Chris Davidson's chapbook of poetry Easy Meal was published by Californios Press in summer of 2020. He lives in Long Beach, CA, and has worked at The Curator, first as poetry editor and later as general editor since 2013.
If you’re a regular visitor to The Curator, you’ll know that it’s been silent around here since the end of December. That’s because we’re on hiatus, with the possibility that we will not resume publication of new work. That it’s taken this long to officially announce that fact is not ideal, but it’s been that kind […]
An interview with artist and writer Makoto Fujimura, on his book Art + Faith
This interview represents a homecoming for Makoto Fujimura, whose International Arts Movement (IAM) was the sponsoring institute of the Curator when it first launched, way back in 2008. He has founded several lasting initiatives, including IAM, IAM culture care, and the Fujimura Institute. A prolific, world-renowned artist, Fujimura’s paintings have been collected and displayed in […]
Analog, Homemade, and Heart-Forward
An interview with Phil Hay, co-writer and co-creator of The Mysterious Benedict Society
The Mysterious Benedict Society, published in 2007, is the first in a series of children’s books by Trenton Lee Stewart that’s being made into a television show of the same name, premiering Friday, June 25 on Disney+. Starring Tony Hale, Kristen Schaal, MaameYaa Boafo, and a handful of young actors, the comic adventure follows four extraordinarily […]
The Curator launches a new monthly series of editor playlists. This month: sonic respite from a tough year.
[Listen to our March 2021 playlist on Spotify.] What is this time that we’re living in? Even with some good news—we’re up to two million vaccinations a day—the larger news of the pandemic (half a million dead, with more on the way) persists among the other news coming with and extending beyond this poorly managed crisis: […]
The Curator – We’re Back And We Want You With Us!
After a long hiatus, the Curator is returning on November 16th!
The Curator itself is a curious business. Maybe in the truest sense: sparked by curiosity.
We asked our contributors to share ten of their favorite things from the past decade...
When I was very young, I saw the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact. In the movie, a family had a dolphin pool in their living room! The dolphin swims over for its morning treat as if it were a dog bounding out of bed for its Milk-Bone*. If this is what we’ll get in 2010, I thought […]
Christmas Unicorn as Generative Text
I'm the Christmas Unicorn, You're the Christmas Unicorn
I first heard the 12-minute “Christmas Unicorn” a few days ago, while my family and I were getting ready for a Christmas visit to my father’s home. I was streaming Silver and Gold, Sufjan Stevens’s 59-track (!) Christmas collection from 2012, when “Unicorn” came on. Its slow build and its insistent, seemingly endless, repeating refrain bowled […]
Someone's Gonna Show Up, Never Fear
Inside The Replacements' Advent Canon
While on a run recently, my phone on shuffle, “Can’t Hardly Wait” came on. It’s a song I’ve written about before, yet as I was running on this crisp December evening, past lawns festooned with inflatable reindeer and trees draped in lights, the thought came to me that “Can’t Hardly Wait” could be read as a […]
The people there showed up for reasons too vulnerable or inchoate to admit or articulate. Or maybe it was just fun.
There is a free event in an expensive city that might, if you enter it with the right spirit, restore a smidgen of your faith in this polarized death spiral of a country. (Clearly, I spend too much time on Twitter.) A few weeks back, some friends and I were in San Francisco for the […]
“Learn about pines from the pine,” Basho writes. And about people from people.
Saturday night, while making dinner for my wife and children, I was listening to The Beths, a power pop band I’d discovered on a podcast a few weeks before. I felt a pang of loneliness, in the midst of all this domestic abundance, and a friend came to my mind. In between actions at the […]
In honor of Labor Day, some images of art and labor drawn from the Works Progress Administration.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a New Deal initiative launched in 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, to combat widespread unemployment and raise national morale, and which, over the course of eight years, employed over 8 million Americans who built roads, dams, sewers, and bridges, and other infrastructure; who designed buildings; who […]
This started out as a FB post about the U.S. president. It became something else.
Culture, that hazy subject upon which this publication focuses, has at its root the word “cult,” which essentially means a sub-group of people who share the same beliefs and practices, fostering in this way a shared identity. That the term is linked to religious or spiritual devotion—that these practices and beliefs point to an object […]
Your knowledge of cultural references, boys, won’t save you. Look outward.
Last fall, Lindsay Zoladz wrote a perceptive, sobering article for The Ringer. In it, she cites Speedy Ortiz frontwoman Sadie Dupuis on recent developments in indie rock: The things that are most exciting for me are introducing narrative elements that aren’t atypical but just aren’t part of the canon—things that are normal to my experience […]
Marianne Moore and the Vulnerability of Perception
On "To a Snail"
My semester has ended (all but the grading), and I return to one of the poems my students and I looked at back in the opening days of February: Marianne Moore’s “To a Snail.” (Before you proceed with the rest of this article, go read the poem. It’s a mere twelve lines.) As in most of […]
This weekend there was an incredible outpouring on social media over the unexpected death of writer Rachel Held Evans. Much of that outpouring focused on Held Evans’s bravery in speaking out in graciousness and kindness for those struggling to stick with a church that fails to be the grace-filled and kind body of Christ to […]
A few follow-up words about Desert X
Can’t believe: How strange it is to be anything at all. – Jeff Mangum ### This past weekend was the first weekend of Coachella, the music and arts festival that has grown to gargantuan proportions in recent years. It also marks the beginning of the final week of Desert X, the Coachella Valley art happening […]
Warm, Fuzzy, and a Little Lame
A few words about National Poetry Month
Today begins National Poetry Month. Like Love Day, it’s a made-up thing that is warm and fuzzy and a little lame. I love it. It comes from the earnest belief that poetry needs to be celebrated at the national level, lest we forget its importance in knitting all of America together. In Percy Shelley’s famous phrase, “Poets […]
Riding my Bicycle Along the San Gabriel River While Listening to a Just-Made Playlist
[Mitski, “Fireworks”] I pull my bike out of the garage. My house and street are straight out of D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land, which means, if you don’t know, that they’re part of a post-war Southern California boom brought on in part by the aerospace industry, the industry that brought my father out West. It’s why I […]
Enjoy some work from our archives over the couple of weeks, while we take a break.
Hello friends! We’re taking this week off. While we’re gone, we’ll post from the archives work that is relevant to the season. We’ll resume publishing new writing on Monday, January 7th. Till then, enjoy a selection of wonderful pieces chosen from The Curator’s past ten years.
A Song I’m Thankful For: “Can’t Hardly Wait”
That is part of the charm: Not getting it right, but trying.
I asked students this week to write for ten minutes on one, two, or three things they’re thankful for, as we approach the holiday. I’m thankful for so many things: My dog, my family, the tall eucalyptus tree by my office that looks like it belongs in Dr. Seuss. Since this is an arts […]
We hope to carry on this good work.
I am typing this on a rare rainy day in Southern California, the first piece in a re-launched Curator, a magazine I worked on as poetry editor for many years, and a magazine I’ve enjoyed for many more. My wife and kids are away for the weekend, and I’m sitting at a table selected from […]
The Curator Returns: Fall 2018
After a too-long hiatus, the Curator is returning this fall. Keep an eye on this space!
My CD Collection: Les Miserables
I can’t revisit this album because it means revisiting a host of other issues that belong in a therapy session, not here in a semi-weekly column. Les Miz fails to admit what all musicals, and all people, should: That while it is necessary, at times, to break into song, it’s also necessarily ridiculous.
My CD Collection, Week 4—Fishbone, Truth and Soul
The “truth” Fishbone sang about came through in glimmers that introduced this kid from Orange County USA to a world past the suburbs. The “soul,” however, shone through loud and clear—in the careening panache the band’s talent embodied, in its overflowing life.
My CD Collection, Week 3—V/A, Bob Dylan in the 80’s: Volume One
The music business doesn’t seem conducive to profiting off covering songs a 70-something, famous though he is, wrote over twenty years ago. For the producers to put all that effort and money into making this CD as the CD as a species faces extinction is an act of irrational, endearing hope.
My CD Collection—Week 2, The B-52’s, Cosmic Thing
To borrow a phrase from Robert Christgau, “Everything Rocks and Nothing Ever Dies.” Life is bonkers.
My CD Collection: Week 1, The Strokes, Is This It
The Strokes were more art-school cool than the self-consciously blue-collar White Stripes, the ironic Hives, or the commercially polished Jet, yet I enjoyed all the music I heard on the radio by these bands, their songs a nice antidote to the post-grunge and Nu Metal saturating airwaves.
My CD Collection: Week Zero, Introduction
“My CD Collection” will be me trying to reckon with the personal history wrapped up in that pile of CDs, along with a critical engagement with its music, its packaging, and the notion that to judge something—like, say, a record by a female-fronted power pop band named after a childhood pen pal—is to step into it.
A Lenten poem by Chris Davidson
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