July 16, 2013 Arts & Culture The Feelies at Maxwell’s By Josh Lieberman Photo credit: Seth Ditchik. Minutes before the Feelies take the stage at Maxwell’s for the last time ever, the room is packed tightly enough to induce heart palpitations in a fire marshal. It’s small, the back room of Maxwell’s, with a capacity of two hundred. From the bar and surrounding area it’s hard to glimpse the stage, even though the room is only about the size of a rural post office. The lucky fans at the foot of the stage must sacrifice drinking privileges, as going to the bar and returning to the front is impossible. The room is hot. No one who’s ever been to Maxwell’s has praised the venue’s air circulation. In no way is Maxwell’s an ideal place to see a show, except that it is. The highlight of a Feelies show is often the blistering combo of “Raised Eyebrows” and “Crazy Rhythms.” The booming, oddly-metered bass drumming of “Eyebrows” was inspired by the rapid and arrhythmic explosions of the grand finale of a July 4th fireworks show. In a few weeks, Maxwell’s, the Hoboken music venue almost always described as “legendary” or “venerated,” will close its doors permanently. Beleaguered by issues municipal and demographic, the club has become too much of a hassle to run, says Todd Abramson, the co-owner and booker. The parking in Hoboken is abysmal; the population is changing. “It was just time,” says a weary Abramson, who will close Maxwell’s on July 31. Perhaps no band will miss Maxwell’s more than the Feelies. Read More
July 15, 2013 Arts & Culture Smoke By Philip Connors If you live on a peak in fire-prone country, as I do every summer in the Black Range of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, the big one will eventually come for you. This knowledge does not cushion the fact that if you’re a lookout evacuated by helicopter you can’t help but feel a failure. The point of the job is early detection: the sooner a smoke is spotted, the more options you give firefighters to contain it. When you’re airlifted by the whirlybird, the options have dwindled to none but run. I realize self-quotation is a dishonorable habit, but it sounds a little smug to say I saw it coming and leave it at that. The fact is, a lot of people saw it coming. All you had to do was read the story written plainly on the faces of the mountains. Read More
July 12, 2013 Windows on the World Rebecca Walker, Maui, Hawaii By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. I have been looking out this window for three years. I have stared out of these rectangular panes full of hope and also despair, giddy with inspiration to connect and overtaken with a throbbing desire to disengage. I suppose this is what writing is to me: gripping the rope that swings between reaching out and pulling in. But whatever my mood, I always love the light beyond this window. I love the quiet. I love my two empty chairs, sentinels awaiting their visitors, open to the promise of more. I feel at home in this spot, on this road to the small village of Hana, on this tiny piece of rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I love the rain that pours down, thunderous and crashing, before sunshine, harsh and stunning, pierces through once again. —Rebecca Walker
July 11, 2013 Arts & Culture The King of Queens By Tara Clancy Squatting behind a bookshelf with a stolen cup of coffee, I tilted my head like a dog at a shadow. Ear to shoulder, eyebrow raised, I mouthed the title of a book I’d never seen before. K-I-N-G L-E-A-R. Huh. Must be some Knights of the Round Table type-a-thing, I figured. Typically, when I cut classes, I was stealing away for a smoke, not Shakespeare. At sixteen, I was already a pack-a-day smoker. My brand was Marlboro Menthol, as opposed to Newport, that likely being the subconscious way Queens white girls differentiated themselves from Queens black girls—a thought I had much later in life. But on this day my caffeine addiction must have trumped my nicotine addiction, because I skipped the smoke, took a cup of coffee from the teacher’s lounge, and hid in an empty classroom to drink it. Straightaway I pulled the book from the shelf and split it in half, a gesture that tells me now I was not looking to read it, but to perform an autopsy. Maybe there would be pictures, or some chivalric bit of nonsense to help me pass the time. But there on the page was line after line of language as beautiful as it was bizarre, and I was mesmerized. I threw myself back, falling from my feet to my haunches, crossed my legs on the cold linoleum and turned to the beginning. Act 1. Scene 1. I had never read a book on my own. But I kept on, in a fury, cutting one class after the next after the next, until I was done. Read More
July 10, 2013 Arts & Culture Labyrinths: On the Centennial of Salvador Espriu By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Illustration by Josep Pla-Narbona. The great Catalan writer Salvador Espriu—and he was a very, very great writer—was born one hundred years ago today, in Santa Coloma de Farners, a town some one hundred kilometers northeast of Barcelona. He moved as a child further south to seaside Arenys de Mar and later even further south to Barcelona. His imagination was inherently Catalan in its most expansive sense, mar i muntanya, the sea and the mountains, weaving in and out of his settings and his sense of character and fate: the sea bringing the atmospherics of maritime communities to his work, as well as the classical and Egyptian via the Mediterranean, and the mountains cradling all of the intimacy, hermetic folklore, and internecine conflict by which towns hemmed in by ecology are often marked. He wrote fiction, plays, and was perhaps best known for his poetry. His skill set was gigantic. He had a project: his imagined, mythical homeland Sinera appears in much of his work (Sinera being a phonetic rendering of his childhood home of Arenys written backwards); characters from his poems and plays would appear in his fiction, without set-up, warning, or explication; if you read all of his work together, you realize that he has created within it, for it, a thriving community with its own inner logic, inner laws, and even physical laws (his work at times paws at the fantastical and the absurd like a cat determined to grab a candle’s flame); he invented other names for Spain, Catalunya, Barcelona as though those names would not do; and, despite what it would mean for his career as a writer, he wrote almost exclusively in Catalan. When I was asked to translate Espriu’s collection of short stories, Ariadna al laberint grotesc, I was happy to do so. For the record, I’m not someone who can kind of read Catalan or who approximates from Spanish: I speak Catalan at home and when we’re back home in Barcelona that’s all I speak and write and read. I write this not to brag but to admit that I didn’t think that Espriu’s prose could get the best of me. But the beautiful and bizarre Adriadna al laberint grotesc (published last year as Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth by Dalkey Archive) provided challenges that provoked in me at the same time great melancholy and great joy. After I was done, fortunately, joy was what remained. Read More
July 10, 2013 Arts & Culture The Best in Wikipedia Prose By Sadie Stein Timothy Dexter. For those of you looking to go down some seriously deep rabbit holes or just appreciate the outsider art that is Wikipedia prose at its best, may we suggest this beautifully curated list of the fifty most interesting articles on Wikipedia? While this compendium is indeed fascinating, we can’t help feeling that Timothy Dexter is a glaring omission.