Many of my most memorable nights at Amherst have involved going out to see live music. Amherst itself has some concert venues (for example, the biweekly Coffee Haus in Marsh), but, in my opinion, Northampton is where it’s at. It’s where things can get a little more intense. This guide is mainly intended for first-years who want to have a great music experience, but don’t really know where to go yet. (I definitely didn’t during my first semester at Amherst.)
“And I don’t know where to begin,” Sufjan Stevens sings in the first verse of “Carrie & Lowell,” his seventh studio album. He has taken on quite a daunting task: to honor the few remaining memories he has of his mother Carrie. She left the family when he was just one year old, but Stevens still spent three summers with her in Oregon, between the ages of 5 and 8. Now that she has passed away in a hospital bed, those summers’ stories are all he has. But what can you do with sparse memories like that? What form do they take on when they’re all that’s left of your mother?
The Common, a literary magazine based at Amherst, released its ninth issue this week. The Common is devoted to a “modern sense of place,” a happily broad mission that I suspect all of us can in some sense relate to. As young adults at Amherst, we’re all away from home in an environment that’s devoted to encouraging each of us to find our own sense of place both here and beyond our college years. These early adult years are no more than an eddy in a tide pool, a brief disturbance of the wider waters of life.
Boy sees girl in a parking lot. Boy falls in love with girl and says, “I’ve seen you around. What’s your name?” Girl falls in love with boy. They begin to spend every day together, getting high and making love. They’re finding themselves in each other; their intimacy is becoming all there is to the universe.
“Exactitudes”, an ongoing art project started in 1994 by the Dutch photographers Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, is first and foremost a work about recognition and confrontation. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have systematically documented numerous identities over the last 20 years. The name is a contraction of “exact” and “attitude” and at the same time the French word for precision or accuracy.
In good movies, all details are worth pondering. During my second viewing of “Her”, Spike Jonze’s latest tale of love and technology, I caught myself wondering what Alan Watts was doing in it. As in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Jonze tells a story about technology that challenges the entrenched beliefs underlying love stories.
