All images from Presença: We Are Here, a series of embroidered 16 x 20-inch photographs. Aline Mello, 2022. IT’S SUMMER BREAK after the first year of my MFA at Ohio State. I am living with my stepfather and mother in their house about thirty minutes outside Atlanta. I am thirty-three, but when I’m at Mamãe’s house, I revert to thirteen. When I cook something, she sucks in air through her teeth. You made that this
Emily Saliers and Amy Ray c. 1990. Photo by Michael Lavine. ONE OF THE most powerful revelations in Alexandria Bombach’s new documentary about the multiplatinum, still-touring-and-recording Indigo Girls is the fact that Amy Ray and Emily Saliers met when they were twelve years old. I fucking knew it! I screamed at the screen. I didn’t know it in the wikipedia sense of knowing, but more so knew it in my bones. I didn’t go to
Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke in True Things (2021) Photo courtesy of BBC Films. A few days before Christmas, we met a friend at a fancy grocery store in Hudson, where people sit at a long table, drinking lattes and eating focaccia. We hadn’t seen our friend in a while. She looked happy in the way of people who have recently jumped out of an airplane. I said, “I was thinking about Jesus.” She said,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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