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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08 Dec
Kingdom of Bones
December 8, 2014
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.
