As I sit here at the keyboard, my backyard view is of gardens punctuated by deep red bee balm and bright yellow black-eyed susans, pink lilies and lobelia, buttery primroses and lilac hostas. High summer is not a time for strenuous intellectual or artistic activity. It’s a time for rest and relaxation, for enjoying the […]
Anchored in the east by Conway Village and to the west by Lincoln, the Kancamagus Highway is driven by more than 750,000 vehicles every year and is some of the loveliest and wildest land in the White Mountain National Forest.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the woman who wrote to me to tell me of the demise of Spencer’s Shad Shack. She had been to visit and she had taken photos and then she went by again and saw the dozer poised to push it over. And I wrote a plea to […]
Before it’s too late, allow me to call your attention to a nifty little exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Entitled Nature/Artifice, the exhibition features 13 works from the museum’s collection that artfully speak to the relationship between nature and culture. I say before it’s too late, because the RISD Museum is […]
Yesterday I went on a house and garden tour in the next town. There are many historic houses in that town, especially on their main street, which looks more like a stage set for Anne of Green Gables than it does a real town, operating in the 21st century. But it does operate every day, […]
Art galleries tend to come and go with the economy. When I first started looking at contemporary art in the 1960s, there was only one serious art gallery in Portland, Maine -Frost Gully Gallery, which eventually returned to Freeport from whence it came. By 1987, at the height of the 1980s boom, there were more […]
I am truly blessed by the mail that I receive. It all seems to me to come out of the blue. A letter from a member of the National Guard, telling me how much he loves Yankee, how it used to be the perfect size to fit into the pocket of the cargo pants of […]
Photographers have long been captivated by itinerant peoples. Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans photographed migrant laborers and sharecroppers during the Depression. Josef Koudelka became famous when Aperture published The Gypsies in 1975. Sebastiao Salgado is regarded as perhaps today’s most distinguished documentary photographer based on the epic sweep of his photographs of the world’s dispossessed. […]
Around here, we have our choices of ways to celebrate the Fourth of July. In the town next to us, dozens of residents gather to read the Declaration of Independence, including the names of all the signers. This is done at their historic Meetinghouse which looks like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The […]
Real Art Ways, an alternative arts space founded in Hartford, Connecticut in 1975, is one of New England’s liveliest contemporary arts venues, like Space in Portland, Maine, and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island, presenting a heady mix of fine and performing arts. This summer, Real Art Ways has commissioned four works of public art for […]
Welcome to the July 2009 edition of “Jud’s New England Journal,” the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, editor-in-chief of Yankee Magazine, published since 1935 in Dublin, New Hampshire. Old-Time New England Humor: Is It Still Funny? Here’s an example from the famous19th-century humorist known as Artemus Ward. You decide … The use of […]
Mayday came home a week ago. Her fever was gone and she was basically ready to return to her life. There had been no ready explanation for her illness and no real explanation for her recovery, other than the antibiotics she received and the “magic” chicken and rice concoction I took to her up at […]
