Also read: Along the United States/Canadian Border Today From Yankee magazine January 1984 Right on the edge of Lake Champlain, a few miles north of Alburg, Vermont, is a quiet country lane called the Line Road. As it crosses into the United States from Canada, it becomes a dirt road and veers away from the […]
maine
Yankee
Art as Invention and Play
Last week, in reporting on the Boston Art Awards, I noted that “When the market is bad and the money is gone, the pressure is off and artists can make art for all the right reasons – to discover what’s meaningful to them, to express what it means to be human.” I can think of […]
Food
Sea Salt | Homegrown
Sea salts’ flaky crystals, infused with the trace minerals and unique essence of the ocean, bring texture to food and oomph to its flavor. All culinary salts–edible minerals buried in rock deposits or dissolved in the ocean–are fundamentally the same compound of sodium and chloride ions. What wakes up your tastebuds, however, is that […]
SLIDE SHOW: Tim Llewellyn photos of Obama campaign in New Hampshire VIDEO: Tim Llewellyn’s interview on Maine’s TV news magazine “207”. I remember sitting in my American history class in school, glazing over at the names and dates, never internalizing the fact that both belonged to real flesh-and-blood people. So much mythology surrounded these figures […]
Travel
United States/Canada Border
No roads follow the neat borderline between New England and Canada that you see on the map. Instead, you have to traverse, back and forth, in and out of Canada–a rough stitch that has pulled the two countries together since before either of them was a nation. This is the story of that line–a line […]
Magazine
Stamped Mail
A lot of letters come to me, all kinds of letters. I often read that the handwritten letter is dead. Everything happens now on e-mail. Probably that is our future but in the meantime, there are reasons why all people don’t use e-mail. Not so long ago, I received a letter. The back of the […]
Magazine
Stone Wall Defender Robert Thorson
SLIDE SHOW: New England stone walls by William Hubbell, from Good Fences: A Pictorial History of New England’s Stone Walls (Down East Books, 2006; $29.95) When geologist Robert Thorson came to work at the University of Connecticut in 1984, he was smitten by stone walls. In all his travels–from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest to […]
Yankee
Boston Art Awards and Beyond
Almost one year ago, in my March 6, 2008 posting, I called your attention to Greg Cook and his indispensable website, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. NEJAR is probably the best regional art site in the country, so I was flattered when Cook invited me to submit nominations and to vote on the just-released […]
Magazine
Poetry of Claire Hersom
Anadama Bread Winter was the worst. The farm windows iced inside, wind howled down off the upper field; through the gauze curtains it kissed our foreheads, noses buried in featherbed crazy-quilts. Wooden spindle framed our heads. It was too cold for ceiling mice. We always had to pee just before dawn. When the […]
Yankee
Ubart at USM
To honor and celebrate the forty-year creative career of artist, educator, and collector Juris Ubans, who is retiring from the University of Southern Maine faculty in August, the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery has mounted a sumptuous exhibition that fills the little gallery on the Gorham campus (through February 15) not just with art […]
Magazine
Small Towns, Big Stories
Saturday night I gave a speech to the Hillsborough, New Hampshire, Chamber of Commerce. It was their annual awards evening, where a business of the year and citizen of the year would be recognized, and generally a time when all the members could gather and sit at long tables in the American Legion Hall, have […]
Dorothy Eisner (1906-1984) was a thoroughly modernist painter who worked her way through most of the artistic trends of the 20th century from the Ashcan School and Social Realism to Abstract Expressionism. Her mature work, however, took the form of a rather Matisse-like application of painterly expressionism, very loose, free, and colorful, to paintings of […]