This article originally appeared in our September 2015 print issue.

Rabelais is the finest culinary destination in Maine where there’s nothing to eat. This bookshop in Biddeford stocks the most up-to-date, most niche books on food and drink, as well as historical acquisitions that serve the cravings of scholars and food trends.

“Fermentation got hot, so I went looking for anything I could find on fermentation,” says co-owner Don Lindgren. “Before that, it was charcuterie.”

In addition to unusual books, Rabelais boasts collections of ephemera such as “Swinalia”—postcards and memorabilia of the late 1800s that feature pigs. The collection’s strength is in its mechanical postcards, many with cryptic political messages, including one depicting a sow continually issuing (via a paper wheel on a grommet) human babies into a Prussian’s helmet.

Don Lindgren | Photo by Cara Slifka

“The pig is giving birth to German imperialists or something,” says Lindgren, who, except for a stint in the ’90s as an A&R man for Sony Music International, has been in the book business for decades. He owns Rabelais with his wife, photo editor-turned-pastry-chef Samantha Hoyt Lindgren.

Less recognizably edible creatures populate The Market Assistant, an index to bygone food markets of the Northeast and what was in season in the mid-nineteenth century: terrapin, black bear, fancy rabbit, brilliant chub sucker, domesticated swan.

It’s part of a collection of early American cookbooks that looms over Rabelais’s space in a converted textile mill. There is ample evidence of the specialized texts that have characterized food publishing in the United States: recipes for industrious frontier orphans, recipes from the birth of southern cuisine, recipes to accommodate dietary restrictions. “All of the reform movements are represented in [American] cookbooks,” says Lindgren. “You look at French cookbooks [of that era], you don’t get any of this stuff.”

Women’s suffrage has its cuisine, and so do gold diggers—“social mobility” cookbooks or, as Lindgren puts it, “so, you’ve married a banker.” The intended audience of Quick Cooking: A Book of Culinary Heresies for the Busy Wives and Mothers of the Land may have been a less aspirational bride, intent on frying up some buckwheat cakes in a hurry, but its introduction reassures us that the purchaser could be fancy: “Even where there is a servant or two in the household the book should be a welcome acquisition, for time saved to the servant is help gained to the mistress.” If she ever needs to know when swan is in season, Rabelais has a book for that.

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All photography by Cara Slifka

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To see ”Seastead,” you walk through Boston’s Seaport district in the process of rearranging itself: out of the Silver Line’s not-a-train-station, too-shiny-to-be-a-bus-station Courthouse stop; through a maze of plywood and newly poured sidewalk; past the buzz of District Hall’s filament bulbs and brogrammers; and across a pristine park in the shadow of ever-higher high-rises and bordered by sailboats, shipping containers, and retail space built to look like shipping containers. As you enter the lobby of the Institute of Contemporary Art, your eyes catch the circular frame of the mural as it rises up into the ceiling. The frame seems to punch through the museum and into the harbor, its lens-like focus trained on a distant aircraft carrier making off with a cathedral askew on its deck.

“Seastead” | By Ethan Murrow

“I was flying into Boston on a beautiful clear day and was comparing maps of early Massachusetts in [Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower] with what I was seeing out the window,” says Ethan Murrow, the mural’s creator, who teaches painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. “I knew that the city had in-filled like crazy to develop and grow, but it was particularly striking in that moment as we circled the harbor and you could see cranes and the new building boom so visibly.”

Stepping closer to the wall, you can see the innumerable strokes of black permanent marker that form the greyscale seascape. It’s evocative of historical engravings and illustrated editions of Moby Dick, but irreproducible and ephemeral by virtue of its scale and medium. “The pens have a dry quality much like that of pencil,” says Murrow, “and this allows an artist to slowly build through mark making instead of blending through washes with a viscous material like paint.”

This is not Murrow’s first large-scale site-specific work executed with office supplies. Murrow chose Sharpies broader than those he’s employed in previous wall drawings at the DeCordova, Facebook Boston, and elsewhere — “chip” and “fine tip” this time, rather than “extra-” or “ultra-fine.” Still, “Seastead” took Murrow and three valiant assistants 11 10-hour days to complete.

“Seastead” | By Ethan Murrow

“We were extremely tired, and our arms felt like jelly when we were done,” Murrow recalls. “This gradual construction is a labor of love. I think it’s important, in part because I want to assert through the work that the intensity of the making is related to the content and imagery, which in this case deals with a dramatic scene of escape or extraction.

“I find it intriguing to live in a city that is in transition,” says Murrow, reflecting on his wariness at rapid construction and what it means for coastal communities. Planning for “Seastead” was informed by a concerns about potential rises in sea level. “I’m intrigued by moments when human needs and desires arc up against big facts of rock, water, and sky and cause failure and disaster.”

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“Writing a chorus is not easy,” says Aly Spaltro, also known as Lady Lamb. “It’s actually, in my opinion, a lot easier to be long-winded than it is to be direct.”

Her most recent album, After, succeeds with both tactics. “Milk Duds” is compact, compelling indie pop, an earworm with a sweet tooth, while more sprawling songs such as “Sunday Shoes” and “Violet Clementine” meander through eons of human history and personal history with effortless shifts between jaunty folk, jazz, and tremendous, guitar-heavy choruses. You can check her out yourself as Spaltro plays shows in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont starting this weekend.

After – released March 3rd, 2015

“I like pulpy phrases that are filled with a lot of blood, and sludge, and that kind of thing,” she says. “But it’s sort of dressed up in a pretty way, with the way the words sound coming out, as opposed to their actual meaning.” The results are strangely evocative, anchoring huge things in small, tangible things (spit and stars) and vice versa (human brains and whales in dark oceans).

Longtime collaborator Kris Johnsen of the Portland Patch Project recently collaborated with Spaltro to create pairs of pink, hand-shaped band patches, fingers dripping with embroidered blood. They’re tattooed with “Lady” on one hand and “Lamb” on the other, underlining the concision of the name, which was recently shortened from “Lady Lamb the Beekeeper.”

“It’s punchier, it’s more direct,” she says, noting the name change reflects the evolution of her music. The older, longer name “really, honestly, pigeonholed me in a lot of ways — like, ‘quirky.’ Which is the worst word. It was time to abbreviate.

“I wanted to challenge myself to write a couple songs that were a little bit more concise and had more formulaic choruses, just to see if I could pull it off. And those were actually the hardest songs for me.”

Spaltro’s process, though, has returned to that of Lady Lamb’s beginnings in late-night experimentation, learning to make music in a basement video store in Brunswick, Maine, where Spaltro worked for four years. “I had permission to be down there after hours, recording. I would close up [the store] at 11 and I would be down there until, I guess, most often 3 or 4 in the morning, just writing music. And then I would go home and go to bed, then go to work and do it all over again. It was a really good time.

“Those early days my style was very much about being impulsive, musically, and just spontaneous, and recording things on the fly and layering each of my instruments all by myself. And then, this record, I kind of went back to that sort of style.”

While in some ways “this project will forever be a solo project — there’s always just me manning the ship, basically, ”Spaltro has a touring band (currently two friends from Portland, Maine, where Spaltro returns for band practice) to make the songs as big, in performance, as they are in the recordings.

Photo by Shervin Lainez

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“It’s a totally ridiculous, impractical idea, which is why we were drawn to it,” says Bit Fest co-organizer Rob Hall as he describes “moving literally tons of fun” for the sake of a single event. “The machines are 200, 300 pounds each. We thought it would be fun to turn [a brewery] into a pop-up arcade.”

Photo by Katherine Kimball Photography

Bit Fest is a series of events that grew out of Boston Retro Gamers — a Facebook group that Hall established — and its members’ classic arcade cabinet and vintage console game collections. Other co-organizers include Joshua Allen, a master electronics repair technician who is the group’s lynchpin for acquiring and restoring classic game hardware, and Andrew Wiley, the proprietor of a Somerville vintage shop, as well as Gideon Coltof and Max Clark.

Inspired by the reimagining of the arcade as 21+ bar in other cities (particularly the recent opening of Portland, Maine’s Arcadia National Bar), Hall and his friends have been organizing forays into video gaming’s past in unlikely spaces, such as a hair salon in the South End, prolifically since last December.

Photo by Chris Anderson

Their next event, on June 4 and 5, will be at Night Shift Brewing in Everett, Massachusetts. Like their previous festivals at Aeronaut Brewing in Somerville, it will include nerdy craft vendors, low-key competitions, recent multiplayer indie games, and local craft beer. “There are conversation pieces and natural shared experiences, and you find yourself breaking into conversation with people about all sorts of things, the games being a catalyst for that. The beer doesn’t hurt that, either.”

Playing arcade games of the early ‘80s provides a glimpse into a very different era of game design, and into the genealogy of an aesthetic that’s invaded the current moment. “Each game was its self-contained experience,” Hall says. “The control schemes were all novel. The side art and the marquee and the control-panel art — it was all custom made and unique.” Even for the uninitiated, the original four-axis Pac Man joystick “just feels right.”

Photo by Chris Anderson

Visually, games were engineered to exploit the qualities of bespoke displays, as in Space Invaders’ layers of computer graphics, painted backdrop, and colored gels. When you’re shattering asteroids on an Asteroids machine from 1979 into sharp, incandescent fragments, Hall says, “you can imagine alternate futures where vector monitors won over raster [monitors] and everything is cool and crisp,” a parallel universe where we’re not looking at dots on a grid all day but graceful lines drawn by electron beams. “That didn’t happen, but we still have Asteroids.”

The visual style of classic games and their technological constraints remain stimulating for independent video game makers. The most recent Bit Fest event featured Towerfall, a contemporary four-player archery battle game with low-resolution graphics, on a huge projector. Accessibility is the common thread that draws Bit Fest’s selection of new and old games together.

Photo by Chris Anderson

“It was neat seeing people walk up to it and start playing it,” says Hall. “Some of these people have no idea that this game was just made a year ago — it just looks fun. We hope to do a little bit more of that this time.” Hall is still finalizing the selection of contemporary games for the upcoming event, “but there’s a game called Starwhal that’s a space narwhal combat simulator. Everything’s very neon. It’s got like one or two buttons and directional [controls]. It’s very accessible.

“It’s meant for anybody to walk up and play. We really like highlighting that. That’s where this heritage sits.”

Top photo by Katherine Kimball Photography

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“I wanted what I wanted.” This is the reason Norma Loehr gave me for learning to sew her own clothes at the age of 8, and it’s also the reason I learned to reverse-engineer vintage bow ties at the age of 33. But even as I moved on to more complex patterns, bras seemed like something made by nature, or by science — like a flower, or a suspension bridge.

A bra is the last thing you’d think to make for yourself. Norma Loehr, founder of Orange Lingerie, wants to change that.

“To me, [a bra] is the most logical garment to sew,” she says. “It’s so crucial. They’re the foundation of everything else.”

Loehr sewed her first bra in 2009, the same year she moved to Boston from New York. After quitting a high-stress job in finance, she studied with an expert bra maker in Canada. Her first clients were two friends from the gym whom she fitted, making bras to meet their particular support needs and asymmetries. She found studio space in Somerville, Massachusetts, “near the Taza Chocolate factory. I am near many other artists in the area, which is great. We get ideas from each other and encourage each other to be adventurous and do more work.”

Loehr has recently stopped taking on new clients in order to shift her focus toward teaching. “I’m really focused on the sewing community, getting them sewing their own undergarments.”

To that end, she’s written a book with the word “demystifying” in the title and published a handsome, versatile bra pattern named after Marlborough Street in Boston’s Back Bay.

She’s planning to name all her patterns for Boston streets. “I really try to align the street with the underlying intention for the pattern. Isn’t Marlborough a pretty street that many of us use every day?”

In late April, she’ll be giving a small, hands-on bra-sewing workshop at Grey’s Fabric & Notions, a hub of creative activity in Boston’s South End. “I want them to feel good about sewing their own lingerie and tell other sewists, ‘Hey, you can do this.'”

Norma Loehr making a “universally flattering” black lace bra

It’s her first sewing workshop ever, but she’s confident: “I’ve taught investment concepts!”

It’s easy for the home sewist to get stuck on sourcing exotic notions (“bits and bobs” like clasps, elastics, and underwire casing) and on the notion that home-sewn garments “need to fit within an inch of their lives,” as Loehr puts it, “not understanding that the body sort of changes a little bit every day.”

In fact, she believes that a bra can be a more forgiving personal sewing project than others. “If it’s a bra, you’re still going to wear it,” she says. “And you’re going to say, when I make the next one, I’ll do this” — a wider strap, a prettier elastic, silk underwire casing, luxurious detail after luxurious detail, until you’ve got something perfect that you didn’t even know you could want.

Photos courtesy of Norma Loehr

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