No stranger to local rock 'n roll, Sean Carlson ran Just Another Scene as a resource on independent music across New England from 1998 until 2005. He now runs his own consultancy, and his writing has been published in The Irish Times, Boston Globe Magazine, New York Daily News and elsewhere.
In “Big Mood Machine,” her 2018 essay for The Baffler, journalist Liz Pelly honed in on the role of digital music as part of “a burgeoning industry surrounding technology that alleges to mine our emotional states.” Zeroing in on Spotify and its familiar categorizations, ranging from “Chill” and “Focus/Study” to “Commute” and “Girls Night Out,” […]
Cave In emerged from the Merrimack Valley north of Boston in the mid-1990s to become a prominent presence in New England’s D.I.Y. music scene, their blistering and emotive hardcore-inspired approach to metal finding a natural home at local shows in warehouses, basements, and community centers. They quickly went on to become a juggernaut on stages […]
Shortly before an array of computer printouts and hand-written notes announcing business closures and curbside pickup policies presented a kind of collective commentary on COVID-19 along North Main Street, somebody spray painted a plea on an undeveloped lot near Rhode Island School of Design’s administration building: “PUT SOME ART ON THIS WALL!” For months, the […]
As an undergraduate arriving at Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, Alta L. Price was dead-set on studying German at “the school across the street” — Brown University. Growing up in New York’s Mohawk Valley, Price had fallen in love with the language rather by accident as a teenager after stopping by the village […]
In 2017, a podcast from Letras Libras, a literary magazine published in Mexico and Spain, aired the essay “Aves Migratorias” contemplating the journeys of Bill Lishman. In his homemade aircraft, the artist and aviator featured in the film Fly Away Home settled into a self-propelled seat in the sky to lead a migration of Canadian […]
After boarding a bus in Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad for a day trip to the ancient archeological site of Taxila with the nonprofit International Center for Journalists in 2013, I fell into easy conversation with my seatmate. A former member of the Brown University Board of Trustees, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman had long served on the boards […]
With hopes that March melts February’s freeze and April’s showers again bring May flowers, Motif’s Sean Carlson interviewed Connor Burbridge of Nuts & Bolts Nursery (374 Farnum Pike, Smithfield), a cooperative housed at the permaculture nonprofit Revive the Roots. Opened in 2021 as a worker-owned nursery specializing in edible perennial plants, Nuts & Bolts is […]
As late January’s nor’easter dropped nearly two feet of snow in Tiverton, Will Mason prepared for his students’ return to in-person classes following extra Omicron precautions. After a week of slow snowmelt, heavy rains gave way to a flash freeze. When Mason stepped outside on Saturday morning for a walk with his dog, he described […]
While working as a nanny in Los Angeles, Kate Jones joined a drop-in chorus. She had sung in school choirs while growing up in Rhode Island and Vermont, but her newfound community traded hymns for harmonies of “No Hate, No Fear,” and choral covers of Bauhaus and OutKast. Founded to resist the fatigue of recurring […]
In 1987, when August Wilson’s Fences received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Providence Journal’s arts critic William Gale hailed the Pittsburgh playwright: “His plays leap from his own gut. They’re about things that really count — family relationships, the Black experience in America — and they have many colors, a multitude of themes, great […]