from InsideOuthv.com
I am very proud of this issue.
In fact, I am bowled over by our writers, humbled by the images, and completely taken with the design. But most of all, I’m smitten with our subject. Apparently, love brings out the best in us.
Here are some (passionate) highlights:
The Raw and the Cooked: Brigit Binns reaches deep within to recount, with muted eloquence, the painful relationship she shares with her mother — and how she heals herself with cooking.
Earth Diary: John Cronin tells the exhilarating tale of braving the Hudson in his first boat, and the fisherman who bought it for him. If you have ever been a teenage boy (I have), you never forget the first mechanical object or the first place you fell for.
In My Garden: If you love a gardener (and we’re all gardeners, right?) — Paula Forman tells us spiritually, emotionally, and concretely what to give them. It’s about the flowers. Stupid.
Seek: When our occasionally shy managing editor told me about her interview with Dr. Gina Ogden, author of the book “Women Who Love Sex,” I didn’t have to feign curiosity. There are, it turns out, women who have spontaneous orgasms.
American Health: I’ve admired Dan Goleman for decades; he’s a virtual advertisement for the many rewards of following your bliss. Among other things he told us in our interview: Love employs three different brain systems — caretaking, attachment, and romance.
Build: Jessie Koester, in an open letter to the former owner of her cedar cabin, reminds us that we are mere passengers on our land and in our houses — that we never own them; we just borrow and share them.
Arts & Culture: Philip Alvaré takes us on another wild ride, this time investigating with precision and humor the historic and local pairing of love with apples.
Local Love Stories: We admired their independence, their courage, their zaniness. We knew better than to try to say what love is, so we caught them in the act. In a moment.
Pattie Boyd: What do three of the best love songs in rock-and-roll (“Something,” “Layla,” and “Wonderful Tonight”) have in common? Not just their timelessness or the way they bring you to a very specific place every time you hear them. It’s that they were written for Pattie Boyd, the premiere muse of our time. And her photographs are remarkable — they are limited editions, and we are grateful to Pattie for letting us print them. Knowing some details behind the stories gives these songs dimensionality and earthiness. It makes you feel very young and very old. And it’s easy to understand the hold she had on these men.
Twenty-seven years ago, Annie Leibovitz took one of the most memorable love pictures of all time. It is a portrait that became an icon — a cover for Rolling Stone that slowly, and then all at once, became imprinted on the public mind. It showed John Lennon, in his last living image, with all his high-guts vulnerability. A rock star without clothes. It showed Yoko Ono as a woman who didn’t care about any of that stuff, who just cared about him. It was first an image totally of its time, and then an image totally for the ages. Now it’s a timeless one, a moment that is still very much alive. And that’s why we chose that image, that moment, to say what we want to say about love:
From the inside out, we modestly proclaim that in the Hudson Valley it is more important that you love genuinely — honestly — than what your sexual preference is. Or the color of your skin. Or who’s wearing the clothes.
Love is the thing. Compared to that, everything else is just a detail.
Have a good year.
