By Jonathan Crowl (@jonathancrowl)
“What if only one person understands your art?” Lee Kirk ponders this in The Giant Mechanical Man, his directorial debut. In Kirk’s line of work, it means you’re out of a job. But considered in a general sense, the question can spark a meditation on the meaning of art and the motivations of artists — those struggling more than those successful.
By Matthew Brennan (@MatthewBrennan7)
Photo by joaquinuy on Flickr
All day, touring the city together, they meandered their way through the crowded, narrow streets and plazas, dodging storefronts and street-performers and vendors. When leading, he glanced back often to confirm that she was keeping up, staying with him through the crush of bodies; following her, he kept his eyes locked on the red flower he had tucked behind her ear that morning, at times finding routes through the crowd alternate to the one she’d slipped through, fighting his way back to her at others. But when she led, she took for granted that he would keep up behind her, not once glancing back.
By Brian Ross
Photo by Swami Stream on Flickr
By Matthew Brennan (@MatthewBrennan7)
Watercolor by Jeannie Beirne
With a saucepan set on top of the cast-iron stove, they boiled water over the wood-fueled flame for the father’s coffee and the boy’s hot chocolate. Outside – even from down in the basement – they could hear the wind, rushing through the trees and pressing against the walls of the house, the gusts whistling between the threshold gaps and rattling the windows, the sharp invasion of air making the house seem to move. With every change in the wind, heavy beads of rain broke like waves against the glass, and the deluge hummed a steady cadence on the roof that the father only noticed when it changed. The weathermen had said the hurricane would curl eastward before it came this far north; they’d said it would miss them.
By Maggie Desmond-O’Brien (@mdesmondobrien)
Image via HitRECord
“If I read our story backwards,” concludes The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, “it’s about how I un-broke your heart, and then we were happy until one day, you forgot about me forever.” Perhaps it’s odd to begin a review with an ending, but I can’t think of a better way to capture the quirky, self-conscious charm of this collection, the literary debut of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his fledgling production company, hitRECord. It’s enough twee to make your teeth hurt, certainly, but read between the lines, and you’ll find a surprising melancholy and insight, too.
By Claire Rudy Foster (@clayroody)
Photo by mrkumm on Flickr
We were playing in the back field after school, the four of us, booting around a football we’d stolen from the gym. We hid it in the boxwoods by the rugby shed. The ball had once been tight and hard, perfect to kick and send sailing with the toe of your sneaker even. But being in the damp and resting on the ground, its hexagons were peeling up. It was soft as an old puffball mushroom. When you kicked it, it made the sound of a punch in the stomach. So we booted it down the pitch, the ball going oof, oof. Hennessey as usual out front, pretending to be David Beckham. We all despised Beckham. He was too pretty for us, too popular. There was a red robin singing in one of the bare branches. The field was mostly black clay and mud. Spring not yet arrived.
By Jonathan Crowl (@jonathancrowl)
Allow us a moment to slip into our fanboy outfits and shoot victory paintball pellets in the air over what Joel McHale has tweet-deemed “The Real March Madness”: NBC’s Community will return to television March 15 at 8 PM.
Following a grim three-month period in which Recess pondered packing up its belongings and sulking into the woods to await the downfall of humanity, the world seems to have finally taken a step in the right direction. The buffoonish overlords at NBC had always insisted Community would return at some point, but given that everything worthwhile aired by the network was basically force-fed to its higher-ups, there was little comfort to be extracted from that promise.
By A. Igoni Barrett (@FCoRT)
Photo by chichacha on Flickr
By Shannon Schuren (@shannonschuren)
Photo by Kevin Dooley on Flickr
After five years of childless wedded bliss, Minerva had demanded they see a specialist. After ten, Harold had bought her the cat. She’d named him Tony, after the tiger on the Frosted Flakes box. He’d been a fluffy orange ball of fur, content to chase anything Harold dangled over the arm of his recliner. He drank cream from a crystal saucer and nibbled tidbits of food that Minerva snuck him while she was cooking. He slept first on their pillows, then an old patchwork quilt at the foot of their bed as he grew older and more obese.
Photo by Mrs Logic on Flickr
Have a seat in our virtual faux-leather chair and inhale the rich scent of our mahogany laminate as we share some recent news concerning Recess Magazine. Since launching late in 2011, we’ve been busy in the back room sorting out our goals for the future and our best approaches to reaching them. Today, we’re here to announce that we think we might have an okay plan mapped out for the future. Since you don’t care about any of that, we’re going to spare you the details and just insist to you, in a haughty, knowing manner, that we have placed ourselves on the fast track to being mediocre at worst.
