08 Dec

Kingdom of Bones

December 8, 2014

by Miles Klee | illustration by William Fatzinger Jr.
 
I don’t visit museums of art, for reasons you’ll understand, and when I do go to other, mostly historical museums, it’s with the hope of finding a room that has no people in it. When that proves impossible, I find somewhere pleasant to sit for a very long time. I lived in Manhattan some months, not far from the American Museum of Natural History, and even a stroll to “get some fresh air” would lead me to its great stone steps, and thence into its echoing depths. On occasions when the museum became quite crowded, for example a Sunday in mid-December, I made my way to the Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals. It’s there that you can study, in a splendid diorama, two stuffed but darkly alive mountain lions. There’s a polished wood bench a few feet away from the glass, and nobody has the time to sit there—nobody but me.
 
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05 Dec

The Naked Negative

December 5, 2014

photos by Ben Simon
 
Photography has a funny relationship with the truth. Photographs presented alone are taken as fact in the absence of more information. We are comfortable with images acting as documentation. I’m not interested in deception. I play within the medium, shooting nudes in the studio with a pinhole lens and long exposures. The images are presented as negatives, pulling them further from reality.
 
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28 Nov

Walking

November 28, 2014

by Conor O’Rourke | photos by Danielle Gasbarro
 
The hills of my city made side streets a gamble. Some streets finished suddenly in blunt dead ends, some in spectacular sunlit vistas. Even streets that looked promising could suddenly turn and disappear into a chain-link fence, leaving me with nothing to do but go back and start over from the beginning. I didn’t mind. Walking made me feel free and familiar with this city, this city where I had been living and working for two years but never really spent any time. Walking was slower than riding a bike or taking the train. It made me stop to notice things.
 
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28 Nov

Red, White, & Bruised
TXRD’s Dusty Doublewide plays the name game

November 28, 2014

produced by Sarah Herndon
 
Roller Derby is one of the fastest growing sports in the world; and if you’re not already a fan, you probably know a few basics: tough, rowdy women on roller skates with weird names and provocative outfits beating the crap out of each other. That’s the stereotype, at least. The sport is especially alive in the quads of the Rhinestone Cowgirls’ Dusty Doublewide. Dusty recently won the league’s awards for Best Blocker, Most Feared Skater, Crowd Favorite, and Dirtiest Skater, which can tell you a lot about her persona alone. When the helmet comes off, though, where does Dusty end and Hayly begin?
 
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28 Nov

League of Three

November 28, 2014

by Emily May
 
There’s a small town in southwest Michigan that boasts a University and a Wings Etc restaurant, and parents buy homes in subdivisions where their kids will shoot heroin as high schoolers. There is a megachurch off the freeway and the girls are all long-haired and well-mannered. Everyone dreams of leaving before they learn to drive—for what or where, they’re not really sure. Briefly, this town was my refuge, and I became an international roller hockey star in a league of three.
 
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13 Nov

Inside the Realm

November 13, 2014

by Tyler Spangler
 
Portraying the truth but just blowing colorful smoke.

12 Nov

Museum of Natural History

November 12, 2014

by Tatiana Ryckman | Illustration by Kyle Butler
 
There’s a picture of zebras in my mother’s childhood bedroom. A whole safari landscape littered with striped horses. They’re not horses, I know. But dozens of zebras, all horse-like and glass-eyed, romping through that picture. It’s pasted like wallpaper over the nook where someone would end up sleeping over the holidays when we all drove in to Buffalo from Cleveland. There’s a pervasive and unacknowledged respect for zebras lingering among my sisters and I that I can only attribute to that giant photograph and everything those zebras saw.
 
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11 Nov

Pineapple Pink

November 11, 2014

by Emma Hartvig
 
“I work to create my ideal world—not a place or something you can grasp, but the pleasure you get from looking at certain colors, shapes, or objects.”
 
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31 Oct

Fright Night at Decker

October 31, 2014

Audio by Feliks Garcia | Video by Nathan Smith and Austin Tolin | Photos by Patrick Bresnan
 
Decker Middle School’s fifth annual Fright Night is a monumental night of scares produced by 7th and 8th graders in the AVID program. Hear their story.

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15 Feb

3 Poems

February 15, 2014

by Aaron Samuels | photos by Julianne Popa
 
Grandpa Origin
After the Funeral
Love Lessons

 
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13 Feb

Tracking Back at 30 Frames Per Second

February 13, 2014

by Jené Gutierrez
 
As I observe the interactions and documented mundanity of my family’s surviving home videos, I search for signs that this life I see, this grainy and familial life, is mine. Representing my childhood from around two to five years of age, these videos document the brief and vaguely recalled time in my life when my parents were still married and we all – mother, father, sister, brother – lived together. Although my parents were unhappily married, these videos don’t indicate that – there are moments of tenderness between them that, if you know them separately like I do, are nearly unfathomable. I know this perceived restoration of wholeness is a myth, but maybe I regard it this way because I almost can’t believe that this was my life, that for a few years I lived with this family, and that everything appears so astonishingly normal.
 
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13 Feb

Crushes, 1993-2006

February 13, 2014

by Susan Cohen | illustration by Sarah Schmidt
 
I can’t remember the name of the first boy I ever had a crush on, but I do remember the trauma of witnessing him projectile vomit all over our kindergarten homework assignments. After that, I didn’t like him anymore. I was much more superficial back then.
 
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12 Feb

Hold Me While I’m Hairy:
The Sexual Awakening of Robin Williams

February 12, 2014

by Patrick Pryor | illustration by Erin Baird
 

Robin Williams slugged down a tumbler of Johnny Walker and struggled to get in the mood. His rumpled button down, soaked with putrescent whiskey sweat, clung to his bloated frame like wilted spinach. You’re a star, Robby. He reassured himself, spilling another stiff one. Babes would knife each other in the throat to hear your Popeye.
 
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11 Feb

Flailing Things

February 11, 2014

by William Fatzinger Jr.
 
Picture the famous wrestling high school. Great glutted trophy cabinet. Tidy gradient of photographed wrestling teams gone by. Photos degrade, go black and white, get ancient, get ugly.
 
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10 Feb

Dave

February 10, 2014

by Emily May | image by Shay Spaniola
 
My next-door neighbor, over for dinner with his wife at my parents’ house a week before I leave for the other side of the world: “Have you thought about certain things? It’s 120 degrees every day. You might want to cut your hair before leaving.”
 
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09 Feb

3 Poems

February 9, 2014

08 Feb

CAP Magazine’s The Sound: Truancy

February 8, 2014

produced by Feliks Garcia and Nick Carpenter | sound design by Soundnoodle
 
Remember those days you just didn’t want to go to school? How did you get out of it? What did you do? In this first episode of The Sound, we share three stories about cutting, told with wisdom found only in hindsight.
 
Featuring stories by Feliks Garcia, Liz Moskowitz, Nick and Kevin Carpenter.
 
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07 Feb

Memory

February 7, 2014

by Shay Spaniola
 
Invoking themes of memory, geography, and family, these images recall simultaneous relationship between youth and aging.
 
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