Pioneer Valley Offers Variety of Venues, Performers for Music Lovers

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.) The Iron Horse Music Hall is one of

Ninth Issue of The Common Transports Readers from Vermont to Mumbai

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 wat

Father John Misty’s Latest Album Emanates Authenticity

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. It’s a classic story of falling in love. But the boy isn’t an ordinary boy — he’s Josh Tillman, self-proclaimed “sarcastic overcompensating asshole,” as he put it in an interview with Gran

Exactitudes: A Photographic Presentation of Classified Identities

“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. Well chosen, because the project inde