caravan’, Van Morrison, 1970 The transistor radio came out between the vacuum tube in the fifties and the Walkman in the seventies. I spent many hours on our braided area rug prone upon my…
White Noise Inside the Supermarket: Reading DeLillo during a Pandemic – Michael P. Mazenko
Wandering the aisles of my neighborhood supermarket, the kind of place Don DeLillo once wrote evoked “a sense of replenishment … and fullness of being,” I tread cautiously out of suspicion and respect for the potential “airborne toxic event” that is the coronavirus pandemic. As the world continues to pass milestones of Covid infections, I…
Back Home in Old Kentucky – Bailey Vandiver
Kentucky governor Happy Chandler once said Kentuckians are always either coming home or thinking about coming home. On the day that tornadoes devastated my home state, I was longing to be home. It was December 11, 2021, and I woke up in a New York City hotel room to the news that tornadoes had ripped…
Mick Jagger Used to Call Me Mum – Jacqueline Ellis
When I was little, the dark staircase between the front and back rooms of my grandparents’ two-up, two-down terrace house had been a mountain. Each step a jagged, granite foothold; the shadowed landing a dark cloud hiding a kingdom of giants, or a castle encased in twisted branches. Their bedroom glowed yellow; the edges of…
Community and Creativity in New York in Patti Smith’s Just Kids – Jasmine Choice
The prolific New York art scene gained momentum in the 1950s through the subversive Beat movement and the experimental first-generation New York School of poets. Both celebrated community and were integral in inaugurating a defiance of the mainstream and the innovation of art as collaborative. These artistic coteries shared geographical proximity; personal relationships; and similar…
Porridge 