Clara Rose Thornton

District Magazine — ‘Mooo!’ is sexual psychedelia. On a late night in Chicago, I told a man I was chatting with on a dating app that researching Doja Cat had filled my evening. I directed him to ‘Mooo!,’ a music video featuring farm references, milkshakes and straws, a speaking style that connotes hip-hop over melodies referencing summer-afternoon soul, and a racially ambiguous young woman eating a hamburger. He said, “Wow. That’s a lot of breasts”. Bouncing anime bosoms, in close-up, fill a green screen I discovered was a sheet hung in Doja Cat’s bedroom, for probably 70 percent of ‘Mooo!’. ...

Stop Smiling — On this, the first and last day of his Chicago press run for The Painted Veil, a melancholic rumination on the criminal impulses of love, the pitfalls of Western cultural commandeering and the nature of forgiveness, Edward Norton looks a bit melancholy himself. It’s late evening and he’s been subjected to a barrage of radio, television and newspaper interviews throughout the day, critics and pseudo-critics pulling and nipping and tucking as most actors and directors complain about after these necessary parades. His appearance is more akin to his character Alan Isaacman in The People vs. Larry Flynt or Holden Spence in Everyone Says I Love You than his larger-than-life embodiments of wounded masculinity in American History X and Fight Club. ...

District Magazine — White supremacy is obviously such a vast, ridiculous lie, and we are already watching it crumble. The concept of pan-”whiteness” across European national identities is a recent capitalist construction, serving to justify West African slavery to build Europeans a “New World”, e.g. North, Central and South America: a manifest destiny fantasy. The word “race” as currently understood was introduced into English around the year 1580, influenced by same word in French, first documented in 1512.

District Magazine — She’s an elegant woman, in her late 40s. A tumble of black hair dips beneath her shoulders, her august form cloaked in a gauzy appliqué black dress. She makes a fitting detail of the dim bar of Trinity City Hotel: its ubiquitous purple velvet, her style owning a hip, soft, sensuality most 20-somethings would covet. An entrepreneur and event organiser, the woman worked as a model throughout Europe in the 1980s and ‘90s. The fact lingers in her demeanour. Yet we don’t talk about what it’s like to live and travel in multiple countries, or the trappings of surface luxury. When we’re together, ...

District Magazine — In 2015 amid an online storm surrounding #OscarsSoWhite, I got a call to be on “The Ryan Tubridy Show”, then titled “Tubridy” and airing on RTÉ 2fm. The year held the least diverse Academy Award slate in 17 years; nary a single person of colour was nominated in a major category. As an African-American radio film critic, I was asked to discuss “Selma”, a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic and the only film about non-white reality to glean a nomination. I was a noteworthy candidate given civil rights activism and association with MLK in my family history.

Artscope — Art is a reflection of human life as lived. The tenuous process of creating art mirrors life’s path: projection, uncertainty, connection then disconnection, and navigating surprise. Thus it makes sense to look to collections of contemporary art and individual pathways through the market as vibrant manifestations of a zeitgeist, the mime’s shadow we cannot see.

Dublin Inquirer — In Woody Allen films, setting is often a character. New York City breathes and vibrates, while punishing, cradling and uplifting people in those narratives; it is the reason for each person's worldview. In a similar way, the new Irish film "Cardboard Gangsters", set in the raw and enveloping universe of Dublin's Darndale, has a place-specific intensity that fully animates each moment and minor character.

Irish Independent — I recently attended a play called 'Dig' from Co Leitrim playwright, actor and director Seamus O'Rourke. The set consisted of a mossy patch of cemetery soil. A hastening dusk framed a stretch of grass that meandered to the theatre door, surrounded by stone walls -- moody boulders with a look of the ancient unmoved, as weathered as the gravestones -- enclosing four male characters, a whiskey bottle, a few empty beer cans and shovels. Once I acclimated to the unfamiliar country accents at breakneck speed, and the occasionally neon comic dialogue, I had an unsettling realisation.

Vermont Maturity — There's a reason medical practitioners and patients often prefer to use the term "cannabis" as opposed to "marijuana." The stigma of irresponsible desire for intoxication continues to haunt any usage of this plant - sidestepping three thousand years of documented medicinal use and research - to a degree that necessitates clear division in jargon between medicinal and perceived recreational use. A climate of fear and culture of forced attrition persists for recreational marijuana enthusiasts, in turn causing roadblocks for the medicinal community, despite three key factors: ...

Rutland Herald — If Dave Matthews stepped in and stole the average band's sax player, the average bandleader might get a bit angry. But not Béla Fleck, frontman and banjo player of the enigmatic four-piece The Flecktones, whose kaleidoscopic sound has flitted defiantly above the concept of genre classification for 22 years, and, thus, consistently maintained a freshness and level of experimentation. The need for freshness and experiment allowed the group a de facto boredom, impatience and dissatisfaction with its own direction by the time virtuoso saxophonist Jeff Coffin had been among its ranks for 14 years. This was in 2008, the same year close friends in the Dave Matthews Band lost their founding member Leroi Moore to a fatal ATV accident. Moore had been a Virgina saxophone player like none the world had seen--graceful, ethereal, yet kinetic--the jazz equivalent of sweet almond milk.

Artscope — A large, airy studio sits in the hull of a 19th-century brick warehouse. The oldest canal in the country, chartered in 1791, rushes at its feet. A few paces from the warehouse is a train depot where the maze of rails offers a vast industrial dreamscape: rusting, ghostly boxcars share space with the rumble of train whistles cutting across the water, resounding now just as they did generations ago. Here, in Bellows Falls, a small mountain village of 3,200 along the Connecticut River in Vermont's southeastern corner, plein aire alla prima painter Charlie Hunter paced about with his trademark limp, brow furrowed in enthusiastic concentration, rambling about Mondrian.

Artscope — It was night, and the rocky terrain of mountain forests made them stumble. A small, caramel-colored six-year-old girl walked briskly, hand-in-hand with her father. Her sister, four years old, was gathered in the arms of her frenzied mother, walking close. They covered terrain at a gait as fast the woods wold allow without detection or injury; in the coming daylight, the family once again would seek the safety of a cave. In 1959, a rebellion began in Lhasa and swept through Chinese-occupied Tibet in a fury of anti-communist, anti-Chinese sentiment.

UR Chicago — For many, the ritual and practice of wine tasting is often shrouded in mystery and pretension. For those not raised in homes prone to oenophilia, where discussion of grape varieties are part and parcel, or for those who didn't catch the wine bug early and begin seeking out a barrel-aged education, there's usually a fear of seeming unsophisticated or not refined or knowledgeable enough amidst all the swirling and sniffing that go on at a tasting. It's a perfectly understandable feeling, given that millennia-old wine culture was fine-tuned among Europe's elite, with beer generally considered the sloppy peasant's drink. This ridiculous notion persists today, with most people being unafraid to chug a British stout at a beer festival without knowledge of malt or hops, but those same individuals feeling out of place when faced with the choice of Italian Chianti at a decent restaurant.

Vermont Arts & Living — There's an unmistakable, rejuvenating zest that occupies the mouth when a good craft beer takes residence. A prickle and an earthy effervescence reign. In appreciation, this installment of Pouring Pleasures takes a detour from its usual focus on vinifera's gifts to the world and explores the wide realm of small-batch beer brewing.

Stop Smiling — A political muckraker and an astute observer of human relations, Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s work seamlessly melds inner emotional worlds with an era’s outer political climate. She was an influential contributor to the Polish New Wave of the 1960s and ’70s, a group of artists that railed against communist censorship and included such greats as her mentor Andrej Wajda and Krysztof Kieslowski, best known for his Three Colors trilogy: Blue (1993), Red (1994) and White (1994). After a stint in France, during which she made the beautifully melancholy, Academy Award-nominated film Angry Harvest (1985), she immigrated to the United States.

PINK — After years of wading through the muck of heinous representations and limited portrayals of LGBT characters on the silver screen, slices of real American queer life seem to have finally made it into the limelight. 2005-2006 was a crowning achievement; Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and Duncan Tucker's TransAmerica dominated box office returns and were showered with the most prestigious awards and nominations in the industry. Damon Romine, Entertainment Media Director of The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) -- the foremost media watchdog -- says, "Up until recently, most depictions of LGBT people have been pretty one-dimensional, if not also offensive and defamatory."

Rutland Herald — Women's History Month comes colliding onto the general consciousness in March, aided throughout southern Vermont, in no small part, by the 21st Annual Women's Film Festival, with screenings held at Brattleboro's Latchis Theater and New England Youth Theatre March 9-18. The extensive, eclectic festival offers its 26 doses of politicized celluloid as a benefit for the Women's Freedom Center (www.womenscc.org), a nonprofit domestic and sexual violence organization serving Windham County since 1977.

The Commons — It was a moment we did not think we'd live to see. America, the most powerful nation in the world, elected an African-American as president, a mere 40-odd years after our people struggled just to get to voting booths unscathed or be able to drink from the same water fountains as other citizens. Riding the coattails of an apartheid that still exists, here was Barack Hussein Obama, an elegant family man whose little black girls were going to grow up in the White House playing dolls. "Well, well. It's a new day," a measured, tearful voice proclaimed ...

The Commons — From a balcony overlooking the pristine flow of water at the base of rolling Fall Mountain, I observe a swirl of colors and register a happy cacophony of sounds. It is the first farmers’ market of the season in quaint Bellows Falls, Vt., and below my perch, near a historic train station, there are booths set up in rows representing organic farms from around the area, children playing and laughing, and jubilant bluegrass sounds tinkling from performers on a makeshift stage. What emanates is a distinct sense of solidarity in liberal consciousness, residents having come together to celebrate and support simpler ways of living, and living in accordance with the Earth. In the far right of this scene, I see a tented booth for Basin Farm, looking as normal as any other — tomatoes, cucumbers, onions in piles. And standing behind that booth are two scruffy, ponytailed men who fit right in amongst the oft-stereotyped gaggle of organic farmers in seeming hippie regalia. Yet these two men, Lemuel and Nadiv, are oceans away from the other farmers milling about--they are oceans away in thought, intent, self-conception, and purpose. This I know from experience.

Artscope — Living amongst the dead is a circumstance usually avoided, yet walking into the studio of Michaela D'Angelo is like entering a ghostly past--or rather, a somber present, intertwined with the echoes of pain from former lives. In an airy, second-floor studio above AVA Gallery in Lebanon, N.H., mountains are visible through floor-to-ceiling windows. From the right side of one window, a white church spire rises above quintessential New England village bustle. Juxtaposing the view, along the window's left side, is a blue-and-white woman in 19th-century dress. Her empty and gaping eye sockets glare down from her perch above the spectator's head, and a rigid hand locks onto the shoulder of a boy at her hips. He is surrounded by the matronly, immaterial faces of figures that seem to pulse in and out of vision.

Artscope — During noiseless moments when the clatter of human endeavor and steel and spinning tires and rail yards and computer keys subsides, and my mind latches onto the occasion of a thoughtless space, I have, periodically--through no effort of my own--bumped against a peculiar ethereal buzz, one that seems to resonate and vibrate under the heavy cloak of the mundane world. One could call this crystalline drip 'God.' One could call it an alternate dimension existing alongside our own. Or, perhaps it is a subconscious awareness, made tangible, of the humming atomic fury binding every particle of our world, at once invisible and omnipresent.

Vermont Arts & Living — Whimsical nights are upon us, with all of the magic that accompanies longer hours spent outdoors. While temperatures elevate, leisure time sees its stock rise and guitar riffs swim though the breeze, and people get quite serious about not being serious at all. Although, one thing that should be kept to decorum--despite letting everything else get a bit crazy--is pairing the perfect wines with the perfect hors d'oeuvres at your elegant backyard parties. We've all heard the cliché of white wines being the better summer drink than reds. Though clichéd and not a hard-and-fast rule--as I happen to enjoy a robust Shiraz on many a summer evening--there's a slew of reasons for this long-held truth in the wine world, harkening to the structural components and characteristics of those Rieslings, Sauvignon Blancs, Pinot Grigios and Chardonnays floating about your palate this summer.

UR Chicago — In a 2005 novel about his time living at Shakespeare and Company, a legendary Parisian bookstore for English-speaking writers and intellectuals, Canadian crime reporter Jeremy Mercer ponders penitentiaries: 'Hard time,' he writes in 'Time Was Soft There,' is a term used by convicts to describe sentences in maximum security facilities, time that passes painfully and leaves its murderers and sex offenders bitter upon release. Alternately, there's 'soft time'--minimum-security stints that pass comfortably and with pleasure. 'Time at Shakespeare and Company,' he concludes, was as soft as anything I'd ever felt.' Shakespeare and Company (37 Rue de la Bucherie), like most talked-about places in Paris, has taken on a mythical quality.

UR Chicago — Deserts are hellish infernos spotted with the dusty, sand-camouflaged visage of Satan himself, jumping from behind cactus to cactus, attempting to stay out of the field of vision. Desert sit like black holes of prickly, forced contrition, where tarantulas wait to attack, lizards rejoice at scampering up sunburned legs, and javelinas (wild pigs) bigger than dogs run screaming in hostile armies. Cruel monochromatic wastelands, deserts are the post-apocalyptic 'Mad Max' sectors of this earth, good primarily for suspicious day trips and long-since-hardened locals who stare blankly while swatting flies from their three-legged dogs. What can I say to those hanging on to such ideas? Stop watching television and book a flight to Tucson, Ariz., for one of the most amazing experiences possible in this brief life we've all been afforded.