Wanderer in Bewitching, Fractious Land // Vimukthi Jayasundara's 'Between Two Worlds'

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Riven with violence and haunted by the dead and the missing, “Between Two Worlds” is a hallucinatory experience. The worlds in question could be a number of things — heaven and hell, peace and war, past and present; but in a film this vivid and this oblique, the cumulative thrust of the images is what pulls us through.

Like Mr. Jayasundara’s 2005 feature, “The Forsaken Land,” “Between Two Worlds” is deeply embedded in Sri Lanka’s devastating civil war and the societal fissures that have resulted. Elements of folklore, myth and political symbolism speckle the story (in one scene a man in a Mickey Mouse mask is mercilessly beaten in the middle of a street strewn with smashed television sets), and marauding rebels prowl on the margins.

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Jay-Z Deconstructs Himself // 'Decoded,' a Guide to Jay-Z's Life and Lyrics

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Michiko Kakutani

In the summer of 1978, when he was 9 years old and growing up in the Marcy housing projects in Brooklyn, Shawn Carter — a k a Jay-Z — saw a circle of people gathered around a kid named Slate, who was “rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time — 30 minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the handclaps” of the folks around him, transformed “like the church ladies touched by the spirit.” Young Shawn felt gravity working on him, “like a planet pulled into orbit by a star”: he went home that night and started writing his own rhymes in a notebook and studying the dictionary.

“Everywhere I went I’d write,” Jay-Z recalls in his compelling new book, “Decoded.” “If I was crossing a street with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I’d break out my binder, spread it on a mailbox or lamppost and write the rhyme before I crossed the street.” If he didn’t have his notebook with him, he’d run to “the corner store, buy something, then find a pen to write it on the back of the brown paper bag.” That became impractical when he was a teenager, working streets up and down the eastern corridor, selling crack, and he says he began to work on memorizing, creating “little corners in my head where I stored rhymes.”

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Muslim Troupe Arrives With Splash and Age-Old Ecumenical Traditions // Music at the White Light Festival

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By Steve Smith

Over the course of the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center, the notion of music as a conduit to spirituality has taken a variety of forms: individual contemplation, communal praise, the physical discipline of dance, a rock star’s beatific charisma. With “The Manganiyar Seduction,” which arrived belatedly at the Rose Theater on Monday night after a visa-related delay, came still another facet of spirituality: communion with God achieved in a manner embracing the sensual and the ecstatic.

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Giving Thanks Through The Arts // Poetry, Music, Design, Literature, Sculpture and more

Bono once commented upon the irony, as he accepted a Golden Globe award for best song for The Hands That Built America which his band composed for the film Gangs of New York, that "it took an Italian (Martin Scorsese) to make a great film about the Irish."

His quip popped into my head last week as our journey into the season of Thanksgiving (primarily a North American holiday) began and as I discovered an excellent series of posts focusing on Giving Thanks Through The Arts as a way to celebrate Thanksgiving - created and written by the blog Transpositions (of the Scottish university St. Andrews).

While I realize that many of their advanced students are originally from The States, I did find the irony humorous nonetheless. And whether or not you find these excellent posts to contain an element of irony, I am quite sure you'll agree that this series discussing gratitude and/via the arts is refreshing, thoughtful and rather inspiring. The separate posts in this series are listed, chronologically, below. Be sure to check out Transpositions over the coming days to see if more entries are published. And as a preface to these posts I am copying below (in italics) Jim Watkins' introductory statement which accompanied the first of these entries on November 15th. Enjoy! -- Leif

In the days leading up to the American holiday of Thanksgiving, the crew here at Transpositions are going to reflect on various ways that works of art can be a form of giving thanks. All art making, at a very fundamental level, revels in and draws attention to the ‘givenness’ of its materials, and so reminds us that gratitude is the human being’s basic response to the world. Happy Thanksgiving!

Giving Thanks through Sculpture: Andy Goldsworthy [11/15]

Giving Thanks through Poetry [11/17]

Giving Thanks through Music: Over the Rhine [11/19]

Giving Thanks through Design: The Thank You Note [11/22]

Giving Thanks through Literature: Wendell Berry [11/23]

In The Beginning Is The Icon // A Review by Transpositions contributor Jim Watkins

Over at the splendid site Transpositions, Jim Watkins has written an excellent and erudite review of Sigurd Bergmann's In The Beginning is the Icon: A Liberative Theology of Images, Visual Arts and Culture. Enjoy! -- Leif

Full Review Here // Excerpt Below

A review of In The Beginning is the Icon: a Liberative Theology of Images, Visual Arts and Culture by Sigurd Bergmann, translated by Anja K. Angelsen (London: Equinox, 2009). [originally published in Swedish in 2003]

In his foreward, Nicholas Wolterstorff declares that Bergmann’s book “is a breakthrough in theological aesthetics.” This is a remarkable endorsement from a scholar who has contributed so much to the contemporary landscape of theological aesthetics. It seems to me that Wolterstorff’s assessment is, on the whole, accurate. Bergmann does actually bring a great deal of originality to the conversation between theology and the arts, and he also widens the scope of the conversation considerably by drawing on voices from philosophy and anthropology rarely heard in a work like this. Furthermore, Bergmann draws our attention to interesting works of art that would not be considered as part of the normal “canon” of high western art.

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One Drawing/Painting for Every Page of Moby-Dick // Matt Kish illustrates the Great American Novel

Well, this is something you surely don't discover every day. Matt Kish created a blog in August 2009 devoted to publishing (at a rate of about one per day) an original drawing/painting for each page of the great American novel Moby-Dick. As of today (Nov. 22) he's on page 451 which means, regardless of which edition he's reading, he's nearing the conclusion of his Ishmaelian journey. Start from the beginning by clicking here. Enjoy! -- Leif

Kanye West Gets 'Twisted,' But Misses The Beauty // West's Newest Release on All Things Considered

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Oliver Wang

On Monday one of the most anticipated — and most leaked — albums of the year hits stores: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West. The rapper began releasing several of its songs on his own website since the late summer, and he even produced a 35-minute music video to go with it. Now, the final, complete album is in the offing.

A friend recently claimed that West is the only famous rapper who still matters. I'd imagine fans of Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg or Lil Wayne might take issue with that opinion, but it's doubtful that any of those MCs ever merited a mention in a presidential memoir. As West himself might ask, should any rapper have all that power?

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Mark Twain auto-biography flying off shelves

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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

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

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

Full Article Here // Excerpt Here

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

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

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

Full article here // Excerpt below

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

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

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

Full article here // Excerpt below

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

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

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"

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

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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