Nominated for a National Magazine Award, our second print issue features Hilton Als on Prince's Eyes, How Adderall Changed America, Sex with Neanderthals, New Fiction by Isle McElroy, Ordering Elements, and more.

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

July

On this and all later Tuesdays in July, the Amateur Astronomers Association will have night/twilight observing for the public from 7:00 to 9:30 from the High Line. Meet at the crossroads of Little West 12th and Washington Street. Watch the weather; rain or heavy clouds will likely mean a cancellation. Also, check the AAA and HighLine websites (both .org).

Earth at aphelion. Today the Earth is 1.017 AU (95 million miles) from the Sun—as distant as it ever gets. Yet it's the hottest time of year for us borealites. The reason is that the Sun's local heating of the Earth depends not on distance, but on the 

 of the noontime sun (now nearly overhead for us) and on the length of sunlight (now 15 hours).

Mercury at “easternmost elongation (26 degrees).” There’s no compelling reason to add “seeing Mercury” to your bucket list—except, perhaps, that it’s really difficult! Allegedly, even 

 never actually saw it. He was a “theoretician,” as we call them today, and must have relied upon the observations of others—especially 10–13 Arab astronomers, who did a very good job with it (and had much better skies). So, to one-up Copernicus, find a spot with an absolutely clear western horizon and look for three stars very low down, about 1 hour after sunset. The brightest and leftmost is Mercury; the other two are the Gemini twins Castor and Pollux.

Fortunately for us northerners, Mercury whips around very fast, and better opportunities will exist when the Sun is well to the south (mid-December of 2025 is good, when a nearby crescent Moon will point the way).

July 4 is also the traditional date for the appearance of the most famous supernova in history. What we know for sure is that in the early summer of the year 1054, a very bright “guest star” (the Chinese word) appeared suddenly, and was closely observed by Far Eastern astronomers (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). It was described as “visible in daylight” for 23 days, and in the night sky for over a year. It must have been amazing to stargazers everywhere—but strangely enough, no definite record exists for its visibility in Europe or the Americas.

Today, the remnant of that explosion is still visible as the Crab Nebula, a small elliptical cloud of gas and dust. Virginia Trimble, an American astronomer famous for her quick wit and insightful astrophysics, found that the nebula is rapidly expanding, such that it must have originated from a single point around the year 1100 (and for once, she wasn't kidding). This proved that the 

 originated in the explosion of a tiny, faint star at its center, or perhaps the ancestor of that star. A few years later, it was found that this star is a 

—a solid star, made entirely of neutrons and spinning at a rate of 30 times a second.

This star is 6500 light years away—and if you do the math, you'll find that in the summer of 1054, this object was about as luminous as an entire galaxy. Holy mackerel! This was basically the beginning of modern stellar astrophysics. Two years later, the first black hole was discovered—and we were off and running.

But what's this “July 4” business? That's mainly a U.S. obsession. The ancient Chinese were exacting at dates, but not that exacting! (Or at least our 

 of their dates is not that precise.) We do know three things that underlie the modern myth: (1) On the morning of July 5, 1054, as viewed from the western U.S., the waning crescent Moon was just northwest of the Crab Nebula's position; (2) several cave paintings and carvings from that region and era seem to show a round object (the supernova?) next to a crescent-shaped object of equal size (the Moon?); and (3) the Pueblo Indians of that era commonly made early-morning observations of the sky, perhaps to mark the seasons.

Despite this ultra-thin reed of evidence, few U.S. astronomy teachers can resist the retelling of the patriotic supernova story. I certainly can't.

Birthday of John Archibald Wheeler in 1911. Wheeler was probably the most important American physicist of the twentieth century. (OK, Richard Feynman fans; you'll have your say later.) Wheeler became a teacher and mentor to nearly all American scientists working on general relativity, or Einstein's theory of gravity. He invented the terms “

” And he came up with a single, short sentence that perfectly expresses the basic idea of Einstein's theory, and which 

 Newton's theory: “Space-time tells matter how to move, and matter tells space-time how to curve.”

From 1–4 pm, we’ll be hosting solar observing for the public at Pioneer Works and the same will be possible at Pier I (at the same time!)—the fishing pier west of Riverside Park, at 70th Street.

” in 1945—as it was called in Lansing Lamont’s famous book, to signify the first full test of a plutonium-implosion bomb. The test was designed by Kenneth Bainbridge (Oppenheimer for the overall leadership, Bainbridge for the test) who, after the blast, was reported to have said to Oppenheimer “we’re all bastards now.” There had been much debate among the scientists about the ethics of the bomb. Bainbridge ran a seminar for Harvard freshmen in the 1960s; I applied… and always wondered if I would have gotten in, had I shown my knowledge of the “actual” Trinity, acquired during prep school at a Benedictine monastery. (Nah, I decided that wouldn’t help… and didn’t get in.)

A second plutonium bomb was later dropped on Nagasaki. Planners were sure that the alternative “enriched uranium” (U-238) design would work—so they earmarked that, without ever testing it, for the first and most famous use of atomic weapons in warfare (Hiroshima, August 6).

In my opinion, the best of many books on these matters is Richard Rhodes’ 

On this famous day in 1969, two astronauts landed and walked on the Moon. The story has been told a thousand times. Less well known is exactly what happened right after the quite dangerous landing. The original schedule called for the astronauts to catch some sleep before attempting the famous walk. But after all the excitement of the trip and peril of the landing, sleep was the last thing on their minds. Even though they had landed on… ahem... the Sea of Tranquility.

So NASA changed the plan and said “Okay, do the walk.” Then it was most-watched live event in television history: “One small step for a man...” Until, of course, the 2006 FIFA World Cup final between Italy and France, ending in a shoot-out. Now 

Interesting side note: Of the six American flags planted by the six Apollo missions to the Moon, all are still standing (photographed by Lunar Orbiters) 

 the first, which was immediately and ingloriously blown down by the exhaust from the take-off rockets. (The take-off rockets were quickly re-designed to correct this egregious violation of flag etiquette.)

Look west for “the old Moon in the New Moon’s arms” on these evenings. Mars can’t resist paying a close visit on the evening of the 28th. Any of these nights in late July are great for 11 pm–2 am viewing of the brightest regions of the Milky Way—the Scorpius-Sagittarius star cloud, and the Summer Triangle (Vega-Deneb-Altair).

This is the oldest and most famous annual gathering of amateur astronomers in the nation. Beautiful night skies if clouds stay away. Events are spread over four days, so google “Stellafane” and take your pick. It's in the tiny town of Springfield, Vermont… which can present challenges in housing and dining. The deeply committed (there are plenty) camp out on Stellafane's hill.

August

First quarter Moon—directly south at sunset. Really good time for telescopic viewing of the Moon’s most cratered regions.

The Moon passes very close to the bright red-supergiant star Antares tonight.

On any clear morning in early August, look for Orion rising low in the east about an hour before dawn. “Ghost of the shimmering summer dawn / King of the winter nights!” It’s my personal favorite season-defining sight in the sky.

Jupiter and Venus, king and queen of planets, stage a little dance low in the eastern morning sky this week. From August 7–10, Venus is just above Jupiter. But Venus, brighter and moving faster, passes Jupiter on August 11. The waning crescent Moon, moving still faster of course, passes the pair on August 19.

Today, the Sun enters the constellation Leo. But it entered the 

 sign of Leo 20 days ago, on July 22. What's up with that? Part of this shift arises from minor tinkering of constellation boundaries by humans… but most of it is courtesy of the Earth's wobbling axis. In addition to its better-known motions (spin, orbit), the Earth has a third and very subtle motion—the slow precession of its axis, like a wobbling top. The axis now points towards Ursa Minor—in fact, almost exactly towards the medium-bright star Polaris, which we therefore call The North Star. But the axis slowly wobbles around the sky, and this causes the 

. Our calendar, however, pays attention to seasons, not constellations. So most people who think they're “Leos” are actually “Cancers.” I don't know what the implications are… but it doesn't sound good.

All night, the Earth's journey takes it through a diffuse stream of cosmic dust particles which were once shed by Comet Tempel-Tuttle (named after that comet's discoverers). When a comet sheds matter (dust particles), it doesn't really go anywhere—it just wanders off ever so slightly, continuing roughly in the same orbit for thousands of years. Those little dust particles are like the odor particles emitted by humans and detected by bloodhounds. Except that the Earth, unlike bloodhounds, must follow the law of gravity—and only encounters that stream when its orbit intersects the stream's orbit, in early August.

The Earth encounters the dense part of that stream every August 12, and many of the dust particles fall to Earth with a streak of light—a 

. The meteors appear all over the sky… but if you trace back the streaks of light, they all appear to be coming from the constellation Perseus. Hence the name: the Perseid meteor shower. It’s the most reliable of the annual showers, and many stargazers plan summer outings to watch the Perseids. Unfortunately for us in 2025, it nearly coincides with the Full Moon, whose brilliant light will wash out all but the brightest of meteors.

On this day in 1868, one of the most historically important solar eclipses was observed in Thailand. During totality, several teams of astronomers—mainly British—took spectra and photographs of the Sun’s lower and upper atmosphere (the “corona”). They found a yellow emission line which occurred at a wavelength never seen before on Earth—so they named it “helium,” after the Greek name for the Sun. That was the beginning of helium’s glorious history. Today we recognize it as comprising approximately 25% of the Universe. Essentially all the Earth’s atmospheric helium has escaped—because helium is so light that Earth’s feeble gravity can’t hang onto it. Mendeleev’s periodic table, for example, has no element of atomic number two. Nor does helium combine with any other element—it’s a “noble gas,” to use the lingo. Our only source of helium is through the radioactive decay of heavy elements mined from Earth’s interior (e.g., uranium). That’s why we have 

(for balloons, cryogenic experiments, etc.).

On these mornings, the waning crescent Moon charges past the Venus–Jupiter conjunction in the eastern sky.

This morning will feature a very good apparition of the International Space Station (ISS) for NYC observers. It will suddenly appear nearly overhead (emerging from the Earth’s unseen shadow) at exactly 4:26 am and move rapidly eastward, disappearing (re-entering the unseen shadow) low in the east two minutes later. It’ll be very bright—brighter than any star. Worth an effort to see, especially with the Venus-Jupiter conjunction costarring near the eastern horizon.

. The moon's shadow swept from the Oregon coast, across the Rockies and the Midwest, before finally heading out to sea near Charleston, South Carolina. Nearly all observers enjoyed beautiful weather and got to witness this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.

If you spend your life rooted to one spot on Earth, you'll have to wait about 400 years between total solar eclipses—and that's assuming no cloudy days! But NYC is in the midst of a streak: four between 1925 and 2020. For the 1925 event (totality occurred above 96th Street in Manhattan), 

 scolded the Columbia University astronomers in headlines for getting the time wrong by four seconds. Maybe the 

was miffed because totality didn’t include 

If you’re inclined to think about future total solars, here are the ones to consider:

2026 August 12: Greenland, Iceland, Spain, or some ship in the North Atlantic

2027 August 2*: Spain, most of North Africa, Saudi Arabia

2030 November 25: South Africa, Australia

On this day in 1835, the first installment of the most successful moon hoax of all time was published in 

revealing the amazing discoveries of John Herschel with “an immense telescope” newly installed at the Cape of Good Hope. The author, Richard Locke, reported that Herschel had found the Moon with rivers, abundant wildlife, and humanoids with wings. There were no photographs to prove it (hey, photography was still a decade away), but there were some great, great drawings.

Locke was no stranger to hoaxes, and hoaxes were not rare in the nineteenth-century literary world. They were great for selling newspapers. Most newspapers at the time were sold on the street, with barkers excitedly announcing the juiciest story. This series (there were five more issues) really energized the popularity of 

. Unfortunately for science, fate intervened. The final issue reported that the telescope was so immense, humans couldn't handle it. Someone trained it on the Sun a week later, in search of yet more amazing discoveries—and wouldn't you know it, that burned down the whole observatory. No more discoveries to report. Not even a trace of the telescope for party-pooping investigative reporters to examine.

Edgar Allan Poe was plenty jealous about this. He had earlier published a very similar story, featuring a traveler 

 to the Moon in a balloon and finding similar goings-on. But as a story, with obvious satire and no pretense of accuracy, it just didn't have the impact of a real astronomical discovery.

On this day in 1883, the greatest volcanic explosion in history occurred: Krakatoa! The blast was heard by humans 3,000 miles away, and the pressure wave travelled around the Earth three times before finally becoming undetectable by barographs. The explosion was 10,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Volcanic dust was blasted into the upper atmosphere, where it lingered for many months—lowering the Earth's average temperature by about one degree. Krakatoa is part of the “Ring of Fire,” the huge region where the Pacific Plate crashes into plates to its west (Japan, Southeast Asia) and east (California, the Andes, etc.). Mount Saint Helens (1980) and Pinatubo (1991) are other members.


The exact 50th anniversary of Nova Cygni 1975, one of the most famous “classical novae” in history. I received a phone call on that night in 1975, directing me to go out and look up… and behold, I saw an “extra star” in the famous Summer Triangle. (Sometimes it pays to know your constellations.) It erupted from a blank spot in prior sky photographs, leading to speculation that it was the long-awaited supernova (none had been seen in our galaxy since 1604). And it was my 

 of graduate school at the University of Texas. A few weeks later, I received telescope time at Texas’s McDonald Observatory and found a little 3.3 hour wiggle in the light curve. I wrote a research paper about it, followed by several others during my years there. That wiggle turned out to be closer to an “ordinary” nova (an exploding white dwarf), but with the twist that the white dwarf was strongly 

Nova Cyg was first seen by observers in Japan, then Korea, China, Russia, and others as sunset occurred progressively later at those longitudes. By sunset in Texas, at least 2,000 independent discoveries must have been made (phone calls don’t count, of course!). Sitting there as an intruder in the Summer Triangle, it was hard to miss.

Birthday of Sir Ernest Rutherford in 1871. By firing alpha-rays (helium nuclei) at gold atoms, Rutherford became famous for revealing 

the tiny size of the nucleus of all atoms

… and for his terrible singing, as he roamed the famed Cavendish Laboratory trying to inspire students with “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

September 

Today, the equation of time is zero. Nowadays, probably 90 percent of astronomy PhD's would have no idea what this even means. But for most of the last thousand years, it would have been elementary to all astronomers, clockmakers, ship captains, navigators, and many ordinary citizens. Why? Because, historically, the only really practical and accurate clock in the natural world (larger than atoms/molecules!) is the Sun. Shadows—and more precisely sundials—were the way you could measure time.

Here's how it goes (in the Northern Hemisphere). Roughly speaking, the Sun is directly south, and casts a shadow directly north, at local noon every day. But there are two reasons why this is not exactly true. (1) The Sun moves in an elliptical orbit—fastest when it's near the Earth (in January), slowest when it's most distant (in July). (2) It moves in a plane different from the Earth's equator (by 23 degrees). Sundial-makers, ancient and modern, usually capture these two small corrections (up to 20 minutes) by etching a little wavy curve called the 

. But on this day, the corrections are zero, and the Sun is precisely south at noon!

noon. But in 1883, the U.S. legislated “Standard Time,” which meant that everybody within approximately 500 miles east or west of a standard longitude (which for us is 75 degrees east of Greenwich, England—roughly Philadelphia) must be on that time. NYC is slightly east of Philadelphia, so the Sun is directly south (“crosses our meridian,” to use the lingo) slightly sooner—at 11:56 am. Check out your shadow today—that's when it points exactly north. (But remember, there's another purely legislated correction—Daylight Saving Time—to which the Sun and its shadows are indifferent. So, it’s 12:56 pm EDT.)

Many things labeled as sundials are simply vertical or inclined sticks with a horizontal scale for the shadow. Many are sold as small works of art for your garden. These lack all precision, but after looking at the selections online, they're number one on my birthday wish list. I'd love to hear about large sundials still up and unmolested in the NYC area.

And on this date in 1859, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson independently observed a huge solar flare—probably the hugest in history. If such a thing happened today, it would probably ground all airplanes for several days (because the cosmic-rays at altitude would be very dangerous… and forget about communications). On the positive side, there would be great auroras—seen in 1859 as far south as the Caribbean. It’s now known as “the Carrington event,” because it was manifest in so many ways.

Prof. Joe Patterson is a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, an observational astronomer, and a baseball enthusiast. (He was also our editor-in-chief’s first astronomy professor.)

sci-ameliapro

Big Apple Sky Calendar: July, August, September 2025

Playing God

Is a River Alive?

Look at Marshall Allen—the slight, bespectacled fireball with gray hair and kind eyes, his arms stretched to the sky. Look at him saunter across the stage, saxophone in mouth, blasting air through the brass. Look at how he’s transformed by the music, and how the audience is transformed by him. See how they marvel at his artistry, his godliness, his 

. Marshall is 101 years old, and he still harbors the inferno of years past—when, as an integral member of Sun Ra’s ever-changing Arkestra, his urgent wails bolstered the chaos of the bandleader’s arrangements. And here he stands, albeit a little gingerly, his steps more calculated. That smile still radiates, his heart full.

Hear him now. Hear that squeal, the explosion, the anarchy. Listen to how the wind swaddles the band, how the space opens and lets the soul and the funk come through. While Marshall is what some purists would consider avant-garde, I’ve never seen him that way. He’s what freedom looks like, what it sounds like, what can happen when the confinements of jazz are eschewed for greater experimentation. By definition, Marshall is a jazz musician, but he’s never seemed preoccupied with the genre, nor with any notion of what he’s supposed to be. Whether alongside Sun Ra or at the helm of his own band, Marshall has never seemed to care what you called the music—space jazz, cosmic jazz, or whatever—as long as you felt the liberation emanate from it. Because immortality resides on the other side of this courage, it’s people like Marshall and Sun Ra whose work lives forever, despite the confusion their melodies may cause at first listening. That we’re talking about this music now is the mark of its legacy.

He’s what freedom looks like, what it sounds like, what can happen when the confinements of jazz are eschewed for greater experimentation. 

In February, at the age of 100, Marshall released his solo debut album, 

, a stark shift from the vast cutting-edge ethos of his Sun Ra work. Across seven tracks, Marshall and his band—a wide-ranging ensemble featuring several Arkestra mainstays and a standout cameo from Neneh Cherry—opt for straight-ahead serenity over pronounced nonconformity. Abstraction gives way, here, for something more traditional in scope. Where Sun Ra sought liberation through space travel, and believed that Black people would only ever be free on Saturn, 

 feels like what we’d play once the mission is completed. It’s the sound of rest and restoration, of finding joy in the quiet moments. It’s also an overdue appreciation for one of the most faithful stewards of Sun Ra’s mission, whose own voice—more subdued than his mentor, yet no less inquisitive—has come to the fore, right on time, at the start of his 11th decade on Earth.

Marshall was born May 25, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky and started playing clarinet at the age of 10. During World War II, he enlisted in the Army, and while stationed in Paris with the 92nd Infantry (also known as the Buffalo Soldiers), he played alto sax and clarinet in the 17th Division Army Special Service Band. Once the war ended, Marshall stayed in Paris and studied clarinet with Ulysse Delécluse at the renowned Paris Conservatory, then toured with the saxophonist James Moody before returning to the United States in 1951, settling in Chicago. There, after a few years “jamming around” the city, as he 

 Jazzwise, he met Sun Ra in 1957. He still remembers being transformed by the musician’s 

album. “The stuff they were doing, I’d never heard that before,” he said. “It was far out and [had] different kinds of melodies. So, I went back and asked the guy I bought the record off, ‘Where’s this band? This is a real band!’” The Arkestra rehearsed six blocks away from where Marshall was living at the time. He heard them practicing, came back with his saxophone, and became a regular fixture in rehearsals.

Sun Ra officially brought Marshall into the band in 1958 to join the equally formidable John Gilmore and Pat Patrick in the horn section. Three years later, the Arkestra moved to New York and became part of the city’s underground avant-garde jazz scene. Perhaps influenced by the area’s free-spirited creative mindset, the group’s music got more experimental, and Marshall responded in kind: his playing grew more aggressive and far out, which—along with June Tyson’s emotive vocals and Sun Ra’s high-wire experimentation on piano and synthesizer—further pushed the band’s sound into the deep space they coveted. The Arkestra moved to Philadelphia in 1968, the group’s base until Sun Ra’s passing in 1993. Gilmore took over as bandleader following Sun Ra’s transition. Marshall took it over in 1995 after Gilmore’s death and has led the band ever since. With Marshall at the helm, the Arkestra has maintained the festivity of its founder. When watching them perform, a strong sense of family emerges. The live show is a grand spectacle, complete with flashy robes and ornate headgear, and the music feels big and orchestral. It’s all quite theatrical; walking away, you’re not fully sure what you just saw—but you can’t shake the vibrations you feel.

As a willing steward of Sun Ra’s legacy, Marshall has maintained the fire of its leader, keeping the music edgy and exploratory while putting his own mark on it. On 2020’s 

, the first Sun Ra Arkestra album in 20 years, songs like “Satellites Are Spinning” and “Unmask the Batman” honored the band’s founder with modern flourishes meant to exemplify Marshall’s wide-ranging ear. He peppered these and other tracks with electronic bleeps and bloops that recalled what Sun Ra did with the synthesizer long ago. When heard with 2020s ears and sensibility, 

 sits alongside the music of Flying Lotus, the noted L.A.-based experimental producer, though Sun Ra and Marshall clearly influenced his sound. Based on his recent affiliations—with the bassist Luke Stewart, the percussionist Carlos Niño, and fellow saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, among other younger iconoclasts—it’s clear that Marshall is still searching for new inspiration and partners to board the spaceship. Like Marshall, each of these artists create music not fully aligned with any particular genre. Sure, you can call it jazz, but even within jazz’s broad expanse and evolution, it’s tough to classify these purveyors as anything other than radical. Just like Marshall did in the ’60s and beyond, these artists create with audacity, perhaps knowing that the bravery of their art will last generations (assuming they consider such forecasts). They all make the kind of work you’ll talk about years later, after the critics have finally come around to the brilliance that was always there. When I listen to Luke, Carlos and Immanuel, I hear Sun Ra, which means I hear Marshall.

The live show is a grand spectacle, complete with flashy robes and ornate headgear, and the music feels big and orchestral. It’s all quite theatrical; walking away, you’re not fully sure what you just saw—but you can’t shake the vibrations you feel.

 and everything Marshall does in the studio, the record to turn to for an indicator of what the artist does on stage, where he’s most at home, is 

Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons Live in Philadelphia

, a collection of live sets from the past two years at the venue Solar Myth. For almost 90 minutes, Marshall’s Ghost Horizons ensemble wades through several iterations of jazz, surging over post-bop and swing, drifting through ambient and meditative styles. On “Seductive Fantasy,” for instance, the band leaps into a sharp double-time beat that breaks down and reassembles at the urging of Marshall’s fiery horn blasts, as if prodding the crew to dig deeper and go 

. The next song, “Back to You,” is a contemplative drone: Between the sedative bass loop, indiscernible vocals, sporadic sax and glitchy electronics, it almost doesn’t sound like a Marshall Allen cut, at least not in the way we’d expect. His songs usually have a bounce to them; in a good way, “Back to You” feels fresh and progressive, like something from a sci-fi film or heavy steel floating through the cosmos.

Songs like “Stay Lifted” and “Square the Circle” almost border on rock territory; the former a drum-heavy jaunt with echoed trumpet effects, the latter an ascendant house arrangement that could sit alongside Floating Points or golden era Radiohead on a playlist. I also love “Warn Them” when the mood calls for it: Over staggered drums and what sounds like a playing card stuck in bicycle rims, the song lands defiantly. It sounds dark and agitated, writhing in mud and content there. Blame my ear if I’m speaking out of turn, but I can’t remember Marshall or Sun Ra sounding this dour before, even as they lamented nuclear war or pleaded with listeners to wise up before it was too late. “Warn Them” is blues of a different kind: vocally angry, it’s the type of song you play when you need to lean into anguish. Even as we navigate our collective angst, Marshall’s art balances radiance and shadows, his dexterity showing us the way to stay optimistic. I’m taken by his faith in the craft. Because while Marshall Allen isn’t an eye-popping name in mainstream circles, his work and his intent are acclaimed by those making cornerstone music. His legacy is ensured. And yet here he is still trying to create a new world, knowing the voyage is paramount. Whether or not you come along is on you, but Marshall’s taking off. ♦

Marcus J. Moore is a music journalist, editor, event curator, professor, and author of

 The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America 

High and Rising (A Book About De La Soul).

mus-robur

Marshall Allen’s Infinite Voyage

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At times, the length of Edie and Marie’s friendship, a full half of their lives—the entirety, so far, of both of their adulthoods—at times it felt that knowing someone this intimately and for such a critical duration had been and may continue to be the main event of Marie’s life. Being in love and later being married had been more urgent, more time-consuming, and in some ways more intimate, but nothing had felt more central and reliable than the conversation that had been happening between the two of them, and, at least until recently, with K. This long witnessing, on even ground—unlike the angled perspective between parent and child or the concave mirror of marriage—had created an unwritten record within each of them about how the other had or had not changed, an archive of actions and habits that became more detailed and more critical with every passing year.

Marie had met K and Edie when she was 17, just shy of 18, gawkish and awkward and closeted, freshman year, still a child in her newly adult body. K and Edie, who’d spent their whole childhoods together, adopted her into their friendship as if they’d been looking for her all this time, and many years ago, though Marie could hardly stand to recall this now, K had told her that she, on her 24th birthday, was 

, a statement she would have been unable to accept from anyone else, not from a girlfriend, not from her own family, and when K’s sister used this exact phrase in her vows to Marie on their wedding day, unaware of what it echoed, Marie had blushed. She knew it was a lie.

As a girlfriend she hadn’t been easy to love, and as a wife she knew she still wouldn’t be easy to love. Marie was melancholic, indecisive, and anxious. She had insomnia so strong it was often contagious, and when she did sleep she hogged the blankets. She couldn’t cook, barely cleaned, and had a regular habit of getting drawn into long conversations with neighbors and colleagues when she should have been on her way home for dinner or carrying out an errand she promised she’d do or meeting her wife somewhere on the rare nights they went out. Above all she knew she wanted too much from romantic love, held it to impossible standards, wanted it to totally redeem her, somehow, effortlessly and constantly. But Marie did believe that she was good at friendship, easy in it, never asking anything unreasonable of the platonic, always relaxing into the human texture, the natural ebbing and flowing of her bonds with K and Edie. She gave herself up without tension into friendship, respected her friends enough to allow them to change her.

It was Edie who had, one day toward the end of their third year in college, said to Marie,

. And she didn’t have to say more than that. Marie knew exactly what Edie meant, yet it was only in hearing Edie make this observation about this change that Marie suddenly knew and felt it to be true—that tenacious streak of self-hatred, that ambiguous but inescapable sense of being a failure, the stiffened way she’d been occupying her body—for years it had been lifting but had lifted almost entirely the moment that Edie said this—

—or at least the first layer of it had lifted, and Marie knew the only reason this change had been possible was the way she’d been absorbed into K and Edie’s world—they, the pair of friends who’d come to college together, platonic prom dates, everyone said they’d be together in the end, those kind of friends. Even as children they knew they were already together in the end—it was already the end, and they were already together. K and Edie’s relationship seemed to be the most radical and rare thing to Marie—a true marriage, a marriage without marriage—and for years she’d thought herself ancillary to the two of them, a role she felt at home in, an additional person, a spare, a friendly ghost, until it was clear, all at once in the August she turned 21, that she was, a shock to herself, no less essential, just a newer element, the obvious third point of the triangle.

The three of them had lived in a crooked and cheap little apartment for a time during and after college, the soft and uncomplicated years before jobs and partners and graduate school and travel had peeled them apart, and though each of those transitions had seemed final or potentially final, none had yet proven so. The moves to other cities or other apartments in the same city seemed to signal the end of an era and the likelihood that it would never be quite like this again, that they’d never live together again, that the nature of this family was once again changing. But relationships that had seemed permanent had ruptured, jobs were lost, new moves were needed, and graduations ended in nothing but a more advanced state of the confusion that had led to grad school in the first place, and it was then that one of them always returned to one or the other or both of them, hovering for a few weeks or months in a guest room, changing their lives once more with the assurance that their conversation and their jointly held archive and their shared support may actually be the most stable thing in their lives, and though other aspects of adulthood may peak or crash, this thing between the three of them would change shape but never reach a conclusion.

It was clear that K and Edie were the axis of her life, though it seemed real adults were supposed to forge that kind of centrality elsewhere.

In fact, the possibility of a diminished potency in her relationships with K and Edie had been the only fear Marie could not even bring herself to confess to her wife in the months before the arrival of the twins. All the other fears—the medical and mortal fears, the fears of their marriage getting filleted by two babies, the financial and logistical fears, the fear of failure—they had all seemed more dismissible than the worry she felt that she might lose her friends. It was clear that K and Edie were the axis of her life, though it seemed real adults were supposed to forge that kind of centrality elsewhere.

Marie’s wife had always been certain that bearing and raising children was a central if not the sole purpose of her life, a certainty that was sometimes unsettling in its unquestioned steadiness, but Marie also knew her wife’s certainty would be the lighthouse of their family life, the velocity that kept the whole thing aloft.

Then the twins came. They had been manageably unruly, without any major or lasting problems in their behavior or health or temperament, and Marie’s transformation into a parent had not (as she had silently feared) ended her friendships with K or Edie, and it had even, in some ways, enriched them. Edie would occasionally obtain permission from her partner to visit Marie and the twins for a weekend, and she naturally became a child around the children, getting on the floor with them, inventing absurd games. When Edie looked up at Marie from the twins’ angle, each saw new dimensions in the other.

Alone with the twins, noticing how intensely they surveilled Marie from their car seats and high chairs, how they seemed to forget nothing and catalogued everything about their parents—words used in passing, momentary flickers of emotion, loose promises made then broken—Marie had often thought of and longed for the softer ways her friends had watched her, how different it was from the nonstop, existential intensity of those two little sets of eyes. Marie’s wife did not, she knew, share this irritation at being watched so closely all the time, and it was possible, Marie thought, that her wife’s innate impulse toward birth and child-raising had really been about this, all along—the desire to be witnessed with such life-or-death intensity, for her children to create hyperrealistic and micro-detailed portraits of their mother, and to live beneath them for the rest of their lives. Knowing this, knowing that these people who did not yet exist could be created and would in turn create this portrait of her—was this what Marie’s wife envisioned as she walked with determination and authority into a sperm bank, mercilessly studied the options, and made her choice without hesitation?

During the years Marie had helped raise the twins, feeding them and ferrying them around and tucking them in and waking up with them once more, she felt that though there was so much humbling clarity in these daily acts, the one-directional devotion of parenting also felt a little demented and compulsive—similar to the way, at the height of her smoking, she’d sometimes realize she was inhaling from a cigarette she had no memory of lighting, like there was a ghost inside of her that smoked without her awareness—like there was a ghost inside of her that went through the actions of parenting without her conscious participation. But she was good at it, she was told. Everyone said so.

Now that her marriage and relationship with the twins and her friendship with K had been severed in the course of a single afternoon, Marie’s relationship with Edie was the most long-lasting thing in her life—Edie, Jesus, fucked up, feral, and precious as she is—and Marie is coming close to crying now, though she’s smiling, watching Edie still talking about her exploits, remembering how Edie has always been able to give the best advice but never to take it, and how irritated Marie has always been by Edie’s tendency to disappear for months on end, then show up as if she’d been there all along.

Marie is still watching her friend recount the details of some small orgy, distantly registering the facts of the event, but mainly she is just watching Edie’s face, the wild gaze of someone newly introduced or reintroduced to the world. It’s in that faint glimmer in her skin, in her eyes, her gestures, and of course her overblown word choice, her breathless way of speaking, the way she fidgets the fray on her shorts, curling her legs unnaturally in her chair, as if she isn’t used to being alive, as if the life in her is constantly at risk of spilling out, rushing out everywhere and into everything.

and Marie says she doesn’t know, that she’s just out of it, but Edie asks again, 

Edie sits up, alert and formal as she recites an answer that seems rehearsed, how sexuality was one of the most beautiful and simple ways for a person to leave their mind and interact with the subconscious, or how sex was one of the few ways to exist directly as a body, as an animal, as a mortal and dying thing, and how sex also brought your awareness out of yourself and into the consciousness of another and how essential that was—but when Edie reaches the point in her response about the Paraclete, the soul, salvation, Marie pours another glass of mezcal and tilts it back quickly.

But she had no self-awareness sometimes, and it was true that what Edie had been through was terrible, and it was true that it was good for her now to be finding pleasure in something, regardless of how frivolous, but Edie’s recently past problems and their subsequent solutions all seemed so small right now, while Marie’s problems were ongoing, they were serious and inescapable and quite frankly they were tragic, and perhaps the most tragic problem was that she could no longer have a reasonable relationship with the twins, and maybe even worse than that she was beginning to feel that the twins were never really hers in the first place, as they had never been genetically hers—the product only of her wife’s body and the anonymous substance from the sperm bank—and though the genetics of the twins had never seemed consequential in the years she had lived with and raised them, her lack of genetic claim and her lack of domestic responsibility now amounted to the fact that though she’d once had children, she now no longer had children, and perhaps they didn’t even miss her, didn’t need her, that she had perhaps always been something like a nanny in their life, removable, extraneous, easy to send away. It had become difficult to even say the word “my” before the word “children.” 

What K saw. That you were seeing someone else.

Seeing is a weird word for it, isn’t it? Seeing—I can see you right now. I’ve seen a lot of people.

I do know what you mean. It just happens not to be a particularly simple situation, and no one knows that because no one asked me anything. K didn’t ask me anything. My wife didn’t ask me anything. You didn’t even call.

Brenda was house-sitting and tickets were cheap.

So you went to Greece for a month. Great.

It’s just that—you’re the sort of person that goes to Greece for a month, and I’m the kind of person who lives here.

But Marie doesn’t know where to start, especially with someone who felt that sex with someone she barely even knew was or even could be something sacred when, in Marie’s life, sex had mainly been something that brought people into her life or sent people out, the beginnings and endings of things.

How to tell it? She wants to tell Edie the truth, but she doesn’t trust herself to know it.

Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles. 

, Marie says, but already she was getting things wrong. It hadn’t seemed like a friendship; it had seemed, for reasons Marie could not completely discern, like a game, a series of challenges from this woman, Helena, a parent she’d met at day-care pickup years ago now, a mother with whom she’d exchanged numbers on the pretext that their kids might want to hang out, even though they could both tell that their kids didn’t like each other, a fact made painfully clear on that one playdate a week later that ended with Helena’s kid pushing one of the twins over and the other twin retaliating by taking a handful from the sandbox and forcing it into his mouth. 

, Helena said, and Marie just felt her head nodding. 

Anyway, this woman is married, and anyway, this woman is straight, and anyway, it’s nothing

, and the next time they saw each other didn’t happen until nine months later, a text from a name she’d nearly forgotten, a slow day at work anyway, an excuse to go downtown for lunch. That evening, when Marie’s wife asked her how her day had been, Marie had simply not mentioned her lunch with Helena. She didn’t tell her about how Helena had launched immediately into the most intimate conversation Marie had ever had with anyone she didn’t actually, technically, know—Helena had been thinking about the nature of desire and power and men and women and how the reasons she had gotten married just ten years ago now already seemed so retro and regrettable, almost unmentionable, but she did believe in sticking it out, in sticking around even when it seemed doomed, when it seemed like she may never again feel 

real sexual pleasure with another human body, 

 What had even been the purpose of sexual pleasure in the first place? 

she asked, undercutting the urgency with which she had just uttered the phrase “real sexual pleasure with another human body,” and Helena claimed that she distrusted the urge toward sex, how it seemed that the people who regularly followed that urge tended to be led around in circles, but still, lately she spent a lot of time thinking about how being in a couple seemed entirely at odds with being in a family and how it might be better if all the women just took all the children away from the men and raised them collectively, without the men, men who seemed only to get in the way, men who seemed so often to be no different than children, just larger. 

Oh, but I don’t really mean it, I do love my husband, what am I even saying, he’s a good father, a great father

 And Marie had tried to reassure her that this all seemed to be normal in a long marriage, the irritation at the edges of it, though Marie did not, at least not consciously, feel any of that irritation in her own long marriage.

, she said to Helena, an observation that seemed to calm Helena, a little, but Marie also noticed the tragic little tick in Helena’s voice when she asked and rapidly answered two questions she’d pushed together into a single line:

 But you’re married right to a woman right? 

Marie paused as if she needed to remember whether she was married (right?) to a woman (right?), then she said, as if reading the phrase, 

. The lunch went on, both of them increasingly tense, overly aware of their own breath and each other’s every gesture, and at times Marie thought she was doing something wrong just by being there (though she couldn’t identify what, exactly, was wrong with it), and at other times she thought she was being presumptuous to assume anything indecent about this lunch of salade niçoise and chenin blanc with Helena, whose intentions, personal history, desires, middle name, fantasies, and current mental health status were all still to be, soon, discovered.

A month passed before they met again, a duration of time that made Marie feel that perhaps deciding not to mention the existence of this lunch with Helena to her wife (or even the existence of Helena) had been absolutely fine, as there was nothing to mention, and Marie accepted the spontaneous invitation for a coffee and a walk—

—thinking that she would, of course, tell her wife about Helena afterward, but the morning coffee spiraled into a long walk through a cemetery and a discussion of the purpose of sexual fantasy in general and the contents of their fantasies in specific, a conversation so frequently punctuated with 

 that shame itself was even worn away and nothing was taboo any longer. They touched only once that day—as they parted Marie had tried to use the vaguely formal contactless bow she’d gotten away with last time, but Helena went in for the European cheek-kiss and missed, landing on Marie’s neck, wrecking Marie’s composure for a fraction of a second, a fraction that Helena had recognized and taken in, and from that day onward their meetings became more frequent and passed with greater intensity, in stranger and stranger locations in order not to be observed, the secrecy of an affair but without any of the traditional forms of contact—without actual sex, for instance, without so much as a kiss. It was like a nineteenth-century courtship, but with conversations that verged on the pornographic; brief, one-hour meetings and occasional phone calls during which they divulged secrets, asked questions that neither had ever asked anyone, and, eventually, each woman dared the other to fuck their spouses with special assignments—positions to use, words to say, and images to imagine. But they never touched each other—not like that—not physically, and because of that lack of contact Marie began to think of her time with Helena as time she was spending alone, or time she was doing something like therapy, or as time she was reading a book, a book called Helena, a book with whom she was on speaking terms. And maybe it could have gone on like that even much longer than their three years, with many extended breaks, which they each filled with remorse, swearing the whole thing off, laughing at it privately, then giving in again, sending a quick text, meeting up immediately to continue this erotic game. Then there was the day they each confessed that this was insane, it had been years, and all their discussions and dares and disclosures had to stop—

, Marie said, and though she wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that, Helena agreed, and from there they went straight to a hotel, texted lies about work to their spouses, and stayed in that hotel until it was time to go home and tuck their children into bed. ♦

by Catherine Lacey. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels 

, which is out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

ser-martin

Rule of Threes

“Welcome to Port Authority, New York City. Please watch your belongings as you exit the bus,” the bus driver’s cheery voice announced.

I stepped through the glass doorway of the bus terminal into the sidewalks of Times Square just two weeks after my 19th birthday. It was 12:30 on a Saturday night in late September 1975. It was warm but not stifling hot like it had been in Florida. I didn’t have much of a warning for the bombardment of people, flashing lights, and signs that hit me everywhere I turned. It looked like something right out of a TV show. I was tired from the bus ride but felt a rush of energy as life gushed all around me. Across from the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue below 42nd Street was a chorus line of girls, wearing the shortest skirts and the highest heels I had ever seen, grabbing at men as they walked by. A half a block down I saw a hotel sign hanging on a hinge over the doorway. I slung my backpack on and walked across the street to the hotel. Just as I reached for the doorknob, a girl, not much older than me, with a feather boa draped around her neck, grabbed my upper arm.

“Hey, Cutie, you goin’ in there?” She surprised me. “Yeah,” I said.

She looked puzzled. “You mean you’re going in there and you don’t need a date?”

I was getting irritated. “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure it’s a hotel. But…” She paused. “But most people don’t go in there without a date.” She looked me up and down. My backpack was getting heavy. “You just get here or something?” She nodded her head to the bus station and asked, “From where?”

“You ever been to New York before?” I shook my head no.

“You know anybody here?” I shook my head no.

She smiled at me, not her working-girl smile, but more like the way my sister Lucy smiled at me just before she left me out on the highway in Florida. She pulled me close to her and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Listen, you take care, sweetheart.” She grabbed another man as he passed us by. “Hey, wanna date?” She disappeared into the river of people on the sidewalk.

It was dark inside the door of the hotel. A steep flight of stairs led up to a bulletproof window. The wooden steps creaked and moaned as I climbed to the top. The rail wobbled in my hand. A big guy with a big stomach and faded tattoos on his forearms came up to the window and looked down at me. He seemed surprised when I told him I wanted a room for the night.

I said for the second time in the last five minutes, “This is a hotel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, wait, hold on a minute.” He left his booth. I could hear him talking to someone. When he came back to the window he said, “20 dollars.” I thought that was kind of expensive since the night before I’d paid $17.99 at a Motel 6 just outside of DC, and it was in much better shape than this place. I pulled out my Traveler’s Checks and started to sign my name.

“You have to watch me sign this check or else it’s no good.”

“Oh shit. We don’t take Traveler’s Checks.”

“Why not?” I asked. “It’s good. You can cash them anywhere. I thought everyone took Traveler’s Checks.”

“Let me see some ID.” I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet and stuck it under the slot beneath the bulletproof glass. He looked at me and then the picture of me on my license. Then he examined my signature on the check. He had a washed-out tattoo of a heart with a knife going through it on his forearm. Blood dripped off the tip of the knife. He slid my license back to me underneath the thick glass window.

“You from Kansas City, kid? I was there once. On my way to LA. Stopped and got gas. Had some of the best damn barbecue I ever ate there.”

He stuck a clean white towel and a key with a room number scratched into it under the thick glass window, and then buzzed me in through a big beat-up metal door.

“Up one flight and down to the left.” He nodded with his head towards the staircase.

My room was big enough for a bed and an old, rusted, white porcelain sink. The window had bars over it and faced a brick wall about two feet away. I tried to open it but couldn’t because it was sealed shut with nails and layers of paint. My fingers turned black from the dust and soot on the windowsill. As I rinsed them off in the sink a roach shot out from underneath and ran up the wall. I pulled my transistor radio out of my pack and propped it up on the edge of the sink. I found a Top 40 station and stretched out on the bed. The sheets smelled like fresh laundry. Downy fresh. The mattress was lumpy. Every time I moved, the bedsprings groaned and pressed into me. An R&B song came on the radio that I knew from the Miami station. Guys singing 

 in high falsetto voices. I liked that song.

I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. It was still warm out, the middle of the night, and the streets were full of people. The sky was black but it felt like daylight because of all the storefronts, streetlights, and movie marquees. 42nd Street was lined with porno shops that had pictures of nude people having sex in their front windows. Kids about my age tried to sell me drugs, but I didn’t want any. I walked down 42nd Street from Eighth Avenue to Broadway and looked at Times Square. One thing I liked about New York was that it didn’t look like other American cities. My first disappointment from hitchhiking and traveling around the country was that almost every city looked exactly the same, only the landscape was different. There were McDonald’s, IHOPs, and Denny’s in almost every suburb across America. Once you got through the miles of ranch-style homes, shopping centers, and fast food restaurants to the heart of the city, a small cluster of skyscrapers, there was nothing to do. Downtowns were dead after 6:00 pm. Anyone out on the street after dark was a sitting duck just asking to be harassed by the police. But New York wasn’t like that. It was piled on top of itself instead of spread out. You didn’t need a car to get around. From the minute I arrived I was surrounded by the feeling of 

 everywhere. It was like I had been plopped down in the middle of a giant school of fish and had to swim fast to keep up.

I woke up early in the morning ready to get out of that hotel and go look for the Empire State Building. I threw my backpack over my shoulders and headed down Eighth Avenue to 34th Street. The city didn’t look like the same place in the daylight. It was a brownish-grey, and the streets seemed almost deserted. All the flash and excitement of the night before had disappeared. I stopped and pulled a sweatshirt out of my pack because it had cooled off during the night. No more warm tropical Miami breeze. Fall was in the air.

A tall man with a camera around his neck walked up next to me and said, “You look like you’re either lost or you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I’m looking for the Empire State Building.” He laughed and said, “Look up.”

I looked straight up and realized I was standing at the base of the Empire State Building. It was so gigantic I hadn’t recognized it close-up. The man watched me as I took off my backpack and tilted my head, looking all the way up the sleek, tan building.

“If you think that’s tall, you should see the World Trade Center. It’s twice as tall.”

This was tall enough for me. Besides, the World Trade Center was new. I wanted to see this old building that I’d heard so much about since I was a kid.

“You should go to the top to see the view.” The man pointed to a revolving brass door, so I walked over and gave it a push. It was locked. A sign in the window said tours started at 10:00 am on Sunday. It wasn’t even 9:00 yet.

“You wanna go get some coffee?” I turned and looked at him. He was big with curly dark hair. He held up his camera and snapped a picture of me. “I’m a photographer. How about you?”

“What are you up to? You look like a runaway or something with that ugly-looking pack you’re carrying around.”

“I’m not a runaway. I’m just looking.”

“Oh. Well. Do you want to get some coffee with me or not? You don’t have anything to do until the building opens anyway. Come on.” He put his arm around my shoulders and tugged at me. I shrugged his arm off. He seemed nice enough. I wasn’t getting any weird vibes from him so I gave in and followed him down the street. At 34th and Fifth Avenue he pointed to a McDonald’s. People sat looking out on the street from tables on the second floor, above the entrance. I’d never seen a two-story McDonald’s before. Yellow cabs honked as the guy ran across the street in front of oncoming traffic. We went inside and got two coffees. I ordered some hash browns, too. He took the tray and led me up the stairs to a table by the window. It felt like I was in a foreign country.

“What’s your name?” “Joe. What’s yours?” “Bud.”

We shook hands. The sudden formality made me nervous so I laughed a little.

“I don’t mean to stick my nose in your business, but what exactly are you doing wandering around with that backpack?”

“Like I said, I’m just looking around. I’m on my way back home to Missouri from Miami and thought I’d stop by to see what New York was like.”

Bud stared at me. He lit up a cigarette. I looked down on the street at the people walking by. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Why wouldn’t I be? Haven’t you ever known anyone who’s gone traveling before?” I poured two nondairy creamers into my coffee and watched the white cream swirl around.

“Sure I have, but most of the people I know want to leave New York, not come here.” He exhaled a big cloud of smoke. “You know what? I’m not doing anything today. If you want, I can show you around. I’ll be your tour guide.”

I thought about it for a while. He asked too many questions. I liked looking around by myself, but I had no idea which way to go, really. All I knew was how to get back to the hotel and that was one place I didn’t want to go.

He said he would take me on a tour, but first he needed to go by his apartment to pick up another camera. We rode in a cab over to Ninth Avenue and West 20th Street. His apartment, on the 11th floor, was small. The entryway had framed pictures of him with Bette Midler and Carol Channing and autographed covers of programs from Broadway plays. There was barely enough room in the kitchen to walk around a table that was covered with dirty dishes and The New York Times. The other room, the living room/bedroom, was as small as the kitchen. At McDonald’s he told me he had a one-bedroom apartment, so I asked him where the bedroom was. He said I was standing in it. In the daytime it was a living room. At night the couch pulled out into a bed and it was the bedroom. From the window above the couch, I could see the Empire State Building over the roofs of the Chelsea district.

He dug around in a closet and found the camera he wanted. Then, when he was ready to go, he told me I should leave my pack there. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Because that would mean I’d have to come back here later.” I figured he had ulterior motives and I wasn’t going to set myself up for another awkward situation. Men only wanted one thing.

“Okay, if you feel like carrying that thing around all day, it’s up to you. But you don’t have to.”

Big Apple Sky Calendar: July, August, September 2025

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