I grew up in cemeteries. One Sunday afternoon a month, after Mass, after the midday meal of lasagna or spaghetti and meatballs, my grandmother visited the dead. Mama Rose never learned to drive, so her cousin–Uncle Rum–took her from graveyard to graveyard in his square green Ford. I didn’t have a choice; when Mama Rose […]
Riding the rails is as thrilling today as it was way back when. Here are Yankee’s picks for New England’s best passenger trips (check Web sites for seasonal schedules): 1. After a 36-year absence, passenger rail service has returned to Maine. Amtrak’s Downeaster connects Boston and Portland along a 114-mile rail corridor. 800-872-7245; amtrakdowneaster.com 2. […]
New England trains are part of this nation’s collective memory and in this train book review, a collection of midcentury images are waiting to be discovered.
Edith Wharton got it all wrong in Ethan Frome. That tortured farmer from Starkfield, Massachusetts, took a suicidal sled run down an icy slope and, tragically, lived to regret it. Perhaps most tragic was that Frome’s thinking on sledding was flawed from the start. He looked at it as a way to end his days. […]
Crampons. Check. Helmet. Ice picks. Backpack. Climbing harness. Check. All geared up, Matt Shove–my ice-climbing guide from Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) Climbing School–and I hiked into the woods. “It’s a short walk,” Matt told me. And three minutes later, I was facing the frozen waterfall at Connecticut’s Thomaston Ice Quarry–the same slab of ice that […]
7:30 A.M. WHERE THE SUN RISES FIRST Sunrise from Cadillac Mountain reveals a coastline carved with a crooked knife. From that famous vantage on Mount Desert Island, the coast of Maine comes out of the dark. It’s a complicated affair of peninsulas and coves, a jigsaw of rock and water, a play of motion and […]
The audience for art is small. The readership for art writing is even smaller. But at the risk of driving what few faithful readers Just Looking has to another art blog, I am devoting this final posting of 2009 to an interesting dialogue that has been taking place between Boston Phoenix art critic Greg Cook […]
Happy solstice, a somewhat forgotten mark of time and the movement of the planets. In the northern hemisphere, today is the shortest day of the year and the longest night; it is also the first day of winter. No one seems to want to celebrate that as much as we like to acknowledge the first […]
Maine is not only white with snow this time of year, racially it is also one of the whitest states in the nation with close to 98% of its residents identifying themselves as Caucasian. So any opportunity for exposure to cultural diversity is both welcome and needed in the Pine Tree State. The conjunction of […]
A couple of weeks ago, in church, our minister got up to preach his sermon and, before he began and without a word, he stepped down from the pulpit and began to distribute something. It looked like he was peeling bills off a roll of cash. We in the choir were served last and discovered […]
Traditionally, the visual arts have been object-oriented, involving the creation of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Increasingly over the last quarter of the 20th century and accelerating here in the early years of the 21st, the leading edge of creativity has become the art of installation, the creation of environments and the staging of events. […]
In truth, there is nothing I want for nor anything I want for Christmas this year other than to have my three daughters home for the holidays, but a few days ago I found myself wandering around Portland on errands and stopped in at a couple of art galleries. I would have stopped at more, […]
