Carter Vance | The Smart Set

15 in ’59

Carter Vance — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000

“I still love Tom Petty songs/and driving old men crazy” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” Nostalgia, as many of us undoubtedly learned from this classic Mad Men scene, literally means, “pain from an old wound,” which raises the question of why we seek to relive and revive that pain. For about as long as people […]

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Indie, From Afar

Carter Vance — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 13:29:47 +0000

It may be a cliché to say that there is a surreal feeling to watching one’s youthful icons get the historical prestige treatment. Perhaps it is simply the inevitable headspace shift of realizing you are now one of the old fogies that complain movies, TV, and music were simply better in some abstract sense in […]

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Dominica & the Long “After”

Carter Vance — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 12:37:10 +0000

The last several years have thrown up seemingly endless good sources of what has increasingly been termed “climate anxiety.” From record wildfires in Australia to record floods in Kerala, confirmations of what in earlier times would have been termed a biblical judgment for humanity’s sins against that which it did not create and yet depends upon for life are close at hand. It is little wonder, in […]

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The Karimunjawa Ferry

Carter Vance — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 11:30:18 +0000

The ferry from Jepara port to the small, otherwise isolated island of Karimunajawa, is a tricky journey even in the best of circumstances, which are rarely on offer. On a slow boat, the kind that most locals take, the trip takes about four hours if one is lucky and can extend to five or six if one is not. On cloudy days, the choice is between […]

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Feeling Blue

Carter Vance — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 11:30:16 +0000

It is now commonly understood that “Little Green,” one of the most arresting tracks on Joni Mitchell’s classic 1971 album Blue is a work of autobiography. More specifically, it’s about Mitchell, alone and freezing in the middle of winter in downtown Toronto, giving her child up for adoption, a fleeting last wish for her daughter’s happiness that the […]

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“Walk Like a Man”

Carter Vance — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 11:30:11 +0000

I am not a religious man, by neither temperament nor upbringing, but I did, once, come close to experiencing the sort of transcendence of the self that the world’s great spiritual traditions speak to. In my case though, it was not in a church, a synagogue or a mosque, nor was it retracing the steps […]

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The Paris Myth

Carter Vance — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 12:30:28 +0000

Paris was once all it was to be modern, urbane, sophisticated: a gilded temple at once to Enlightenment rationalism and ancien régime splendor. The American in Paris, now a cliché so well-worn that it may actually be coming back around to being counter-hegemonic, became so because it was where the leaders and intellects of that […]

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