For four years in the Seventies, my father moonlighted as a session musician and live performer in Nashville, while also teaching English classes at Fisk University. He was a conga player trained on the beaches of Chicago’s Lake Michigan, but arrived in Nashville in 1970 as a newly minted professor, the first in his family to finish college. My mother, my sister, and I moved with him. A few nights a week, he and his band would play psychedelic jazz at Exit/In and other spots, or on recordings of country and folk albums by artists who heard him in local clubs. What he found in Nashville was a meeting of desires: a city with a music industry that was booming and almost all-consuming; a Black community that had become fragmented and somewhat wrecked, but was still producing great music; and within himself, a desire for joy in the face of an eight-year marriage that was in trouble.
Anyone in magazines knows what it takes to wrangle a famous person for a photo shoot. There are weeks of phone calls, green-room demands, issues of timing and availability and vanity. So what happens when you want 72 celebrities for one image? Therein lay the challenge for this issue’s cover photograph by Pelle Cass, who’s known for his multiple-exposure composed images, shot from one spot and then set down, digitally, into one frame.
Kare rice is for celebrating, and kare rice is a current for living, but mostly kare rice is for lunch. Seasoned lightly (or heavily), served alongside accouterments (or solo), the dish is wildly accessible. It can be cooked by the most experienced chefs or beginners just finding their way in the kitchen. It’s a meal that can exist in the background of your weekly revolutions, or as the marquee event of your evenings. Kare rice holds the imprints of a cook’s hands and influences, yielding delicious results regardless of whose stove it’s bubbling from.
For a writer who spurns the conventions of punctuation, Stella Maris feels a lot like a full stop, a parting pronouncement on the whole sordid human experiment. It’s the second McCarthy novel to be published this year – a companion volume to The Passenger, released in late October. After 16 years of literary silence, McCarthy has produced a drought-busting, brain-vexing double act: first, a nihilistic vaudeville; now, its austere twin.
More than a few scientists have blithely sauntered across this metaphysical minefield as though it were safe terrain. They claim that science has proved that free will is an illusion and say that’s all there is to it. Psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon is a different kind of trespasser on philosophers’ turf, arguing that free will is real after all. Yet his metaphysical claim, which occupies the early chapters of “Freely Determined,” is treated perfunctorily and is in any case irrelevant to what the rest of this fascinating book has to say.
The heart won’t make its point.
Why not let you go out into the sun
where blossoms burst
and rush like oxycontin?