"It was twenty years ago today / music tore down a wall of gray."

"It was twenty years ago today / Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play." Those are the lyrics, of course, of The Beatles. But for today's occasion we might re-write them (ever so slightly) for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall and say "It was twenty years ago today / music tore down a wall of gray."

Just up this morning from The New York Times is a wonderful little piece on the role of music as an inspirational and subversive force in breaking down the Berlin Wall.

------Excerpt below // Full Article Here

Guitars, keyboards and drums did not topple the Berlin Wall. But for the young people who helped bring down Communist regimes across Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989, music was a profoundly subversive force, inspiration and vital tool of protest for challenging and undermining a totalitarian state. Continue Reading

The Fall of The Wall: "Freedom Danced Before My Eyes"

A treasure trove of terrific pieces are flooding the newspapers - both online and in special print-only sections - today, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This morning, New Creation highlights an unusual piece with the perspective not of 2009 but of 1989. It is the Op/Ed piece which Tom Brokaw wrote in the immediate days following the fall of the wall in November 1989. Read through his account of the events and of people's emotions - his included - and reflect on how far we've come, and how much has changed in two decades.

Excerpt below // Read the complete piece here

When I arrived in West Berlin Nov. 8, the morning after the East German Government resigned, Mr. Krenz was reorganizing the Politburo. There was a growing feeling that the Communist Party was on the run, panicky in the face of mass migration and ever louder voices of dissent.

At Checkpoint Charlie, however, expressionless guards remained true to their calling, running every visitor through time consuming and exasperating searches. On the East side of the Brandenburg Gate, we were allowed to record segments for Nightly News, but the 100-meter no man's land between the streets of East Berlin and the wall still was being patrolled by Army units with weapons and dogs.

The next day, Thursday, Nov. 9, word began to leak out that the Politburo had decided to legally recognize the opposition parties and prepare for free elections. It was a dramatic concession, but still nothing about the wall.

Jazz in Theology & Reconciliation -- "Tension gives it groove"

Just in time for Sunday, Ross Kane reflects on the powerful potential for instruction which Jazz music offers ministers and congregations alike when encountering conflict. Instead of eliminating conflict, Kane argues that Jazz teaches how to create something useful - even beautiful - out of it.

An excerpt from Ross Kane's article is below // Click here to read the full article from Duke Divinity's outstanding online resource Faith and Leadership.

Despite the church’s expressed commitment to creating a peaceable community through reconciliation, in daily life we often sidestep tension and conflict. “It’s probably easier to move to something else and not address that comment,” thinks a pastor in a tension-filled meeting. “I’d rather not talk to the pastor about the way we’re doing our music these days,” thinks one parishioner. Often Christians see conflict and tension as problems to be forgotten or hastily avoided.

For the jazz musician, however, without the tension there is no groove. The sense of movement in a jazz solo depends upon the building up of harmonic tension followed by release. In jazz, the idea is not to reduce the tension or eliminate it, but rather to negotiate it and let the tension and resolution work together to create something beautiful.

Uncovering "The Holy Grail Of The Unconscious"

The phrase 'truth is stranger than fiction' rings throughout this article ("The Holy Grail of the Unconscious") regarding Carl Jung's mysterious Red Book. It had long been considered by many to be the most important unpublished work in the history of psychology - but that all changed this past October as a facsimile of the Red Book, with introduction and extensive footnotes by Sono Shamdasani, was finally published. (You can order it for yourself off Amazon by clicking here.)

Below is an excerpt of The New York Times Magazine article where the story first premiered. Article available in full here.

//EXCERPT//

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.

THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book...

Click here to continue reading

How To Write A Great Novel -- 11 Top Authors Share Their Secrets

Just in from today's Wall Street Journal is a fascinating and insightful article featuring candid disclosures from eleven luminaries of the novel, including: Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of The Day), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), Richard Powers (Generosity), Anne Rice (Interview with a Vampire) and six other top novelists!

-----EXCERPT BELOW //READ THE ARTICLE IN FULL HERE

Richard Powers lounges in bed all day and speaks his novels aloud to a laptop computer with voice-recognition software. Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," shuts himself in the bathroom and perches on the edge of the tub with his notebook when he's tackling a knotty passage. Hilary Mantel, whose Tudor drama "Wolf Hall" claimed this year's Man Booker Prize, jumps in the shower when she gets stuck. "The number of pages I've got that are water marked, I can't tell you," Ms. Mantel said.

Jewish painter grapples with the Holocaust in St. Louis exhibit

The St. Louis Jewish Light reports:

Artist Deborah N. Sessel, whose paintings and drawings include striking juxtapositions of powerful, sometimes disturbing images, often portrays the horrors of the Holocaust tragedy intertwined with the realm of eternal faith. Sessel's exhibition of Holocaust drawings and paintings, entitled "Faith," is on display at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center through the end of the year. They are accompanied by poems to complement the art written by the Sessel's mother, Janice Sussman.

Read the full article here.

Duke Arts Weekend is THIS Weekend!

As a part of the Duke Student Arts Initiative, Duke University's Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts is hosting a campus-wide Student Arts Showcase to be held on Friday, Nov. 6 and Saturday, Nov. 7 in the Bryan Center on Duke's West Campus.

Friday and Saturday events will include:

• Exhibition of student art works
• Performances by student musicians and dancers
• Panels with alumni working in arts, media, and entertainment (pre-registration required)
• Dinner for students and alumni (FREE, but pre-registration is required)
• Networking Reception for students and alumni

Click here for the complete schedule for Friday and Saturday.

Picasso Film Series Tonight @ Nasher!

Tonight, Thursday November 5th, the Nasher Museum of Art will continue with its Picasso film series in support of its ground-breaking exhibit (in collaboration with Yale University) "Picasso and the Allure of Language". The film, tonight, is "Life Begins Tomorrow" and shows at 7pm. It is free and open to the public.

Brief synopsis: Nicole Verde's film tells the story of a visitor to Paris who assembles the great minds of the city to answer philosophical questions about the human experience and universe at large. Co-sponsored by Duke's Art of the Moving Image Program.

Legendary Violinist Joshua Bell Helps Classical Music Take Center Stage At White House

On Wednesday, legendary violinist Joshua Bell helped classical music soar on a mighty stage as he and other musicians performed and taught at The White House.

The New York Times notes the following:

The festivities and performances were sponsored by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, created by executive order in 1982. The first lady serves as honorary chairwoman of the committee, and Michelle Obama, fully embracing that function, has created a White House Music Series.

Mrs. Obama spoke movingly of children who grow up in major cities where arts institutions thrive yet feel that those resources might as well be miles away. The arts and music have a place not just in our museums, theaters and concert halls, she said, but in “the halls of this White House.” She wants the White House to be a showcase for the arts, she added.

Read The Times article in its entirety here.

U2, Jay-Z mark 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

Only hours ago today, November 5th, crowds massed around Berlin's historic Brandenburg Gate as U2 (with a guest appearance by Jay-Z) played an outdoor six song set as a prelude to the MTV European Music Awards (which were held indoors at a separate locale). The concert was limited to 10,000 ticket holders who snatched up all of the tickets within 3 hours after they were released online. The cost of the tickets? $0.00

The Set List: The Irish musicians opened with "One", a song they first recorded in Berlin during sessions at historic Hansa Ton Studios shortly after the fall of the Wall for their seminal 1991 album Achtung Baby. "Magnificent", from new album No Line On The Horizon, was second followed by "Sunday Bloody Sunday" which featured a surprise guest appearance from Jay-Z ("Let me introduce you to the Mayor of New York City - Jay-Z is in the house!" was Bono's intro). Up next was "Beautiful Day" with a snippet of Paul McCartney's "Blackbird" mixed in at the end (as became customary during the U2 360 concerts from this past year). The final two songs were "Vertigo" (which gets its name from a bar named "Vertigo" in Germany and which, in many ways, is the setting for the song) and "Moment of Surrender" (rumored to be U2's next single) also from No Line On The Horizon. Read more via Reuters

UPDATE:

Watch U2 perform One and Magnificent

Watch U2 & Jay-Z perform Sunday Bloody Sunday

A Place to Worship, and to Jam, Shop and Feast

A wonderful little piece from The New York Times on the Lutheran Church of the Messiah in Brooklyn where rock 'n roll and the sacred have quite a comfortable overlap. Read an excerpt from the article below. The complete article is linked in red after the jump.

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Excerpt:

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The mostly empty pews at the Lutheran Church of the Messiah spoke of a dying congregation. But as the 17 worshipers returned to their seats after communion on a recent Sunday, they faced a more encouraging symbol: guitars, keyboards and drums poking up from the choir loft, hinting at the church’s double life.

The instruments belong to two rock bands that, along with many other artists and local food enthusiasts, consider the church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a secular home.

“It’s a great reminder of the duality of the space,” said the Rev. Griffin Thomas, pastor of the church, gesturing at the instruments. “The creativity and the art nurtured here make the space more sacred and holy.”

Read this short article in full, here.

See the "Holy Land" at the Nasher!

You still have a few weeks to catch a wonderful exhibit of the seminal figure David Roberts at Duke's Nasher Museum of Art.

Today we take for granted what the Holy Land looks like, but back in the early 19th century people knew of it only through verbal and textual descriptions. That all changed with Roberts, who gave the general public in Europe and America their first visual encounter with the region. A brief synopsis of the exhibit from the Nasher's website is below. Visit the Nasher's site for the exhibit to learn even more by clicking here.

Excerpt:

David Roberts (1796-1864) of Scotland was one of the first major European artists to travel in the Middle East, sketching its landscapes and religious sites. He arrived in 1838, after the region had been reopened by Napoleon's expeditions. He traveled from the Sinai peninsula northward to the ancient ruins of Baalbec, in what is now modern-day Lebanon. Enduring the rigors of the land and the climate, Roberts recorded the historical sites along his route, producing hundreds of drawings with notes on light, color, local customs and dress. After Roberts returned to London, his sketches, now mostly lost, became the basis for 125 color lithographs by the printmaker Louis Haghe (1806-1885). They were published from 1842-1844 as "The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia," giving the general public its first glimpse of the biblical landscape and monuments previously known only by verbal descriptions.

Pope to meet 500+ artists in the Sistine Chapel to "rekindle the special relationship between Faith and Art"

Pope Benedict XVI has invited hundreds of artists to meet with him in the Vatican in an attempt to rekindle the "special historical relationship between faith and art."

More than 500 personalities from the worlds of art, theater, literature and music have been asked to gather with the pope under the legendary Michelangelo frescoes in the Sistine Chapel Nov. 21, 2009.

Most of the list will be disclosed shortly before the event, but a few names of the invited were mentioned at the news conference: Italian film score composer Ennio Morricone, avant-garde theater director Bob Wilson, architect Daniel Libeskind, and Bono, the lead singer of the rock group U2.

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the meeting was to be the first of many initiatives aimed at bridging the gap that has developed between spirituality and artistic expression over the last century or so. Read more about it here.

The Super Hero and His People

Writing in the most recent edition of the esteemed journal Image, Santiago Ramos considers the religious elements in recent superhero films such as "The Dark Knight" and "The Watchmen." Read all about it here

Depicting "the secrets of God's Kingdom" through Icon Art

Here is a fascinating article that's a few years old but still as relevant as ever. A March 2000 piece from The New York Times, "A Calling of Faith and Art in A Russian Church" centers upon, among other things, icon art. Read a snippet below or jump directly to the article in full by clicking here.

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Excerpt:

Every church needs a good priest. But an artist, it turned out, was what this church needed most.

In Father Andrei, 43, intense, balding and bushy-bearded, it got both. He grew up in Moscow. His father was a philosopher and author. But from the very start, the son was an uncommonly talented painter.

''For me, it's just a part of my biography,'' Father Andrei said during a long conversation over tea in a spare, white-walled studio next to the church. ''If I were not given a chance to paint, I would probably die.''

But while most artists his age honed their talents on bowls of fruit or portraits, he was somehow drawn to paint religious icons: saints, Madonnas, crucifixions, resurrections -- all on wooden panels, just as in medieval times.

These were not just knockoffs. For the young Andrei, icon art became an almost transcendental obsession.

''It turned out to be so interesting that I realized that I needed nothing else,'' he said. ''This is a way of depicting in human terms the secrets of God's kingdom.

"Painting With The Brush of Time"

Check out a classic piece from the vast and wondrous archives of one of the best programs on the radio today, Krista Tippett's enthusiastic and always elegant Speaking of Faith (produced by Public Radio International & American Public Media).

In this edition of the program that explores faith in all its polyphony, we encounter the novelist Mary Doria Russell who has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page. We discover what she discerned — in the act of creating a new universe — about God and about dilemmas of evil, doubt, and free will. The ultimate moral of any life and any event, she believes, only shows itself across generations. And so the novelist, like God, she says, paints with the brush of time.

Read more and listen to the entire broadcast for free here.

Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame celebrates 25 years with 2 epic nights

Read the notes of The New York Times chief music journalist Jon Pareles as he chronicles the two nights of epic concerts celebrating the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame's 25 year anniversary this past weekend in NYC. The two nights included performances by Aretha Franklin, U2, Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, Ozzy Osbourne, Annie Lenox, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Lou Reed, The Black Eyed Peas, Bruce Springsteen, Metallica, Tom Morello and more.

The Van Gogh Letters // "File This Under Impossibly Cool Art Websites"

"Culture Monster", the arts-blog of The Los Angeles Times, reports the following:

----EXCERPT BELOW----(Read the full post here) ----

File this under impossibly cool art websites.

In what is perhaps the first project of its kind, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has put English-language translations of 902 of Vincent van Gogh's personal letters on line.

The website -- vangoghletters.org -- provides English versions of his letters and allows you to search them by keyword, correspondent, city and more. What's more, the website is free.

While Van Gogh's letters have been published many times before in different volumes, the museum's new website -- which launched last month -- offers a chance to interact with them with astonishing levels of intimacy and dexterity. (Thanks to Art Info for alerting us to its presence.)

The site allows you to view facsimile images of the letters and to view the English translations side by side with the original-language versions. Some include rough sketches that are also viewable online. In addition, each of the letters is richly annotated to help readers navigate the artist's references to different people in his life and even some of the biblical references that he makes.

The Van Gogh Museum is showing an exhibition on the artist's letters that runs through January. It has also published a book featuring the letters in English translation.

Want to have CORNFLAKES WITH JOHN LENNON?

Iconic music journalist Robert Hilburn (who was pop music critic for the Los Angeles Times for 35 years, from the psychedelic era to the emergence of the iPod) has written a fantastic new memoir chronically his days with John Lennon, Bruce Springstein, U2, Public Enemy, Jack White of The White Stripes and more in

Corn Flakes with John Lennon (and Other Tales From a Rock 'n' Roll Life)

Read more about his new book just released last month (October '09) and watch video interviews with Hilburn as he discusses the enduring meaning of rock and roll - as well as its future possibilities - in the full piece by The Los Angeles Times here.

The End(s) of Words: Raymond Federman, literary luminary, passes

Raymond Federman, a French-born scholar, critic and avant-garde novelist whose work sought to straddle the boundary between fiction and reality — and in so doing to emphasize the inadequacy of language to capture either one completely — died on Oct. 6 in San Diego.

“I do not think that my life and history are the sources of my fiction, but that in fact my fiction is what invents my life and history,” Federman wrote. “In other words, the stories I write are my life.”

But the larger point of Mr. Federman’s difficult, sometimes profuse style seemed to be this: However many words a writer might bring to bear on his subject, there are some subjects that language is ultimately powerless to describe.

Read The New York Times obituary in full - here.

Only by the Night: The Chronicle praises Ishiguro's "Nocturnes"

Here is a short, nicely written review of a new book which appears to be worth taking a look at. "Nocturnes" as reviewed in the Duke University daily The Chronicle. Chronicle writer Paul Horak comments in his opening sentence that, "Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest book, is literature imbued with all the beauty of a Chopin composition." Read the full review here.

Science reveals Art

A fantastic little piece from The New York Times excellent photo-jouranlism blog "Lens". The piece, which includes a nifty slideshow, is entitled In microscopic realms, science reveals art.

Just one more way in which the arts, this time photography in particular, can unite disparate fields of knowing in beautiful and unexpected ways. Check it out, y'all!

From the opening paragraphs:

After about 30 years as a travel and nature photographer, Charles Krebs said he was “yearning to see something new and different.”

He remembered taking pictures with a Polaroid through a microscope when he was nine. So he picked up where he left off, only this time with a digital camera and a microscope found on eBay.

“It enabled me to see a lot of new and fascinating things that didn’t involve a lot of travel and carrying around and shipping lots of equipment all over the place,” Mr. Krebs said.

Music as Ministry // "The Songs They Can't Forget"

Hey everybody!

This is the inaugural post for New Creation's new blog.

To start with: A piece that's a few months old, but absolutely profound in its implications for the intersection of ministry and the arts.

From the third and fourth paragraphs in:

Researchers and clinicians are finding that when all other means of communication have shut down, people remember and respond to music. Familiar songs can help people with dementia relate to others, move more easily and experience joy.

Music memory is preserved better than verbal memory, according to Ms. Clair, because music, unlike language, is not seated in a specific area of the brain but processed across many parts. “You can’t rub out music unless the brain is completely gone.”

Check out this essential piece on music as ministry below in its entirety by clicking below:

The New Old Age: The Songs They Can't Forget

The New York Times

Sara Davidson

April 23, 2009