Mark Twain auto-biography flying off shelves

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Julie Bosman

When editors at the University of California Press pondered the possible demand for “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” a $35, four-pound, 500,000-word doorstopper of a memoir, they kept their expectations modest with a planned print run of 7,500 copies.

Now it is a smash hit across the country, landing on best-seller lists and going back to press six times, for a total print run — so far — of 275,000. The publisher cannot print copies quickly enough, leaving some bookstores and online retailers stranded without copies just as the holiday shopping season begins.

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State of the Arts // As Film goes 3-D, Theater goes 2-D

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by Ben Brantley

One great and glorious advantage that the theater used to have over the movies was the third dimension. You knew that when you watched actors on stage that they were just as fully rounded – physically, I mean – as the people in the lobby at intermission.

In the past few years, though, filmmakers have been co-opting the third dimension for themselves. Once James Cameron’s “Avatar” broke box office records with the help of silly-looking 3-D glasses, what had been a novelty (and a punch line) in the 1950s started to be taken very seriously.

Now, as if from some perverse competitive spirit, the theater has decided to step back into two dimensions, in a big way. True, actors remain irreducibly of flesh and blood. But that doesn’t mean that what’s around them has to share their unchangeable spatial identities. In scenic design these days, the biggest thing in the theater is film.

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Blue Grass + Punk Rock + The UMC = ?!? // Faith and Leadership interviews Seth Avett of The Avett Brothers

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by Faith & Leadership staff

The Avett Brothers have been described as “grunge grass,” “punk grass” and “Roert E. Lee playing with the Ramones.” Their high-energy performances have scandalized bluegrass purists but delighted fans: they were identified by Rolling Stone as a band to watch in 2009 and have appeared this year on David Letterman’s and Jimmy Kimmel’s shows.

The four-man ensemble includes the two actual Avett brothers, Scott and Seth, as well as bassist Bob Crawford and cellist Joe Kwon.Kwon and the Avetts all grew up in small United Methodist churches in North Carolina. Clegg Avett, the Avetts’ grandfather, was a Methodist minister in western North Carolina.

In live performances they throw themselves around the stage, as Esquire magazine says, “in the best campfire, hootenanny sing-along tradition.” Yet their songwriting has the delicacy and truth of the very best sermons. Faith & Leadership’s Jason Byassee interviewed Seth Avett by e-mail about tradition and innovation, handling success, being both playful and serious, and the church. The following is an edited version of the interview.

Click here to read the interview

More than "Just Kids" // Rocker Patti Smith wins National Book Award

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by Julie Bosman

The rock musician Patti Smith won the National Book Award for nonfiction on Wednesday night for “Just Kids,” a sweetly evocative memoir of her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe and the romantic days of bohemian New York.

Accepting the award to wild applause and cheers, Ms. Smith — clearly the favorite of the night — choked up slightly as she recalled her days working as a clerk in the Scribner bookstore as a young woman. “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

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Activist Artist Goes on Trial in Beijing

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by Andrew Jacobs

BEIJING — In a case that has galvanized the Chinese arts community, a prominent artist who helped lead a short-lived demonstration along the nation’s most politically hallowed thoroughfare went on trial Wednesday on assault charges that supporters say are aimed at punishing him for his political activism.

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A Poet Well Versed in Grief

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by Mary Plummer

Born to a family who ran a funeral home in small-town Michigan, the poet Thomas Lynch began pondering aging and death at a young age, as a child leafing through the gory pages of his father’s mortician texts.

A National Book Award finalist, for “Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade,” and the subject of a 2007 “Frontline” documentary, Mr. Lynch has just published his fourth collection of poems, “Walking Papers.” It is a pilgrimage of sorts through growing old and facing death — subjects that caregivers know all too well. His upfront, unvarnished style is likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life’s most important questions.

In the book’s title poem, Mr. Lynch advises an ailing friend to put aside his lab reports and explore a different type of medicine:

I say clean your plate and say your prayers,
go out for a long walk after supper
and listen for the voice that sounds like you
talking to yourself, you know the one:
contrapuntal, measured to footfall, true
to your own metabolism. Listen –
inspiration, expiration, it’s all the same,
the sigh of creation and its ceasing -
whatever’s going to happen’s going to happen.

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Destroyed Apple products as Works of Visual Art

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by The LA Times staff

When does an iPhone or an iPad cease to be a mere consumer gadget and enter the rarefied world of visual art? How about when someone willfully destroys it, turning it into an abstract, brutalized husk of its former self?

A series of smashed, mangled, shot up and melted Apple products are the subject of a recent photography project by a San Francisco-area graphic designer who said he's trying to make people think about their relationship with these universally beloved gadgets.

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'Battle Hymn Of The Republic' // The Other National Anthem

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By NPR Staff

Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. There is no song that more vividly evokes that conflict than "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Julia Ward Howe wrote the famous words­ "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord" in 1861. Since then, the song's become a kind of second national anthem.

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Thursday at Duke // "Sufi Verses for the Heart and Soul"

On Thursday, November 11th, the Duke Islamic Studies Center and Center for Islamic Life present the poetry of the medieval Sufi mystical poet Rumi in the Nelson Music Room (East Duke Bldg. 201) at 7:00 pm. The program is called "Sufi Verses for the Heart and Soul." English and Persian spoken word will be accompanied by music. For more information, contact Lauren Braun 919-668-1955 or email disc@duke.edu.

Rapper Finds a New Life in Orthodox Judaism

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by Dina Kraft

JERUSALEM — The tall man in the velvet fedora and knee-length black jacket with ritual fringes peeking out takes long, swift strides toward the Western Wall. It’s late in the day, and he does not want to miss afternoon prayers at Judaism’s holiest site. “We have to get there before the sun goes down,” he says, his stare fixed behind a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, the first clue that this is no ordinary Jewish man of God.

It’s the rapper Shyne, the Sean Combs protégé who served almost nine years in New York prisons for opening fire in a nightclub in 1999 during an evening out with Mr. Combs and his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Lopez. “My entire life screams that I have a Jewish neshama,” he said, using the Hebrew word for soul. Living as Moses Levi, an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem (he legally changed his name from Jamal Barrow), he shuttles between sessions of Talmud study with some of the most religiously stringent rabbis in the city and preparations for a musical comeback.

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A Life After Death Double Feature // Eastwood's "Hereafter" and Noe's "Enter the Void"

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by Jay Michaelson

Two very different films about what happens after we die are in the theaters right now: Clint Eastwood’s gentle Hereafter and Gaspar Noe’s raw, hallucinatory Enter the Void. While covering the same cosmological territory, the films couldn’t be more different, stylistically, thematically, and religiously.

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Today at Duke // Faith & Fiction: Writing Creatively

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

12:20pm - 1:20pm
0014 Westbrook

Writing Workshop

The Duke Divinity School Center for Theology, Writing & Media will hold a brown bag seminar led by experienced author Susan Ketchin on “Faith & Fiction: Writing Creatively.”

Saul Bellow's "Letters" // Dispatches and Details from a Life in Literature

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by Michiko Kakutani

Herzog, the title character of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel, is famously a writer of letters he never sends, letters to friends, rivals, relatives and strangers; letters that satisfy his craving “to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.” The letters are, by turns, cranky, coruscating, clever and cerebral: the outpourings of a man overflowing with ideas and grievances, and reeling from the complications of his life and the stubborn mystifications of the world around him. The real-life letters of Herzog’s creator turn out to be just as arresting, seizing the reader by the lapels and refusing to let go.

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Elvis Costello on music, religion and the act of writing songs

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By J. D. Considine

With a cover showing a cartoon wolf in robber-baron garb, running off with a carpet bag spilling cash, it’s not too hard to guess whose ox is being gored on National Ransom, the title track of Elvis Costello’s latest album, out Tuesday. And even though some of the songs are imbued with the sweetness of bluegrass and gospel, there’s plenty of the satirical bite that made Costello a new-wave icon.

[...]

There are a number of songs addressing religion on the album, but they don’t seem anti-religious so much as opposed to the abuse of religion.

I’m suspicious of people who think they know what God knows. Myself, I actually think that’s blasphemy.

I once sat on the steps of a church with an Orthodox Ethiopian boy. And he said, ‘Are you Orthodox?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And I thought that was very beautiful, that he thought it was more a sorrowful thing, than he hated me because I wasn’t what he was, you know?

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The Varieties of Religious Experience [in Indie Rock] // From Religion Dispatches

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by S. Brent Plate

Religion has returned to the arts, philosophy, politics, and, by extension, the news media that reports on them. More broadly, contemporary Western societies may have entered a period of what philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls “post-secular,” which is to say that, in a sense, religion has been there all along. If philosophers, politicians, and artists want to talk about religion, fine—but for God’s sake, alt-rockers too?!

Alternative rock, with its default anti-establishment stance (whether feigned or forthright) has not been the typical go-to place for sincere religious music. That may be changing. Though stylistically diverse, several recent releases show a unique motif: treating religious histories and sacred texts as fonts of wisdom, experience, and poetry.

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Makoto Fujimara // A Letter [from a Christian Visual Artist] to North American Churches

Letter in Full Here // Excerpt Below

by Makoto Fujimara

Dear Churches of North America,

I speak to you as an artist.

An artist’s relationship with you has not been easy; we are often in the margins of your communities, being the misfits that we are. Artists often sit in the back, if they come to church at all, wear black and look menacing to you. But many of us, actually, sit in the front, we volunteer, and are first to be with the poor. You just don’t notice us. Some of us are even up in front preaching, and you call us pastors, but we consider ourselves really artists of the Word.

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Ke$ha, Katy Perry, P!nk, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift sing for Gay Rights

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by Alex Hawgood

AT first listen, “We R Who We R,” the current single from the pop singer Ke$ha, sounds like just another entry in her glitter-caked catalog of dance hits. But “We R Who We R” has a subtext: It is intended as a response to the recent rash of suicides by gay teenagers and young adults, several of whom were close to Ke$ha’s age.

“Mean,” a song that Taylor Swift released early in anticipation of her third — and current No. 1 — album, “Speak Now,” is a bluegrass version of an antibullying public service announcement: “Someday I’ll be living in a big old city/And all you’re ever going to be is mean,” she sings. “Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me/And all you’re ever going to be is mean.” Pink’s “Raise Your Glass,” a new single that is included in a greatest-hits album that is to be released next week, addresses similar themes of overcoming persecution: “So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways, all my underdogs.” For the song’s just-released video, Pink plays a singer at a gay wedding. (Or would that be a commitment ceremony?). And the video for Katy Perry’s new single, “Firework,” a song from her album “Teenage Dream,” features a scene in which two boys passionately kiss as pyrotechnics burst from the singer’s bust.

Together, these artists represent a new wave of young (and mostly straight) women who are providing the soundtrack for a generation of gay fans coming to terms with their identity in a time of turbulent and confusing cultural messages.

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Learn About Durham's Top Ranked Creative Economy November 4th // How You Can Be a Part of It

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4th

Join us for a fantastic morning of Creative Economy and Entrepreneurship learning, discussion and networking in 6 programs with 17 dynamic creative economy speakers.

Two Options:

• Creative Vitality Index™ Announcement Program and Breakfast
8:00 a.m.-9:45 a.m.
Includes CVI™ Program, Breakfast, Resource Handouts Ticket: $15

• CVI™ Program/Breakfast + The Art of Business Workshops and Luncheon
8:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Includes CVI™ Program, Breakfast, Resource Handouts plus 2 Art of Business Workshops
and Lunch Program
Ticket: $35

CLICK HERE FOR EVENT TICKETS & LISTING OF SPEAKERS


Presented by: Alpha Zeta Omega Chapter, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and the new Durham Business Committee for the Arts which is a partnership of the Durham Arts Council, Americans for the Arts, the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce, The Durham Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Duke University, the Durham Cultural Advisory Board and the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Rock 'n Roll Catholicism // The surprising unity of Catholicism and the so-called "Devil's Music"

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Mark Oppenheimer

For the rock stars that Rob Sheffield writes about, there is a lot of God, but not much church attendance. From Depeche Mode or Bob Dylan, you learn that God is a big deal — but you will not find much support for weekend rituals that require fighting a hangover to rise early.

Mr. Sheffield, who writes for Rolling Stone, feels otherwise. His second memoir, “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran,” published by Dutton in July, not only contains important observations about the Go-Go’s, Tone Loc and New Kids on the Block. It also explains why a literate suburban teenager might become a major fan of both rock ’n’ roll and regular Catholic Mass — how those sacred experiences are not opposed, like Satan and God, but united by one sensibility.

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"The Underbelly Project" // In an abandoned Subway, a stunning Art Show

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by Jasper Rees

A vast new exhibition space opened in New York City this summer, with a show 18 months in the making. On view are works by 103 street artists from around the world, mostly big murals painted directly onto the gallery’s walls. It is one of the largest shows of such pieces ever mounted in one place, and many of the contributors are significant figures in both the street-art world and the commercial trade that now revolves around it. Its debut might have been expected to draw critics, art dealers and auction-house representatives, not to mention hordes of young fans. But none of them were invited.

In the weeks since, almost no one has seen the show. The gallery, whose existence has been a closely guarded secret, closed on the same night it opened. Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can’t buy the art. The public can’t see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across it are the urban explorers who prowl the city’s hidden infrastructure or employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. That’s because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station.

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'Frank - The Voice' // Attempting to capture the spirit of Sinatra

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By Michiko Kakutani

He provided the soundtrack for several generations of Americans trying to navigate the rocky shoals of romance and grapple with love and heartbreak. And he became one of 20th-century pop culture’s quintessential men of contradictions: the bullying tough guy whose singing could radiate a remarkable tenderness and vulnerability; the ring-a-ding-ding Vegas sophisticate with an existential outlook on life; the jaunty urbanite who could deliver a torch song like no one else. Fans could recognize his voice from two or three perfectly phrased syllables, and they knew him instantly from his style: the rakishly tilted hat, the coat slung over one shoulder, the Camels and Jack Daniel’s. He was the original teeny-bopper heartthrob and the harbinger of a new age of celebrity.

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Living in Art // At the Met "Big Bambu: You Can't, You Don't and You Won't Stop"

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by Robin Pogrebin

Take 6,800 bamboo poles, seven miles of colorful cord and plans for an art installation that will change every day over a six-month period and ultimately grow to 50 feet high. Add two artists and a bunch of rock climbers who like to listen to the Rolling Stones while they add to the piece, and drink pilsner when they’re done working. And then stick the whole thing on the roof of the esteemed, establishment Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was bound to be a combustible mix.

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"Memento Mickey" // A short film evoking death, or perhaps life, for Halloween

Full Article and Video Here // Excerpt Below

by Jeff Scher

Wide-eyed and always smiling, skulls are the most recognizable bone(s) in your body and easily the scariest. They once whispered, kissed and dreamed, just like us, but now, the life is gone, the soul inside vanished and only a generic symbol of death remains. “Memento Mickey” is a Halloween memento mori. Latin for “remember you will die,” it is also a genre of art that uses death to remind the viewer that life is indeed fleeting.

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Otherworldly Sounds at a Spiritual Retreat // Meredith Monk and the White Light Festival

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By Vivien Schweitzer

When Meredith Monk performed her “Click Song No. 1” on Thursday, it sounded as if she was accompanied by an array of percussion. But she was alone onstage as she offered a taste of her remarkable extended vocal technique, a petite figure framed by an enormous bright blue screen that changed colors throughout the program.

The event, at the David Rubenstein Atrium, formed part of the opening evening of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. Jane Moss, the center’s vice president for programming, was inspired to create this multicultural festival of sacred music as a spiritual retreat for New Yorkers awash in a digital din and floundering on the multitasking treadmill.

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Let There Be Light, and Elegance // Morgan Library & Museum's Restored Building Reopens

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By Holland Cotter

“Elegance is refusal,” Diana Vreeland declared. But not always. She would have had a tough time selling that line of logic to the financier and elegance addict J. P. Morgan, a notable nonrefuser in practically every area, including art. He bought porcelains by the pound, drawings by the ream, bucketsful of Near Eastern cylinder seals and box upon box of rare books, chucking the junk and keeping the gems. Such was his way.

Nor did he hold back in commissioning the architect Charles Follen McKim to design the personal office and library for him at the corner of 36th Street and Madison Avenue that will reopen on Saturday after a $4.5 million restoration. The 1906 building is part of the Morgan Library & Museum.

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The Magic Of Harry Houdini's Staying Power // A Rabbi's Son's Escape from the Dustbin of History

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By Robert Smith

Harry Houdini was known for escaping from handcuffs, straitjackets and water tanks, but his greatest trick was escaping from the dustbin of history. After all, how many popular performers can you name from 1902? Yet more than 80 years after his death, Houdini is still referred to as the greatest magician who ever lived.

A new exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York, called Houdini: Arts and Magic, looks at the visual legacy of Harry Houdini and how his fame managed to survive.

The answer to that question, at least in part, lies in the nature of Houdini's legend, which was so simple that kids are still passing it around the playground. There once was a man who could escape from anything …

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Beyond ABCs of Lady Gaga to the Sociology of Fame // University of South Carolina Professor to Offer Gaga Course

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Katharine Q. Seelye

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta may not sound famous, but the University of South Carolina is offering a course next spring devoted to her — and the sociology of fame.

Apparently one secret to becoming famous is to change your name. Ms. Germanotta now goes by Lady Gaga.

What else accounts for the soaring popularity of the 24-year-old global phenom? The question has intrigued and inspired Mathieu Deflem, 48, a sociology professor at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, who plans to teach a course called “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame.” He believes it is the only such full-time college course in the country.

He wants to explore what makes a person famous and what being famous means in today’s culture. Or, as the course description puts it: “The central objective is to unravel some of the sociologically relevant dimensions of the fame of Lady Gaga.”

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How Art Gives Theology a Voice // Luba Zakharov on the Divinity Spotlight Blog

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By Luba Zakharov

In the same way that writers of theological texts speak to one another through the arguments they fashion, so too do painters ‘write’ theology in their works. In Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Saint Jerome in his Study (on the left) Jerome is seated at his desk, with a holy light shining above his head, exemplifying the meaning of his name, Hieronymus (in Latin), which comes from ‘gerar,’ meaning holy and ‘nemus,’ which means, ‘a grove.’ The textual basis for Jerome’s iconography (and for the iconography of all the saints) comes from, The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, published in the 13th century.

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Two Worlds // Torn Between the Artistic and Religious establishments

The hits keep coming from Transpositions, the blog of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews. Their latest must-read arrives via Tanya Walker, a PhD student in Divinity at St. Andrews, on young Christian artists being torn between the aesthetic and religious establishments. An excellent piece. Enjoy! -- Leif

Full Essay Here // Excerpt Below

by Tanya Walker

I recently asked 24 young artists who were Christians to consider two questions:

What does your craft require of you?

What does the church require of your craft?

Their answers revealed the tensions they felt trying to “fit” into two worlds whose differing values seemed to pull them in opposite directions.

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The 99: the Islamic superheroes fighting side by side with Batman // DC Comics Crossover

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Carole Cadwalladr

Even if you deliberately set out to try to dream up the least probable superhero ever, it's unlikely that you'd manage to come up with a character as far-fetched as Batina the Hidden. Forget Wonder Worm, or a man born with the powers of a newt, Batina is a superhero of a kind the world hasn't until now seen. It's not just that she's a Muslim woman, from a country best known for harbouring al-Qaida operatives – Yemen – but that she wears an altogether new kind of super-person costume: a burqa.

She, along with her fellow crime-fighters, a vast team of characters from around the world, including Jabbar the Powerful from Saudi Arabia and Hadya the Guide from London, collectively known as "The 99", are the world's first Islam-inspired superheroes. And this week, in what is perhaps the ultimate comic-book accolade, they will join forces with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. DC Comics, the US publishing giant, will publish the first of six special crossover issues in which The 99 will be fighting crime alongside the Justice League of America, the fictional superhero team that includes Superman and Batman.

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