Iambic Admonit

Inklings "Complete" List

2012-01-31T20:07:00.005-05:00

I am attempting to compile a FULLY COMPREHENSIVE list of good Inklings resources -- websites, podcasts, etc. -- on world wide web. I am only interested in the really useful, intelligent, and scholarly ones, not silly fan pages. Would you dear readers be able to assist me, by pointing out mistakes I have made in this list and especially omissions I have made? Thank you!

GENERAL INKLINGS:
(including scholars' homepages)
The Inklings blog
The Mythopoetic Society
The Marion E. Wade Center (Illinois)
Gavin Ashenden
Bruce Edwards
Paul Ford
Diana Pavlac Glyer
Malcolm Guite
Peter Kreeft
Joel Heck
Kathryn Lindskoog
Peter Schakel
Arend Smilde
Paul J. Spaeth
Will Vaus
Michael Ward
Ralph C. Wood

CHARLES WILLIAMS:
The Charles Williams Society
The “Co-inherence list”, a yahoo discussion group
“The Novels of Charles Williams” by Glen Cavaliero
“What about Charles Williams?” by Thomas Howard
video of Lewis talking about Williams' novels
An intro to the novels by Rider W. Miller
The Other Inkling by Thomas Howard

C.S. LEWIS:
Mere Lewis
Into the Wardrobe
C. S. Lewis Chronicles
Narnia movie news
Into the Wardrobe — a C. S. Lewis web site
C.S. Lewis classics
C. S. Lewis society of California
C.S. Lewis Foundation
Oxford C.S. Lewis Society
The Window in the Garden Wall: C.S. Lewis Quotes
The C. S. Lewis Review
Recordings of C. S. Lewis from the 1940s
C. S. Lewis Institute
The C. S. Lewis Minute
HarperCollins' C. S. Lewis blog
C. S. Lewis Society of Chattanooga, Tennessee
Narnia Fans
The Lion’s Call
Aslan’s Country
WikiNarnia
The Tedder Library: C. C. Lewis and the Inklings
HarperCollins
Arizona C. S. Lewis Society
Aslan Society, Arizona State University
C. S. Lewis College (Massachusetts)
C. S. Lewis Foundation (California)
C. S. Lewis Society of California
Southern California C. S. Lewis Society
C. S. Lewis Society of Trinity College (Florida)
The C. S. Lewis Society, Taylor University (Indiana)
C. S. Lewis Festival (Michigan)
The New York C. S. Lewis Society
C. S. Lewis Reading Group of Dayton (Ohio)
C. S. Lewis and Inklings Society, Oklahoma City University
Memphis C. S. Lewis Society (Tennessee)
C. S. Lewis Institute (Virginia)
Discovery Institute: C. S. Lewis and Public Life (Washington)
Friends of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry
German Inklings Society
Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society

J.R.R. TOLKIEN:
Tolkien-Online.com
The Tolkien Society
Oxford University podcast on Tolkien

Carl F. Hostetter's Linguistic Resource Page

Ardalambion: Of the Tongues of Arda

The Linguistic Fellowship

"What's in the History of Middle-earth?"

Arda Encyclopaedia

The Tolkien Library

An Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography

TheOneRing.Net

Planet Tolkien

The dedicated Tolkien site of HarperCollins

2011 film recommendations

2012-01-29T21:34:00.000-05:00

Here is a great list of films Stephen Graydanus recommends from 2011. I've actually only seen 4 on his main lists, and would push Harry Potter WAY further up. And you?

Top Ten about-the-Inklings books

2012-01-29T19:14:00.001-05:00

TOP TEN BOOKS ABOUT THE INKLINGS

The works on this list vary wildly in quality, but each is sort of necessary in some way or another for a well-rounded understanding of the Inklings, their lives, and some of the controversies in interpreting them. If anybody wants a commentary on each book -- such as a summary, why to read it, or what its strengths and weaknesses are -- give me a holler and I'll roll out such a commentary posthaste. Or at least, I'll get around to it.

And please add your recommendations in the comments below!

The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their Friends by Humphrey Carpenter.
The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer.
Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis by Michael Ward.
C. S. Lewis: A Biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper.
The Novels of Charles Williams by Thomas Howard.
C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier by Sanford Schwartz.
Charles Williams: Poet of Theology by Glen Cavaliero.
Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Work by Alice Mary Hadfield.
Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration by Gavin Ashenden.

…. and, I'm hoping,
the yet unpublished Charles Williams: The Last Magician now being written by Grevel Lindop.

Top Ten Inklings books

2012-01-28T15:01:00.003-05:00

Here are my recommendations for the TOP TEN BOOKS BY INKLINGS you should read. I've cheated by considering books in series as one. I've also included those non-Inklings hangers-on who are part of the same literary school, from an historical perspective. And I suggest reading them in this order:

1. The Narnia Chronicles – Lewis
2. The Hobbit – Tolkien
3. The Man Who Was Thursday – Chesterton
4. Phantastes – George MacDonald
5. The Great Divorce – Lewis
6. The Nine Tailors – Sayers
7. The Place of the Lion – Williams
8. The Space Trilogy – Lewis
9. The Lord of the Rings – Tolkien
10. Descent into Hell – Williams

Nineteen Inklings, give or take

2012-01-28T14:53:00.002-05:00

According to Humphrey Carpenter, in his excellent (if not flawless) book The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends, this is the total list of attendees at Thursday evening Inklings meetings:
Owen Barfield
J .A.W. Bennett
Lord David Cecil
Nevill Coghill
James Dundas-Grant
H.V.D. Dyson
Adam Fox
Colin Hardie
Robert E. Havard
C.S. Lewis
Warren Lewis
Gervase Mathew
R.B. McCallum
C.E. Stevens
Christopher Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien
John Wain
Charles Williams
C.L. Wrenn

Just in case you wanted to know.

Countdown to Caduceus

2012-01-13T14:02:00.006-05:00

CADUCEUS is a full-length collection of poems scheduled for publication in February of 2012 by WordTech Communications / David Robert Books. It is 100 pages long and contains 48 poems in 6 sections: Lovers, Skeptics, Preachers, Believers, Metaphors, and The Voice of God. As the publisher's back-of-the-book blurb has it: “Heartbreak and faith are the twin strands threading through Caduceus by Sørina Higgins: a book of voices, messages, personas, layered texts, ancient tales, and contemporary feeling.” In this volume, I try on the roles of many characters both ancient and modern to express dilemmas of my own, of my loved ones, or of my times.

Please let me know if I can offer a poetry reading, discussion, or workshop at your church, home, school, coffeeshop, bookstore, or other venue.

This book has been graciously endorsed by three superstar poets: Jeanne Murray Walker, Luci Shaw, and Dana Gioia. Here is what they had to say:

“Here is a remarkable young poet who connects our small, personal twentyfirst century stories with the great, overarching cultural narratives. It’s always our own time and place Sørina Higgins writes about, but against a backdrop of Greek myths and Biblical stories which lend these private confessions astonishing power. When she asks ‘Oh Lord, will you tell me, what good is grief?’ she might as well be Job; her interrogation is that passionate. Posing her wild human questions with great skill in some of the oldest English verse forms, she has written a musical, heartbreaking, timely and timeless book.”

—Jeanne Murray Walker

“Sørina Higgins takes the stuff of myth, legend, history and mystery and pours it into her visceral poems, many of them formal. Where others might see the ordinary, she translates what might seem mundane or insignificant into something extraordinarily arresting. Here is a poet of a deep, dissecting and penetrating faith.”

—Luci Shaw

“Sørina Higgins is an ambitious, young poet who defies easy classification. Her work embraces the lyric and the narrative, the sexy and the sacred. Hers is a capacious imagination trying to make sense of a world full of both heartbreak and wonder which she views with a tough-minded clarity and vast compassion.”

—Dana Gioia

This book will be available on amazon sometime in February; check back then! Meanwhile, here is the first poem in the book, which kind of sums it up:

Prologue: Dramatis Personæ

My little heel-wings are not made of feathers:

they are made of tongues. Their voices flap

around my feet, hiss through my veins, and coil

their noisy helix on my heraldic staff.

They whisper I am, I say, making me

play all the characters this writer writes.

I am the dead man on the field; I am

the bird, the beast, the god, the groom, the bride.

I am a hypocrite, a metaphor,

a myth. If every wing-word was hermetic,

lovers, skeptics, Romans, Christians took

my secret voices public, grew frenetic

in praise of their high places and their gods—

and in the end, their clamor just might run me mad.

The Great Divorce comes to Philly again

2012-01-05T17:45:00.003-05:00

Anthony Lawton Returns to Lantern Theater Company with Adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, Feb. 7-12

For one week only, Lantern Theater Company will present reprise performances of The Great Divorce, Anthony Lawton’s popular adaptation of the C. S. Lewis work. A Philadelphia-based theater artist, Lawton has received widespread critical and public acclaim for this one-man show, described as “passionate acting combined with riveting storytelling” by The Philadelphia Inquirer and “unmissable” by Philadelphia City Paper. Oh, and IambicAdmonit called it "truly excellent: lively, accurate, impassioned, challenging, convicting, and all-around amazing." Surely that's too many adjectives?

According to the Lantern Theatre press release, C.S. Lewis' own favorite among his works, The Great Divorce tells the satiric and comic tale of hapless professor Clive and the motley band of malcontents who join him on a very curious bus ride. Journeying between Hell and Heaven, Clive crosses a wildly inventive landscape drawn by Lewis' philosophical imagination in a story filled with dazzling language and surprising insight.

The Great Divorce opens Tuesday, Feb. 7 and runs through Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012 Tickets are $35 for general admission or $40 for premium seating and are available online at lanterntheater.org or by calling the Lantern Box Office at (215) 829-0395. $10 student rush tickets are available 10 minutes before curtain with valid ID; cash only. Additional discounts are available for seniors and groups of 10 or more. Lantern Theater Company is located at St. Stephen's Theater, 10th & Ludlow Streets in Center City Philadelphia.

You should go see it!!!!!!!!

Ekphrasis Report #14

2012-01-04T08:43:00.007-05:00

Sorry, I failed to report on the Nov. meeting, then we didn't have one in December. But here we are again, in full swing.

This was an excellent, well-attended meeting, mostly because many of our college-student members are home on break. There were 13 people present: TMcC, SMB, KP, JH, MD, JF, NJ, JA, ES, BG, CS, ES, and myself.

We began with a discussion of our affiliation with the International Arts Movement, which will become more clearly defined after I attend a regional leaders' conference in February -- more on that later. For now, we share the vision of "rehumanizing" our little corner of the world, pursuing excellence in our arts, and encouraging church-and-art dialogue.

We also spoke briefly about the excellent work one Ekphrasian is doing in documentary film with The Backyard Philly Project. Please check it out.

Over the course of the evening, we had 4 poems, one personal narrative, two pieces of piano music, and one piece of fiction. I would love for more visual and performance artists to join us to broaden our conversations and our cross-disciplinary experience. As it was, we had good talks about many topics.

We discussed how hard it is to create a sense of immediacy in a personal narrative, which JH achieved very well with a sorrowful personal narrative.

We talked about how to balance originality and inspiration, as JA did in a poem responding to Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq.

We talked about form, freedom, meter, rhyme, and line breaks in relation to two poems on opposite ends of the form-spectrum: a Villanelle by ES and a piece of free verse by KP. ES's piece prompted some cursory talk about how to appropriate Biblical metaphors (in her case, a gate) in ways that are still relevant to the 21st century. KP's piece also led to a discussion of how to respond to a specific Biblical passage in a way that is original, artistic, personally meaningful, and accurate -- which is a huge challenge.

We talked about some of the difficulties in the lives of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff in conjunction with NJ's performance (off-the-cuff, from memory, over break!) of a sonata movement by B and a prelude by R. He apologized for the "depressing" nature of these two pieces, which gave me a perfect opportunity to pull out a saying SPB (oops, now SPG -- she got married!) and I like to use: "Depressing is good as long as it's well done."

TMcC's poem, as usual, led to a profound and thoughtful conversation about living life in a fully conscious manner. This time, it had to do with the meaningless routine of analyzing-to-death that happens, unfortunately, in many college classes. He said, for instance, that many English professors sever the text from its context, encourage any and all uneducated interpretations, and ignore history/biography/etc. This becomes a ritualistic, superficial application of one theory, say, feminism, in a brainless methodical way.

I shared a bit of very rough fiction that, to my chagrin, promoted a discussion of cliches and originality in fantasy! Shame on me! I'll have to do better....
So, all in all, an excellent and inspiring evening! Won't you join us next time?

New Orleans World War II Museum

2011-12-29T09:50:00.006-05:00

NEW ORLEANS, DAY FOUR
THURSDAY, 22 DECEMBER 2011

The World War II Museum (also known as the D-Day Museum) is in New Orleans solely because of one guy, without whom the Allies would have either lost the war or gone about winning it in an entirely different way, and with whom I have a feeling of affinity based on shared names:
Andrew Jackson Higgins.

Probably no relation.
He designed the boats that were used on D-Day, and he lived in New Orleans and built his boats there. Hence the New Orleans connection.

Now, since this blog is supposed to be about art, I'm only going to tell you about one aspect of the Museum. It is a remarkable, sobering, informative place to visit and I highly recommend it. But I want to talk here about the use of art -- specifically, film -- in narrating human tragedy and horror.

Throughout the museum, there was a kind of visual theme in the use of film installations that I've not seen much elsewhere: the use of split screen. There were lots of small/short installations showing and/or narrating important moments of the War, such as the invasion of Normandy, and they all used split screen in one way or another.

Then there was the big highlight film, so important that visitors can buy a ticket for just the movie and skip the museum (or, as in our case, pay for both; but you don't just get the movie thrown in with museum admission). It's called Beyond All Boundaries, and it stars (if that's the right word) Tom Hanks. It's called a "4-D Experience" -- which wikipedia helpfully notes is not actually, geometrically, 4-dimenional -- involving chairs that shake, the actual nose of a bomber plane lowered in front of the screen, a real anti-aircraft gun, etc. While it is not 4-dimensional, it is a very powerful physical/emotional experience designed to put the viewer either into the position of a solider on the front lines or into the mood of some back home waiting in agonized suspense for news of the beloved solider on the front lines.

I'm a bit confused where to go from here. That's because I'm a bit confused about the purpose of such a film. Is it to make us sad that such an awful thing happened? Proud that our country survived such horrors? Impressed with the technology of the film? I felt some of each of those.

Then there's also the question of making art -- to make money -- out of suffering. Now, I don't suppose this one was designed to make money. And even though the admission price was the same as that of a normal movie theatre, I don't suppose it was for profit. Do you think this is an example of the cheap exploitation of suffering for the sake of something bordering on entertainment? I'm not sure.

On the other hand, part of what humans need to do in the face of horrors is to pass along the stories of those who suffered, in an attempt to preserve their memories and the enormity of what they accomplished. This film does do that.

What do you think?

-----------

On a related note, I do think that so-called 4-D is the wave of the future. I think we'll probably keeping combining 3-D visuals with more and more special, physical effects until that's the movie norm. Although you'll see from this list that the U.S.A. is way behind Asia and England in using these techniques.

It may be a while yet, but I'm guessing Huxley was right.

New Orleans Three Jazzy Nights

2011-12-28T15:00:00.000-05:00

NEW ORLEANS, DAY THREE
THREE JAZZY NIGHTS

During our stay, we went to three different venues for live jazz. We could hardly have experienced more variety, or a better cross-section of the historical and current styles of jazz, in such a short time. I'm going to write about them in the order that makes most sense for the points I'm making, rather than in the order in which we went to them.

The Davenport Lounge at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel
The Ritz is, fittingly, a very beautiful, stylish hotel. The public spaces—lobbies, reception, etc.--are all made of white marble. At this time of year, they were resplendent in gold and glass decorations, adding to the glitz and glitter of the place. The Davenport Lounge is a kind of glorified sitting-room and bar combination, with live music most nights. It is nicely decorated, as well, in mostly gold-and-white Victorian and faux-Georgian armchairs and loveseats.

But neither the music, nor the crowd, befitted its environment.

I haven't spent much time around drunks, and certainly not well-dressed drunks in an expensive hotel. They're really, really stupid. When the band played swing, they slowdanced. When the band played blues, they tried to swing. When the band played cha-cha, they cha-chaed to some beat other than the one the band played: flamboyantly, foolishly, with a kind of pathetic sensuality that made me rather ashamed of my species.

And the band was of that most watered-down kind of slightly syncopated pop that calls itself “jazz” mostly because there's a saxophone in the ensemble. It was the hotel's headliner group, Jeremy Davenport, and was about as spicy as iced tea sitting in the sun with all the ice cubes melted. Sappy, smooth, a little too loud, a little under-talented, very under-trained, but the kind of music that goes down easy when you've had a few (I suppose) and when conversation means more than music. So much for the classy venue.

The Spotted Cat night club

One evening, we walked all the way down Decatur Street through the French Quarter and beyond, where it turns into Frenchman Street. This is, apparently, where the locals hang out for real jazz and maybe some dancing. Um-hm, it was real jazz! And there was some dancing, too. The band was called “The Orleans Six” (quite original name for drums, bass, clarinet, trumpet, guitar, and piano, eh?), and they were hot. They were just playing standards, nothing original as far as I know, but they were a tight group, and they were swingin'. For most of the time we were there, locals were also swinging: swing-dancing in a tiny space between the band and the bar. It was a small, smokey, cramped place, but full of good feelings and great music.

So that was an example of the best of what jazz can be today: the old songs, still just as lively as ever, with some creativity in the instrumentation and a little bit of an update to the sound.
And how many clubs sport a piano in the ladies' room?!

Preservation Hall

All week we kept saying that we had to get to Preservation Hall to hear the old-time jazz. Finally we stood in a long line, then crammed into the back of the tiny hall with its stripped plaster walls, where we stood on weary feet to hear the best of the jazz that there is to be had in that city of the best of the best of jazz.

This band of sax, trumpet, tuba, trombone, snare, and drums might as well just have been put into suspended animation in about 1940, then woken up just long enough ago to practice up to their peak again. Man, were they good! They played the oldest of the traditional stuff, with other lively, silly tunes mixed in: “You Are My Sunshine,” “Jambalaya,” “Jingle Bells,” “Summertime,” and others I didn't know. I've always hated the saxophone, but that old guy cured me. His saxophone was the sweetest, smoothest, most crooning sound I've ever heard. It was more like a string instrument than any sax I've ever heard. And he could flutter his fingers and hold out a note, and just play that thing for all it was worth. Indeed, each player was just having tons of fun with his instrument. The trombone player drew out his slides as long as he could; the tuba player made noises like an elephant, or like a rude kid; the snare player crashed on his neighbor's cymbals when occasion called. It's impossible to describe the sheer fun of this concert.

Part of the joy came from the requests that the audience shouted out, accompanied by $2.00 for each song. They passed the money forward, and the trombone played draped it lovingly over a tin hat. Sometimes the band didn't know the songs that the audience requested, because the audience was a bit ignorant of the provenance of the tunes they wanted to hear. A young boy asked for “anything by Duke Ellington,” but they said, “We don't play the Duke. We only play the real traditional stuff: the beginnings of jazz, the stuff that got the Duke going.”

They ended the concert with a parade of the brass instruments through the audience, around that tiny crowded hall, with much cheering and delight.

If you ever go to New Orleans, then, you can experience Jazz as it is, as it was, and as it should be!

New Orleans Swamp Tour

2011-12-28T12:56:00.003-05:00

NEW ORLEANS, DAY THREE
WEDNESDAY, 21 DECEMBER 2011

SWAMP TOUR

OK, there's not really any way to make this post fit the "faith and art" theme of this blog! -- except to say that God's creation really does lick art hollow sometimes. After that very disappointing visit to the New Orleans Museum of "Art" yesterday (quotation marks mine), as we set out on the swamp tour into the misty beauty of the bayous, I said, "Wow, forget about art."

But as usual, it's not that simple.

We had a most marvelous day, photographing egrets, herons, turtles, and alligators. We didn't see any big alligators; they're asleep for the winter already. The more energetic young ones stay out and about when it is so cold that the great-granddaddies cannot function. Alligators don't technically hibernate, but they sleep all winter with a heartbeat of one pulse every 3 or 4 minutes! Their metabolisms slow down so much during that time that they can't eat: even if you forced food into their mouths, they wouldn't have enough energy to swallow it. Anyway, we only saw those that were about 4 feet long or less.

The really fun surprise came at the end of the trip, when the “captain” of our little tour boat pulled a baby alligator out of a bucket and handed it around! It's belly was extremely soft, like the most expensive leather. Its little throat was smooth, delicate, and fragile. It has a “nictitating membrane,” like a transparent eyelid, that acts as a windshield wiper over its profound bronze eye. I held the little guy on my shoulder and stared into his ancient face.

Because of that, and all the beauty of wind, sun, and water, this day was much more enjoyable than our visit to the boring art museum the day before, which is what led me to say that “nature beats art.”

But there is a problem. What we enjoyed was not really “nature.” Some of the time we cruised on the bayous—natural, endless waterways that flow into one another all over the word—but some of the time we were on man-made canals. And on Friday, we watched an I-Max movie at the Aquarium of the Americas that explained how the canals and levees have contributed to the depletion of wetlands, which used to protect New Orleans from the full force of hurricanes. In other words, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was in large part due to the ill effects of human “artistry” on the landscape: canals that bring in salt water and kill the trees (leading to severe erosion), levees that prevent annual flooding (leading to conservation of the silt and topsoil that used to flow down the Mississippi and build up the wetlands). So the temporary comfort of protecting New Orleans from little floods and the commercial benefits of canal-building contributed to a much bigger disaster.

The wetlands are still forming, but they are just in a low, narrow line at the very tip of the Mississippi, rather than spread across hundreds of acres of the Delta. The movie we watched talked about lots of things that can be done to rebuild the wetlands. All of that was interesting and challenging. But the way this whole thing affected me was to shock me a bit, that the so-called “nature” I was enjoying more than “art” was not only largely artificial, but even detrimental to itself in the long run. That's depressing.

I still enjoyed playing with the baby alligator.

New Orleans Gospel Choir

2011-12-28T12:55:00.002-05:00

NEW ORLEANS, DAY THREE
WEDNESDAY, 21 DECEMBER 2011

ST. PETER CLAVER GOSPEL CHOIR
AT ST. LOUIS' CATHEDRAL

After a lively day out on the swamps, handling alligators, we continued our adventure with an evening packed with music. The first concert (yes, we went to two concerts in one evening!) was Gospel music; the second was jazz. See the next post for a report on all the jazz we heard during the week.

So, we went to the justly famous St. Louis' Cathedral to hear the stellar St. Peter Claver Gospel Choir. This was music that made us move, and made us laugh, and made us cry. Well, I cried a bit, anyway. It was a primarily African-American choir, led by a really dynamic woman who also played the piano in addition to directing (for a couple numbers). The songs were pretty much the same, but a kind of "same" that I couldn't really have too much of! It was thick, piled, toothy harmonies in really catchy rhythms (no kidding: Gospel, catchy? sorry). There were a few solos over the thick texture of the ensemble (none of whom were particularly good -- I mean, their voices were mostly very shrill and sounded untrained to my Classical ear, but that's mostly a matter of taste). And there was one real solo, by an enormous elderly man who rendered "O Holy Night" and "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" in a heart-stopping arrangement. He got an immediate standing ovation, as did the whole Choir.

That was a marvelous concert, and the most Christmasy event of the week. No matter what kind of a church it was in, and no matter what kind of a church the singers came from, it was a universally (I think that's OK to say?) worshipful event. Wow. It felt like Heaven.

New Orleans Museum of "Art"

2011-12-27T22:33:00.004-05:00

This series of posts is just a tad more personal than others in the past; that's because I'm spending the first week of my Christmas holiday in New Orleans! I'm posting each of these one week after the events each describes, and -- as usual -- I'm going to try to focus on arts, aesthetics, culture, and faith as I experience them in my little New Orleans adventure. Enjoy!

NEW ORLEANS, DAY TWO
TUESDAY, 20 DECEMBER 2011

NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART

We went to NOMA today -- well, we generally go to the art museum in whatever place we visit -- primarily because I'm going to be writing about it for Curator. I hope to produce something fairly balanced and coherent for that excellent voice of reason, so here is my chance to ramble, vent, and babble.

Ugh.

It's really a bit of a mess. There are some lovely pieces, but the collection is a gumbo, or a gallimaufry, or a mishmash. It's quite jarring to walk from a Picasso to a Rodin to a Warhol to a Boucher. OK, it's not quite that bad, because each room or at least each wall has some kind of unifying theme. But the collection is totally random. There is just one work by each artist; frequently just one piece from an entire culture or time period. The rooms are small, so even those that have some kind of reasonable scheme do not allow much time for that concept to sink in.

But I suppose I've been spoiled by having my taste formed, more or less, at the Met, the Louvre, the various National Galleries, the Smithsonians. Not that I have spent many, many hours at these, but that each visit to one of the biggies was at some impressionable, important stage in my life, and was therefore unforgettable.

Back to NOMA, though: the signature, advertized bits of the collection were the worst of all. The famed Vogel collection is sickening rubbish. Drops of watercolor on pieces of notebook paper. Three jagged lines in pencil on a white field. A badly made movie about the Vogels at home, talking to their "artist" friends on the phone, or revisiting their old co-wokers. It made me sick. Is it all a fraud? Is it a joke? Who is fooling whom? Did the Vogels fool the galleries? [they gave 50 pieces of "art" each to 50 museums]. Did the "artists" fool the Vogels? Are the museums fooling us, the admission-paying public?

These lines constitute a work of art?

This little piece of steel is a work of art?

Yup, those are pieces of notebook paper with blotches of watercolor paint.
Yup, they're in a glass case.

Ugh.

So I got worried that maybe I was just an ignoramus. After all, Picasso doesn't do much for me. I sometimes think Warhol was a charlatan -- and probably John Cage, too, although that's off-topic. I'm a bit terrified admitting this. Am I going to be tossed out of the arts world? Am I going to be labeled as one of those ridiculous throwbacks who never got over the 1940s? Sigh.

So then I started thinking about what I do get, what does it for me. It's basically stuff from the European continent from about 300 BC - 300 AD and then from about 1300 AD until about 1900. That's not much. Kind of pathetic, really.

Is it just a matter of education? Is that just how I've been trained?

Or a matter of genetics and cultural context: when and where I was born, to whom?

So then I walked up to the third floor of NOMA, where the "Pre-Columbian" floor, where there is stuff from Cambodia in the 700s, from the Mayan empire, from Africa in 1050, Zen Buddhist drawings from Japan.... And it was spectacular. Amazing stuff. Real artisanship, with intricate detail, profound feeling, wit, intelligence, insight, spiritual depth, humor. Wowie.

All it took was time, a very little time, to see into those pieces.

They licked the 20th century hollow.

And I'm going to stop now, but the thought that crossed my mind then was that this stuff was made for a practical purpose: for war, love, religion, or death. It was all useful. And the 20th century art was useless. And arrogant. And self-serving.

Hm. Am I on to something there?

Juztaposition of the Classical and the Crazy

New Orleans's Aesthetic addendum

2011-12-27T07:00:00.003-05:00

In addition to that unifying curve I wrote about yesterday, there is another, temporary, aesthetic binding New Orleans into one artistic whole right now.
It's Christmas!
The entire city is resplendent with wreaths, garlands, fir trees, red-&-gold ribbons, red-&-gold ornaments, red-&-gold bows, white lights, glitz and glitter and sparkle, but mostly very tasteful.
I don't know what the city looks like at Mardi Gras (OK, I'm looking at pictures online, and that's a whole other story!), but right now that color scheme of green, red, and gold, sparkling with white lights, really creates a visual continuity everywhere.
It also enhances every otherwise plain surface: garlands and greens etc. are on nearly every doorway, light fixture, lamppost, archway, balcony and so forth all over the place.

The restaurant where we ate lunch yesterday (Deanie's, which I highly recommend for glorified Cajun-touched pub food) was resplendent with Christmas decorations, and would otherwise have been rather plain.
And the jazz musicians scattered along the streets mostly play Christmas carols, too, which is sweet.
So if you can't be here for Mardi Gras, try to come at Christmastime.

And did I mention it's 70 degrees?

New Orleans' Aesthetic

2011-12-26T12:00:00.004-05:00

This series of posts is just a tad more personal than others in the past; that's because I'm spending the first week of my Christmas holiday in New Orleans! I'm posting each of these one week after the events each describes, and -- as usual -- I'm going to try to focus on arts, aesthetics, culture, and faith as I experience them in my little New Orleans adventure. Enjoy!

NEW ORLEANS, DAY ONE
MONDAY, 19 DECEMBER 2011

I haven't even been here for 24 hours yet, and I have already discovered a surprisingly unified aesthetic all over this city. It is as if all the architects, all the interior designers, and all the private homeowners have the same taste. I'm not talking just about the general European "shabby chic" beauty, but about something more specific: there is a pattern that ties this whole city together, from the French Quarter to the Garden District, through the Warehouse/Arts district, across the parks, and even into the Ninth Ward. There, or course, millions of Fleurs-de-Lis everywhere. But those are more like decorations than an essential style, although they contribute to what I'm talking about. It's an oft-repeated pattern of filigree, swirls, curlicues. Here it is:

It's all over the multitudinous delicate wrought-iron lace-work balconies on almost every house in the French Quarter. It's in nearly every other wrought-iron fence in the Garden District. It's on the ceilings, in the wallpaper, in the carpets, on the curtains, on the furniture. In our hotel room, it is framed in two versions above the bed. It's in the networked dome over the lobby bar. It twists and twines in uncountable varieties, beautifully and subtly, all over this town.

And it goes beyond just an identifiable pattern. This complex, delicate aesthetic has an influence on many of the shapes and curves of the architecture. There are ogees aplenty. There are arches. There are neoclassical columns that favor the more voluptuous capitals: the Ionic and the Corinthian rather than the Doric.

So the thought crossed my mind that maybe all this has something to do with geography, not just history. Take a look at this aerial view:
What do you think? Do you think that this curvy-ness comes, not just from the Fleur-de-Lis or from the architecture of Europe -- or, ahem, from the curves that are crudely displayed in the many houses of ill repute that blight this lovely city -- but also from the Mississippi River? I think it's a pretty notion, anyway!

Thinking about Hallows

2011-12-06T16:00:00.003-05:00

I would like to write a paper about Hallows -- in the Arthurian Tradition, in the writings of Charles Williams, and in the Harry Potter series. This blog post gives an excellent overview of the Hallows in history, mythology, Arthurian tradition, etc. It's brilliant.

So my question is, What needs to be studied in this connection? Do you have a question about the relationship between Rowling's Hallows and those of legend? What kind of an angle would you recommend I take? Any ideas?

All thoughts are welcome!

The Bard of Our Time?

2011-11-26T10:09:00.004-05:00

Here are some selections from my current Curator piece, a review of Anonymous.

...Anonymous is little more than a showcase for pretty boys to strut about in gorgeous, historically inauthentic costumes, speaking anachronistic lines and participating in fictional events.

...I laughed through most of the movie, but for mostly the wrong reasons: I was incredulous, amused, and bemused by its clichés, its psychological implausibility, and its lavish big-budget spectacular emptiness.

...this movie didn’t make up its mind. It could have been an educational immersion in 16th-century England that plunged its audience into the sights, sounds, and society of Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns. Or it could have been a watertight case for the Earl of Oxford’s authorship, ravishing the minds of its viewers with compelling evidence that he was the man who wrote “Shakespeare.” Or it could have been just a good movie.

...Why this movie, why this message, here and now? ...The message of Anonymous is essentially that a normal guy, an average middle-class fellow, could not achieve greatness.

Please read the whole article, then leave me your thoughts here! Thanks!

Preview of "A Little Princess" by Players of the Stage

2011-11-23T14:03:00.001-05:00

Players of the Stage, our only -- and therefore, but for many other reasons as well, an essential part of the local arts community -- Christian youth theatre, is presenting their semi-annual play. This time around, it is The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, adapted by the company's director, Sharon Barshinger.

There are some beautiful lines and very profound themes in this “children's” story. The main character, Sara, is a very intelligent, well-educated girl whose thoughts tend to the metaphysical. At one point, she tells a story about what she images Heaven to be like, infusing it with the generic conventions of myth and fairy tale (scandalizing some of her more conventional listeners). There are, of course, huge obvious themes of classism, with the traditional hierarchy only gently questioned and generally reinforced by Sara's renewed wealth and status by the end of the tale. The importance of education is both emphasized and embodied, with an especial focus on the importance of literature, history, and a large vocabulary. There is even a touch of posthumanism (according to Sara, the rat who shares her garret “is a person too: he gets hungry, he's married, he has children.”

But the two most prominent themes are patience under suffering, and the power of imagination. Sara's friend says, “When you talk about things, they seem real.” She responds that “they are real” and that, conversely, “everything is a story.” She understands the necessity of the past as a means of making sense out of the present: the major difference between Sara and her friends is that she knows history and literature and can both compare the present to them, and use them to transform the present. In other words, she has something with which to feed her imagination. The difference between herself and the “scullery maid” Becky is that she has a wealth of images, characters, and events to draw from to keep her mind and hope alive. It is not that she has an imagination and others do not, but that her imagination has a constant supply of material.

The theme the director has chosen to emphasize is the idea that we are given our trials and sufferings for a reason, and that suffering is part of life. The director's note will pick up on this theme, so you can read that when you attend the play.

PERFORMANCE DATES:
December 1st, 2nd, and 3rd at 7:00 p.m.
December 3rd at 2:00 p.m.
At Living Hope Church, 330 Schantz Road, Allentown, PA

Due to the natural changes of the growing up and graduating of the most experienced members, the current cast is young and the result is much more artificial than previous performances. They are also quite difficult to hear, not yet having mastered the arts of diction and projection. In spite of that, these children show remarkable control. They are focused and intense, handling the slightly formal language with great aplomb. They are also not distracted by the reporters snapping pictures right in their faces, setting off flashbulbs with tremendous noise -- but they just go right on. All in all, an inspiring performance, and not “just” for kids.

Allen Organ Concert

2011-11-18T22:03:00.001-05:00

Review of a concert by Carlo Curley at Allen Organ in Macungie, PA

Carlo Curley, a burley wonder of an organ showman, is dazzling us with his talent, wit, and flashy technique. In a varied program of classics both poignant, boisterous, and overplayed, he's setting us laughing and slack-jawed with delight.

I first visited Allen Organ for a Lehigh Valley Arts Council event a couple of months ago and vowed to come back for a concert. It is well worth it. First of all, the hall itself is just about worth the ticket price: the audience sits inside the instrument, surrounded by pipes and bells and whistles. We feel the music as much as hear it.

Allen Organ is a remarkable place, and the instrument-makers masters of their craft. They have set some world records, earned many firsts (including first digital instrument), and sustained their reputation over nearly a century of making fine organs.

And Mr. Curley himself is as good and funny a storyteller as a dazzling musician and showman. It's almost as much fun to listen to him talk as to listen to him play, then talk, then play, story after story, piece after piece....

His program is very well chosen to exhibit the range of the organ's varied abilities and to exploit the varied sensibilities of a (mostly very aged) audience. We can see him listening to each chord, each note, each overtone, even. He holds the last chord twice as long as annotated, leaning into it, ears extending, body absorbing and enjoying the whole layered resonance of it all. This listening pleasure was reflected in the varied program, which started with a challengingly delicate, sustained bit of Dvorak, and proceeding through fast and slow, loud and soft, harmonic and contrapuntal and melodic: Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein....

So he told one story just now, before intermission, that set us off into paroxysms of amusement. He was asked to play at St. Paul's Cathedral in August of 1979. He was practicing on the fine instrument there (!), when a clergyman approached him and asked, “in a voice dripping with ridicule,” if he would “play something American” if he were asked for “a little something extra at the end of the show.” Well, Mr. British, thinks this North Carolingian to himself, I'll give you a little something extra. So he was encored at the end of a very heavy European program, and turned on all the brass in the place: trumpets over the entrance, trumpets up in the dome, trumpets over in the choir, and cranked the thing all the way up, and hit 'em with John Phillip Sousa's “Liberty Bell” March! Before he was done, “the thousands in the crowd were clapping, and dancing, and I looked down, and there was that same clergyman standing in the midst of a gaggle of 20 or 30 others, looking as if he'd been hit over the head with a cricket-bat. By the time I ended, there weren't enough stretchers in the whole city of London to carry out the corpses of the clergy!”

All together a delightful evening, even though accuracy often suffered for the sake of effect. Still quite enjoyable, though the aged audience meant an unending background of coughing, sneezing, and nose-blowing; tuneless humming along throughout the “Meditation” from Thais; and a constant accompaniment of hearing aids whistles. In spite of these small distractions, it was a concert in the bones, in the blood, in the gut. While he played a Bach Sinfonia, I never wanted it to stop. It was the rhythm of my body.

Allentown Symphony review

2011-11-14T15:21:00.005-05:00

Written on Sunday afternoon
I am here at the Allentown Symphony for the afternoon's concert. But first, the Young Musicians String Festival is playing a shortened version of this afternoon's (abridged versions or just movements from the three major pieces) for an audience composed mostly of their parents. It is a thrilling educational, musical, and community event. And that's not all. The 14-year-old composer of one of the pieces came out to talk about his composition: what a way to connect the young musicians, their parents, and the community together over Classical music! Now the violin soloist is talking to the young people about practicing, its challenges and rewards. She's very endearing. She's telling them about her unique violin—of which more below.

Now a college freshman, winner of the Voorhis Competition, played a gorgeous Paganini caprice—a sustained, delicate, challenging piece unlike the technical fireworks we usually expect from that composer. Young talent like that terrifies me!

The experts from the pieces are surprisingly short. I imagine the students would be a bit frustrated to just barely get going with the piece and have to stop. But they do have full concerts of their own?? They're good, but not quite “on” with their intonation and ensemble work. However, at least they're here, violins and violas in their hands, which is marvelous!!

This is one example of all the amazing initiatives that the Allentown Symphony has going on to include the community in the life of the orchestra—and to include music in the wider life of the community. Another example occurred on Friday afternoon, when the conductor Diane Wittry invited the community into Symphony Hall, onto the stage, to participate in a conversation about the weekend's concert. Diane spoke about her programming of the concert as a whole. Then she introduced Stephen Czarkowski, a conducting fellow here with the Symphony. I had a chance to talk with him later, and he is a wonderfully positive supporter of young musicians, finding and promoting new talent. He also has boundless energy of his own for conducting, playing cello, teaching, and starting new musical ensembles and programs.

So next at the bag lunch event on Friday, the “child prodigy” composer talked about his work. This young man's name is Rory Lipkis, and I interviewed his father, Larry Lipkis, for the “Where Are We Now?” series last spring. Rory is one of these multi-talented people: he sang the boy soprano solo on the recording of Tony Caruso's Final Broadcast by Paul Salerni (another interviewee, at whose CD release party I met Dana Gioia, yeanother interviewee (and a gracious endorser of my forthcoming book).

Rory Lipkis is a remarkably articulate person—not just “for a 14-year-old” (which denigrates the actual maturity of most well-educated 14-years-olds), but simply as a human being. He spoke intelligently about his education and experience, his composition process, his ideas, revisions, and working with the orchestra. How thrilling it must have been for him to hear these 100 or so professional musicians perform his composition today!

After Rory spoke, the conductor invited the weekend's violin soloist, Elizabeth Pitcairn, on to speak about the Prokofiev concerto and about her own famous violin: the notorious “Red” Stradivarius that inspired the film The Red Violin. She is a slender, willowy woman whose bony grace matches the lean woodwork of the famous instrument. I was rather shocked that she would just walk on stage in amongst a bunch of random Lehigh Valley residents (among whom I was the youngest by a good 30 years or so) with this priceless, irreplaceable instrument. It was made by Stradivarius When her grandfather gave it to her as a gift 21 years go, it cost $2 million dollars. That was 21 years ago. I can hardly imagine what it is worth now, two decades later, with that time and its notoriety added to the value. Whew. And she's just walking about, holding it in her slim hand. But I suppose that's the safest place for it.

Ms. Pitcairn was sweet in person, and a powerhouse on stage. Her playing ranges from delicate to devastating. And the whole concert was just thrilling. I am privileged to live here -- and blessed to be beginning to realize that! It might not be Lenox, Massachusetts, no siree, but it suits me.

James Shapiro wrote Shakespeare?

2011-11-03T09:46:00.003-05:00

Take a look at the cover of the book and you'll see what I mean. :)

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So far, this book is amazing! It purports to be a balanced view of the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and presents the case for Francis Bacon, then the Earl of Oxford, then Shakespeare. The beginning, however, is a remarkable survey of early Shakespeare scholarship (late 1700s), tracing the lines that laid down the kinds of thinking that made the authorship controversy possible. I highly recommend it.

. . .

Now, after finishing this book, I still highly recommend it! It's excellent. It is not unbiased, but a long immersion in postmodernism has taught us that objectivity is impossible anyway. So, it's a lovely, lively survey of (not the authorship question itself, but) WHY people question Shakespeare's authorship. It has a great cast of characters: forgers, lunatics, spiritualists (one guy held seances in which his medium called up Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, and Shakespeare to get from them the whole story. He did get the whole story of who wrote what, and even got a couple of lousy sonnets out of them. Funny that guys write better when they're alive than when they're dead), philosophers, psychoanalyists (Freud was an Oxfordian), novelists (Mark Twain was, too), feminists, historians, politicians.... It's well-written, quite readable, and (in the end) quite persuasive that Shakespeare of Stratford was the guy after all.

If you're going to go see "Anonymous" (don't know why you'd waste your money, really), read this first!

View all my reviews

PA Shakespeare 2012 season

2011-10-28T14:16:00.005-05:00

OK, so last week I promised to announce the upcoming season at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival as soon as I was allowed. Well, it's now public!

Here is the artistic director's official announcement. This summer's plays will include:

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
by William Shakespeare
July 11 - August 5

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
by Tennessee Williams
July 19 - August 5

THE TEMPEST
by William Shakespeare
June 20 - July 15

KING JOHN
by William Shakespeare
July 25 - August 5

SWEENEY TODD
by Stephen Sondheim
June 13 - July 1

Wowie kazowie! I am super excited, most especially about King John. Last summer's "Shakespeare untamed" version of The Two Noble Kinsmen (original performance practice, i.e., without a director, rehearsal, blocking, etc!!!) was STUNNING. One of those memorable theatrical experiences that changed my life and will live along as part of me. I've been blessed to have lots of those!! -- but this was certainly up there. I have high hopes for King John. Plus if I just stick around the Lehigh Valley and live long enough, I'll meet my goal of seeing all of Shakespeare's plays live. (I've seen 15 of the, ahem, 40? plays)

Now, I'm also engaged in reading up on the authorship controversy these days in preparation for seeing Anonymous tomorrow. I'll report back on that. I'm sure it will be lavish.

Inklings Reading List

2011-10-20T10:50:00.004-05:00

OK, so a couple of friends who attended my Inklings presentation last week have asked for a recommended reading order to get into the Inklings' works. (I've added Chesterton & MacDonald & Sayers to the list to be more inclusive). I've chosen to put only fiction on this list. This is because these two friends are English/History profs. at a community college, so will probably be more interested in the "literature" side of things. I've also tried to keep the list short and to ease the reader in from most accessible to more difficult. What would you add? What would you omit? Would you change the order? Do you think it really needs to include theological and lit. crit. works? How about poetry?

1. The Narnia Chronicles - Lewis
2. Three "Princess" books by MacDonald: The Princess & The Goblin, The Princess & Curdie, The Light Princess
3. The Screwtape Letters - Lewis
4. The Lord Peter Whimsey mystery novels - Sayers
5. The Man Who Was Thursday - Chesterton
6. War in Heaven - Williams
7. The Great Divorce - Lewis
8. The Hobbit - Tolkien
9. The "Space" Trilogy by Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength
10. The Place of the Lion - Williams
11. The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) - Tolkien
12. Descent into Hell - Williams

5-minute Glyer

2011-10-18T07:41:00.001-05:00

The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the most important Inklings studies in the last few years (the others are Planet Narnia, C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier, The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams & His Contemporaries, and C.S. Lewis & the Church). If you had to pick just two, I would recommend this one and Planet Narnia. This is a lovely, lively, fascinating study of the many ways that the Inklings influenced one another. As a writer in community myself, I found it very encouraging.

View all my reviews

PA Shakespeare volunteer dinner

2011-10-16T19:27:00.004-05:00

This past Thursday, I attended a thank-you dinner for volunteers of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. It was a beautiful event, with lovely decorations, good food, and good talk. Not many organizations treat their volunteers so well!

This past season at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival was, as usual, excellent. The time has come (believe it or not) to begin thinking about this coming summer! This evening I am attending a thank-you dinner for Festival volunteers, and I'm already getting excited for summer 2012. So whoever you are, wherever you are, please plan ahead to attend the Festival next year!

South Pacific, Comedy of Errors, Pride & Prejudice, Hamlet, The Two Noble Kinsmen
Record attendance; record sales. National coverage.
Added 5th production, 3rd Shakespeare play, two plays in rep.

This past summer was, as I mentioned, excellent. It was not uniformly so (the musical, South Pacific, was rather silly and artificial; I've seen a better Comedy of Errors (at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA). However, the quality of Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen just blew me away. This is world-class theatre, let me tell you. As the speaker said during her introductory remarks, "Excellence is an intoxicant." If you attend one of the great plays at PSF, you'll need to come back for more.

PSF has admirable long-term goals. Artistic Director Patrick Mulcahey summed up "Vision 2030" thus: A world-class Shakespeare festival celebrated regionally and recognized nationally, with artistry consistent with leading regional theaters.

He also announced the 2012 season, but that's not public yet, so I can't share it here! Check back later. :)

Interview with Ron Reed Part 2

2011-10-14T09:12:00.003-05:00

Please read Part I of this interview. Your comments are welcome.

Part II

RP: You also write for the Soul Food Movies blog and are currently at work on a book, Soul Food Movies: A Guide to Films with a Spiritual Flavour—so you are also knowledgeable about contemporary film. A glance at your blog suggests that you have seen just about every movie that came out this past year, so it’s pretty fair to say that you have a good sense of what the film world looks like right now. What topics would you say tend to recur in films that have been released in, oh, the last ten years?

RR: The book’s on hold; it started to come back alive again, and then I got three ideas for plays and decided I’d write them. And I’ve seen all the good movies that came out last year.

Ten years is a big sample size. It probably shifts more frequently. I’m actually going to go back 12 years, to 1999, which was a milestone year. It was this peculiar explosion of really memorable films that are still watched over and over again. There’s just a ton: Magnolia, American Beauty — just a heap of remarkable films in 1999. The peculiar thing, as Mr. Soul Food Movies, is how many films there were that were engaged with spiritual themes, even Christian themes. Before that, by and large, if a film had spiritual themes, it still wouldn’t be a Christian story. And so Babette’s Feast or Chariots of Fire, every Christian on the planet would go see those, because we were never up there on screen, unless we were a lying evangelist, a pedophile, a bigot, or a Klansman. I’ve been a Christian all my life and I don’t know any of those people. They’re choosing a really small sample size. And then all of a sudden there’s just people who are Christians, or themes that are obviously spiritual and Christian, or just spiritual but in an unabashed way. I think it was a certain amount of superstition about the turn of the millennium, but whatever. It was also some kind of synergy with the economy of the film industry itself: the rise of independent films, the health of film studies, some kind of sweet spot for money to fund the films, some peculiar flowering of screenwriting, Many, many real lovers of film emphasize the director. I would never minimize the role of the director, but I actually give equal weight to a strong screenplay. That is diminished in a Hollywood film, because so often the screenplay is just a piece of processed meat; it’s been ground up and reshaped and repackaged so many times. But on a smaller independent film or an auteur film, that screenplay is incredibly important. Again, coming from the theatre world, you don’t change a word of that play, the script is Scripture. In the film world it’s almost opposite, but it shouldn’t be. Many of the best films come from a screenplay that is superb. Half the time it wasn’t developed by committee. Somebody wrote that thing. It comes from a person’s heart, so I really value the writer.

All that to say, for whatever reasons, 1999 was such a year. And then that openness to spiritual things has continued. I feel like it lulled some, because as the conservative presidencies carried on, the country became more polarized again, and people who were scared of Christians or scared about Christianity – sometimes with good reasons, because of the only churches or Christians they knew – that asserted itself again. Whatever kind of openness there’d been started to get polarized again: “Oh, those Christians just want to invade countries and bomb people.” The tide’s turning again, and these tides do turn. I’m seeing more of those Christians who are obnoxious characters, more films that vilify Christians or even generally spiritual characters. But nah, not too bad. It’s not like some backlash. It still comes up more often than you might have thought, more often than I grew accustomed to growing up in the 60’s, 70s, and into the 80s. It still feels like a heyday for films that are spiritually engaged.

RP: What specific film techniques have you seen invented or significantly developed in your years as a film critic?

RR: Disruption of narrative continuity. It doesn’t flow from beginning to middle to end. It can be a gimmick, but it can also be very invigorating. A good film used to be filmed consistently from beginning to end with one look and feel that would give a sort of visual unity -- just like we have the dramatic unities of time and place. Certain kinds of filter or film stock were used throughout. You’d see Scene 3 of Dr. Zhivago and Scene 10. One was a frozen ice palace, and one was blood in the streets, and yet you’re going “that’s the same film.” A good thing, however I think of a film like Into the Wild. I love the way that was filmed. One section is shaky like it was filmed with a camera phone, and then another is a panorama, a massive gorgeously detailed, sculpted shot. I like that kind of mash-up of filmic style at the same time as I can love a film that has unity of style. I think that comes about because people have camcorders and cell phone cameras and point-and-shoots, and all that. So we are used to that variety. The news used to just be film: Channel 5 film crew filmed all the events. Well now, people’s cell phones capture an accident, and they put it on. “If it bleeds it leads.” We just take the data in through every kind of form, so films can reflect that.

There’s also the fact that you can shoot a pretty gorgeous film now with far less expensive equipment, so it doesn’t need to be a studio. There’s been some discouragement in recent years, though. We thought independent film would explode, but then we found out that distribution is critical. That’s still a challenge.

RP: I’m guessing more people are trying to make films now, just because the cost of equipment is going down, and the understanding of filmmaking as an art form is more available, you can learn about it on the Internet.

RR: You don’t assume a studio has to hire you or bankroll you. But also there’s the proliferation of film schools. With the first film school graduates of the 70s, now there are so many film school graduates, you’ve got a large community of highly educated people doing it. So I suppose there’s more crowding, harder for an individual to do it.

RP: But there are all kinds of ways to distribute a film solo, by publishing it on the Internet; you might not get a lot of money from it, but you might get ad clicks, you might get discovered.

RR: If people want to do that, there are those ways to make a webcast, something made for the Internet. There is a proliferation of small film festivals, so you can have a very little film. I have one friend who makes a film or two a year, shows them in those places, and is quite content to do that. That’s his art. He no more craves nationwide distribution than I crave a 2000-seat theatre. I’m going to do my work for 100 people at a time. I wouldn’t mind 250, but that’s it. It’s like the slow food movement. You don’t expect to feed 5000 people with this meal. You take five hours to make it, and it’s for a dozen guests, and that’s it. And that’s what my theatre is, and that’s what my friend’s filmmaking is. And if you’re content there, great. Most people who make the webisodes are doing it as a calling card so someone will hire them to do it for real. That’s a shame. But I mean, why not. Any strategy you can use. I say it’s a shame, because the chances are still so slim.

RP: Social networking is affecting film too, isn’t it? Not a huge number of people hit it lucky in that way, but if you are able to catch a huge wave, if you’ve got something that’s really good and somebody forwards it around to enough people and it spreads…

RR: The first movie like that was Blair Witch Project. That’s the one that the Internet made. But it had no legs. As soon as it closed at the end of the summer, nobody watched it anymore. People laugh about it: “Why were we scared about that?” Somehow the hype made it a phenomenon. But some things that have been Internet driven have great staying power I think.

Lots of little independent films were made last year for terribly shrunken budgets with little hope of getting beyond Sundance, and Winter’s Bone did. Why? Well, it’s phenomenal. It really is a piece of complete integrity. It’s real filmmaking, extraordinary story, fine screenplay, based on a novel. That probably could be said of a number of other projects. But somebody saw it, somebody promoted it, somebody else decided to show it. It is a combination of luck, perseverance, and high artistic quality. Those ones with the luck factor will keep happening. Every now and then there will be a piece that’s just terrific. I believe that Animal Kingdom was an equally strong picture. In my experience it was actually slightly stronger. They’re very comparable. But it didn’t catch the same wave in America. Most people, when I say Animal Kingdom, say “oh, that nature thing?” No, It didn’t get on their radar. I remember several years ago, two films that I saw, really close in time, that were so comparable in so many ways: The Lives of Others and After the Wedding.

RP: I saw The Lives of Others; haven’t heard of After the Wedding.

RR: My point exactly. When I saw them, I was equally excited about both. One of them caught the wave, got lucky (in my opinion that’s the only difference), and became a “you’ve got to see this” movie. And I was thinking, “But what about After the Wedding?” In retrospect, I think After the Wedding was a better picture. Remarkable film. Maybe it had a less sentimental ending; and people, even when they like their art films, they still like – I don’t want to call it “sentimental” – that’s a little too strong a word. I don’t mean to demean The Lives of Others. But you know, you felt good. And I’m not sure After the Wedding gave you quite that. It’s a little bit cool and more Nordic, so maybe that’s why. Nonetheless, very comparable films. One you’ve heard of; the other you haven’t. So there’s that luck factor. Luck or who knows what.

RP: How do you think spirituality (in general) is faring in films? How about Christianity, specifically? How should it fare in the movies, and how should the Church respond to filmmaking?

RR: I’ll just take the “should” part, because that’s where my mind tends to go. When Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ, he made a personal vision, a peculiar, eccentric film, where he might as well film it in weird languages, because nobody was going to see anyway. It was only going to be shown in a few art houses, so he would follow the limit of his vision and make his most distinctive film. He could make Lethal Weapon 79. But this was his heart. He put that film out there. It became the biggest sensation imaginable. And then the organized church said, “Hey, he made a film for us. There’s a Christian market. Let’s tap it. Let’s have more of those films for us, and let’s make money off making them. So let’s do some market testing, and find out what Christians want to see, and let’s make that for them.” Is that what Mel Gibson did? No. Some people say it was a mercenary, calculated financial thing to make all this money. They are full of rocks. That’s just not true. It did not begin there. I know that once they saw that this could sell 87 trillion dollars worth of business, they went after it. Well, so would Winter’s Bone if it had the chance, or the most obscure Polynesian postmodern performance art. So it became a bit of a media circus. But it was not made for that purpose. They got it completely wrong. And so we saw many years of insipid, churchy movies. Now, some of the people who worked on those films are people of integrity, artistic skill, even vision. But still, what showed up on the screen was like Hallmark movie of the week, with more religion. That’s OK. That’s what some people want to see. I don’t criticize them. I don’t think that Mrs. Swenson in some small town in Minnesota should have to watch Jesus Hopped the “A” Train. She should have some art that suits her, and that does, so God bless it. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be made. I’m just saying “is it actually of any interest to anyone who is not in that subculture already?” Nope. Find me a positive review from your regular old theatre reviewer about those and they’ll be in short supply. They tend to make vastly populist, sweetly religious films, though there are some exceptions.

RP: There have been a couple that got attention outside the Christian subculture. I can’t remember when the remake of Shadowlands came out. That was before Mel Gibson’s...

RR: Oh, that had nothing to do with the Christian subculture. No, that wasn’t made for the church.

RP: What about Amazing Grace?

RR: Amazing Grace got marketed a little more that way. That is post-Passion. But it wasn’t made by a group of Christians who said “Let’s make something for the mega-church-goers in Atlanta and LA.” They were trying to do something different. They marketed it, though, very much to the churches, especially evangelical churches, saying “Look, evangelicals were at the forefront of abolitionism. Why shouldn’t we be today?” They loved the way it engaged social conscience and explicit themes of faith. And they were evangelical Christians in this film, as opposed to those dread Catholics or Anglicans or Lutherans or something like that (all in quotation marks). So it crossed over that way; it tried.

RP: There were a couple of films where there was quite a push in the evangelical subculture to email all your friends and get them to go see such-and-such a movie, because if it doesn’t get enough views the first weekend, it’s going to die, and we need to have it survive. I don’t remember which ones they were.

RR: Well, exactly. If you actually came up with the name of the film, you wouldn’t remember anything about it.

Another thing that’s happened more and more. Young Christians see no barrier to working in the film industry, whether they are a camera person, a screen writer, a director, a grip. So more and more there are Christians involved in the film industry. I want to put an asterisk by that. I keep differentiating between evangelical Christians and other Christians. It’s not because one is real and one is not, at all. There have been Catholics and mainstream Christians involved in live theatre and film way back. Far less of a divide there. It’s just that evangelicals came later to the game, in engagement with the culture as a whole (late 60s into the 70s), in letting their kids go to theatre schools and film schools (70s, 80s). And then with film, again, something happened ramping up to the late 90s to make an explosion in the world of film. Partly DVDs. You could get whatever film you wanted. Partly the Internet. You could read about any movie you wanted. You learned about films. So I think that explosion caused lots of Christians to end up there. The business itself has a lot more Christians, evangelical and not. (Those labels become not that useful.) So that shifts how the whole things works. Though, again I don’t want to be negative about this, but money drives most of the movie business. Massive amounts of money, power, ego. And all three of those are a poor fit with the real gospel of Jesus. Most people who decide they’re going to invest $20 million in a film aren’t probably going “I admire the integrity of this work. It needs to be done, even if only five people see it.” I don’t think so. I think it’s “If I put $20 million in, I get $40 million back.” So however many Christians might be involved, as producers, directors, writers, it’s going to have a pervasive effect. But that’s exactly where Christians should be. The most venal of motivations can lead to a spiritually profound work of art. It doesn’t matter if the producer is married to Satan. If it happens that the screenwriter was telling some truth, and it makes it through the rewrites, doesn’t get cut, you can go to that theatre, you can see that, and your life can be changed.

RP: Who are some of the most important directors working right now, and why those? What is it about their work that you think will make it last and become classic (if it hasn’t already)?

RR: I could have given you a really good answer on this five years ago, but not now, partly because I’m not immersed in it anymore. Partly also because the people I would have named then haven’t made any good films since. I would have pointed you to Lars von Trier, P.T. Anderson, Whit Stillman, Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth). I might have thrown Peter Jackson in the mix. Also Anders Thomas Jensen who made Adam’s Apples.

They all made extraordinary films with the kind of things I especially like in film, but then— Lars von Trier had a really dark and nasty element in his film that I felt was in tension with the other elements; the other elements fell away and it just, oh my goodness, the poor man. Antichrist is so toxic and so nasty. He had a breakdown and fell into a clinical depression and didn’t make films for a while. Who knows what’s to come of that? Then P.T. Anderson, people felt he had come back with marvelously with There Will Be Blood. I didn’t like it. I admired it. It’s well shot, it’s fascinating. But to my mind it went back to a story that I was sick of by 1970. I was only 13 in 1970. The venal, compromised revival preacher who really doesn’t care about spiritual things, and is just as much of a manipulator as the oil baron, and it’s two power-grubbing people. Yeah, yeah. And it didn’t surprise me at all when I found out eventually that it’s actually from a novel that was written 80 years ago. That’s what the stories were about then, and I find that boring. Well-made, but I was disappointed. Whereas in his previous films, there was so much nuance and intricacy about spiritual themes, even Christians themes. And all of a sudden, the Christian character is reduced to this two-dimensional cardboard stereotype. Quite a disappointment. It was still a very strong film, though. So, is he still a strong filmmaker? Yeah. Although he went from Hard Eight to Boogie Nights to Magnolia in the space of a few years. And then…Punch Drunk Love. To my mind a wonderful but more minor film. Other people feel it’s his best of all. I think it’s a little bit more of a side exercise before his next great film. That looked like the trajectory: Really interesting small, independent film; much bigger, really good film; and then a masterpiece. And then this wonderfully quirky brilliant smaller piece, while he’s gathering strength for something big. And then a bunch of years, nothing. And then, what many people consider his greatest masterpiece, which I feel disappointed in. He’s just not on that pace he was on as a brand new filmmaker.

Then there’s the Coens. You never know. Each new film comes out. People see it and go, “Nah, it’s too clever, it’s shrill, it’s jokey.” And then a little bit later, the tide always shifts and people go, “That’s really interesting, that’s substantial.” They keep pulling that out of their hats. Their recent film, A Serious Man, engages right on the center of theological questions in a direct sort of way. I think they’re playing for keeps there. And then True Grit. I still don’t know if that Protestant voice of the narrator is meant to be taken seriously in the novel. The Scripture-saturated, hymn-quoting thing, is straight-up. And this is a good, religious character, in the middle of an anarchic world. Or if that’s the irony, that this girl, in her naiveté sings hymns, quotes her daddy, quotes Scripture, quotes theology, and heads out to commit vengeance, and actually is as conscienceless a killer as anybody around her. I haven’t discerned that yet. The Coens may have just liked it because they like strong voices. They like Marge Gunderson to talk with her accent. They like O Brother, Where Art Thou to talk from the South. They like the dude to be a Southern California drop-out. They love those. When I say “voice” I mean a character voice – an audible, spoken voice. And I bet they like the voice of that character in that book. And they found it funny, and they found it ironic; they probably never stopped to go “Hmm, are we setting this up or not?” But they play with that stuff; they keep doing it. Who knows what lies ahead for the Coens; they’re pretty fascinating.

RP: What are some good movies waiting in the wings—films that you either know are in production, or that you wish would be made in the next few years?

RR: Again, because I’m not writing regularly about film, I’d have to think about it. I’ve got some written down. That’s a really good question, but I’m kind of stuck. David Michôd, the guy who directed Animal Kingdom. That is the director I’m most interested in right now. I can’t wait to see what he does next. I’ll also say playwright Martin McDonagh. His first, which he wrote and directed was In Bruges. And that’s got legs. I loved it overwhelmingly when it came out, and now it’s one of those ones that everyone talks about. It’s so good, and very theological, as well as very funny, very offensive, very entertaining. He was kind of the bad boy entertainer-playwright, and then he made that film. He made a short film, Six Shooter, that won an Academy Award that’s really interesting. And then In Bruges. I hope he makes another film. No guarantee it’s going to be theologically or spiritually engaged. But he’s pretty fascinated by moral and ethical questions. So I’m curious to see if he makes another film. [He is at work on Seven Psychopaths (2012). – rp]

And Danny Boyle! I can’t wait to see what he does next. His last films have been very flashy. 127 Hours was his most recent. And Slumdog Millionaire. Some pure cinephiles have thought it was a little superficial. I don’t find it to be so. Both films were engaged with spiritual questions. I know you could say that Slumdog Millionaire is about getting rich quick. You could say it’s about rags to riches. It’s the Horatio Alger nonsense. I don’t think so. I think it’s about a young man’s faithfulness. It’s about doing whatever was needed to recover this relationship with a girl that he knew. It’s got all the social conscience of Dickens. It’s also got all the storytelling tricks and melodrama of Dickens. I don’t care. It’s wonderful. And it was profoundly about the question of this peculiar series of coincidences. Were they luck? Were they skill? Were they “Insha’Allah” (God’s will)? 127 Hours is about an irresponsible, bike-riding, adventure party boy who gets in a scrape and by his ingenuity gets out again. What’s spiritual about that? Yeah, well, it is. Profoundly it’s about a young man who is all the things we described at the beginning, who realizes as he sits there for 127 hours alone, facing his death, “I lived every second for me. I deserve everything I’m getting.” It’s like The Christmas Carol in a gorge. His life flashes before him, and he comes to reckon with…[goes to get The Christmas Carol and reads an excerpt] “’Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,’ said Scrooge. ‘But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.’ The spirit was immovable as ever.” That’s at the heart of 127 Hours. There’s a parallel theme in Into the Wild. Danny Boyle goes after those things. I recently saw the National Theatre of England broadcast of the Danny Boyle stage production of Frankenstein. It was broadcast live to theatres. Brilliant. And again it deals with these questions about the nature of humanity, consequence, ethical things. Danny Boyle is all over that stuff.

RP: Where is the film industry going in the future? How has technology affected it (online streaming, etc.) With amazing home theatres, will we stop going out any more? How much further can special effects and digital technology go? Is the movie experience become more solitary rather than communal?

RR: Yes, the film viewing experience is more solitary than it used to be, significantly so. However, two things: after you’ve seen the film, it’s more communal. People really didn’t have as much opportunity to talk together about a film afterwards. So you’d go for coffee after and talk with your friends. Sure. But that’s it, you couldn’t see it again. There is such a conversation about film now, in the culture as a whole, and online. This conversation makes me wonder if cinemas are going to become like live theatres. They will never go away. The feeling of sitting in a room with strangers, munching popcorn, and looking up at that massive screen as the movie starts, and nobody can text you and phone you (if people text in front of me I tell them to stop). That’s something. I’ve got a 52” screen. I believe you can have a great experience in your home, a better one sometimes. But the cinemas are never going to go away. There are always going to be people showing movies in public.

RP: Are our standards for acceptable content shifting, and is this to be deplored? Are Christians going to have more or less influence in Hollywood over time?

RR: Well, the influence in Hollywood we touched on. There are more Christians there. That’s lovely. It’s still Babylon. But that’s where Christians belong. So, enough said. Content? Well, the movies have always had appalling content and great content. Just because it’s sexual content or violent content doesn’t make it bad content. Just because it portrays characters who are morally appalling… Well, Macbeth. Where are his redeeming features? Should we watch that? “No, he’s a terrible role model. What do we see except bloodshed and sexual undertone and ambition.” Well, take away Macbeth and I’ll punch you in the eye. So those are very open questions to me. I have a very safe middle-class upbringing. I’m a jerk sometimes. But I’m a nice person. I’m very invested in being a good citizen. Just a decent, boring, white, middle-class guy. But artistically, I’ve always been fascinated by films about very dark or questionable things. Maybe that’s an indulgence of my dark side. I don’t know. Now there are films that I simply don’t go see. A couple of films by Gaspar Noé. Would I say that film should never be shown? No, I wouldn’t say that. But I’m not going to see it. I just have a feeling that it’s not what I want to put in there. On the other hand, I watched Antichrist. And that’s nasty. And I watched Dogville. With Antichrist, I borderline regret that I saw it. I’m glad I saw it, but I would not see it again. But Dogville is one of my three favorite films of all time. But it’s nasty. That’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. Each individual has to discern, listening to the Holy Spirit and their conscience: what should I see, what should I not see, what films should I make, what should I not make? There’s so much made and shown that really is morally vacuous, and even negative, even bad. I’m sure the Devil himself runs many studios and can make pictures that are appalling, and yet you don’t know. Tom Key, the man who took Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospels and made them a stage musical. He is a marvelous man. He’s a Southern gentlemen, deeply Christian, a Catholic man. He’s a leader. He runs a live theatre in Atlanta. He’s a respected member of the theatre community. His conversion came when he saw Bonnie and Clyde, which his church friends were completely opposed to. It was degenerate, conscienceless kids, with a level of violence that was unacceptable. He went, and he got saved. God spoke to him, and he changed from a safe church-going kid to someone who saw the commonality of sin in them and himself, realized that he actually needed God instead of God being a nice little add-on to his merit badge collection. Did anybody making that film intend that? I doubt it. Neither was it made just to exploit. It was made I think by artists. But it’s very violent, and especially for its time, over the top violent. Should it have been shown? Well, apparently. God’s mysterious. As long as he’s engaged in the whole thing. And he won’t allow himself to be disengaged.

RP: Well, thank you very much.

Interview with Ron Reed Part 1

2011-10-08T14:11:00.007-05:00

This is THE LAST INTERVIEW in the "Where Are We Now Series"!!! Please take a moment to peruse the INTRODUCTION AND INDEX to this series, to leave a comment on this post, or to tell us what you thought of the series.

This interview was conducted by my blog co-writer, Rosie Perera. Thanks, Rosie!

Interview with Ron Reed, actor, playwright, director, founder and artistic director of Vancouver's Pacific Theatre, and writer about films
(Edited from our conversation on 21 March 2011)

Part I

Rosie Perera: Let’s start by talking about your acting, writing, and directing. You studied at the University of Alberta, and received an MFA in acting from the California Institute of the Arts. Were you trained in a specific acting style? Would you say you are you a “method” actor?

Ron Reed: The approach at CalArts is the standard approach now in actor training. It’s got lots of Stanislavski in it. It is that you act from yourself. You don’t picture a character and then try to embody that person and copy their emotions. Instead, I imagine me, as if I had been born in the circumstances of the character in the world of the play. And then within that, there’s an objective that my character is yearning for, whether he knows it or not. This is the “super-objective” of the whole play. Then each scene has an objective that is a stepping stone to that super-objective. When acting the scene, I’m thinking what do I do with the other character in the scene. I’m not playing my emotions. All I’m trying to do is to win the other character’s allegiance to me. You don’t think of the audience at all, except that’s where your technical training comes in. You develop your voice, your speech, your body, so that there are no barriers in talking too softly, or whatever. That said, you’re not playing for the audience, you’re playing to the person opposite you. You don’t do what is called “indicating” – which is taking what you might feel and pumping it up so the audience will get it. Don’t do it! Forget that you’re in a play. Live in the reality of it. And then the director can shape it.

Chris Humphreys and Ron Reed in A Man For All Seasons; photo: David James

RP: You have also written close to 20 plays, including Book of the Dragon, Tent Meeting, A Bright Particular Star, Refuge of Lies, A Wrinkle in Time, You Still Can’t, Dreams of Kings & Carpenters, Remnant, and your one-man show Top Ten Thousand of All Time. Can you give us a brief overview of some of the topics, themes, and ideas in your plays?

RR: Long ago I said to a dramaturge friend “They say ‘write what you know,’ but I think you should write what you don’t know. Your plays should be as different one to the next as possible.” My friend said, “Yeah, as far as the setting of the story is concerned, sure, but I bet the real essence of your stories is the same from one to another.” Then I realized that there are a couple of threads that occur very pervasively. The central one is the preoccupation with two related things: one is the continuum of sin, responsibility, accountability, judgment, all to the end of reconciliation, forgiveness; and then the related thing is new life – we can be changed. Unbelievably, it wasn’t until a decade ago that I encountered the story of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, and I realized that that’s my central story. My plays, as different as they are, almost always end with reconciliation – between two characters, between one character and a community, or between a character and God. They are often about something in someone that needs to be reckoned with, and their agonizing journey to reckon with it and be humbled, and reach out to make that relationship right.

Two other things that are common in my plays: a character who thinks they can do it on their own, they are the king of their own world, but they are challenged to accept an outsider, to change their view of how the world works; and that’s the crisis for them and they can’t do it.

And then a common figure that I’ve noticed is the plucky girl. I’ve written a ton of plays where there’s a young woman under 30 who goes up against it and has to tough it out and find a way to achieve what she needs to achieve. For example, Lilia Macdonald in A Bright Particular Star. She’s a compliant first-born, not going to make any waves, gonna be the best person and make everybody happy. However she has an extraordinary ability as an actor and comes alive when she acts. But there are many other things she’s passionate about. Octavia Hill, her mentor, works with the poor in London. She falls in love for the first time with a young man who loves her. She reaches that age where life’s full of possibilities, and then they collide. And she still wants to please her parents. Suddenly all these forces are saying “Don’t be an actor. It’s self-indulgent, it’s spiritually dangerous.” Is she putting it ahead of God, her social concerns, her family, her parents, her lover, her fiancé? She has to decide. The fact that it plays out in a young woman’s story – I’m not sure why.

RP: What specific techniques do you use in your play writing? Do you use any experimental narrative, set design, casting, or other techniques? How would you describe your particular style of play writing?

RR: All the specifics that you mentioned come after the fact. The playwright doesn’t write those by and large. I believe that the playwright needs to write whatever comes to mind. It was a pressing point in my very first real play that I wrote which was on a fishing boat. As soon as I had the idea for it, I said to my director “I want to write the play on a fishing boat. But that’s crazy. So should I set it somewhere else?” He said, “No write the play however you want. The designer will solve the design problems.” Or you’ll do it in later drafts. You get the most exciting results that way. So I endeavor to just write the story. It’s also true that when you’ve been in the theatre a long time, you get theatrical ideas. Bright Particular Star was written without any idea of how it ought to be staged. I simply told the story scene by scene. Every character has that kind of story arc that I described. But one character drives the whole story. When their objective is reached, or not reached, the play is done. When I write the play, I’m finding who that central character is. Sometimes in draft two you rewrite the play; it’s about a different character. Then you go scene by scene. They’re always fighting for something. One thing leads to another. There’s a circle of consequences to each choice. I spend a great deal of time thinking about the dramaturgical structure of the choices, actions, consequences. I carry around blank business cards, I get a scrap of dialogue, a phrase, I see someone in the bank lineup and I go “That’s what Fred looks like!” That’s the soil from which the things grows. When all is said and done, the play might not look anything like that.

I do think of staging things. There are two plays that I want to start. One of which is a straightforward adaptation of Longford, the film that Peter Morgan wrote. I’ve been in touch with his agent and he says I can adapt it for the stage. That’s fairly straightforward. The other one is a non-fiction work that reads like a novel about some events in the 19th century, and I won’t say what they are because I don’t have the rights yet. In this case, I can picture how it’s staged, and written in the play will be the fact that one woman plays all the female characters; words/definitions/phrases are projected onto the stage and included in the sound design at certain points in the story. So sometimes I think of the staging of it and sometimes I don’t.

RP: Who are some other contemporary playwrights whose work you particularly admire? And how does your work compare to theirs?

RR: One is Stephen Adly Guirgis (Jesus Hopped the “A” Train). Extraordinary writer. His themes are mine. This constant attention to sin, redemption. Always complex. Not a straightforward narrative of “do something bad, apologize, God loves you, go to heaven.” It’s shocking to find such complex, unsolvable kinds of questions in plays that are so popular, contemporary, edgy. His great strength is dialogue. Sometimes story structure is not important to him. In The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, it’s more about what each successive witness says. They each hold the stage in a remarkable way. Is there really a story? Yeah, but I always lose track of it. The important thing there is the line of the argument. I actually value storytelling above following the line of an argument. So for me that is not the strongest thing about The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. That said, I couldn’t care less. It’s stunning on stage; you can’t take your eyes off it.

There is also Lanford Wilson. I love his stories, I love his characters. I love the fact that every play is drastically different than the last one. Same thing is true of John Patrick Shanley.

RP: Do they all have that same sort of common theme that you can pick up in their plays even though they’re all different?

RR: I can’t come up with it in Lanford Wilson. My favorites of his are Talley’s FollyFifth of July) and Talley & Son. Another of his that I really love is Angels Fall, about a priest, a native American young man who’s becoming a doctor, and a tennis player. With John Patrick Shanley, there are themes in common. Widest possible variety of styles. He’s a complete chameleon. I get a whiff of what his themes are. But I have a hard time putting my finger on it. Next season at PT we’re hoping to do a John Patrick Shanley trilogy, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, which is very dark. These are characters that would easily fit in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s neighborhood. Really troubled characters. And there is real hope and restoration in the end of the play. Small enough glimmers I suppose, but in light of how dark their circumstances and their personalities are, it’s incredible. And then Doubt, which won the Pulitzer Prize; I’m going to direct that. And then concluding with, we hope (this is the only one that’s not confirmed yet) a musical version of Joe Versus the Volcano, which is a wacky, absurd, romantic comedy. For those who love it, like me, it’s off the charts lovable. They are so different from one another. But the whole idea for that season occurred to me when I was watching Danny and the Deep Blue Sea last summer. I thought “oh my goodness, that’s like Joe Versus the Volcano.” And it’s a bizarre thought. They are worlds apart. Joe Versus the Volcano is all about living day to day, celebrating life. His character is told he has X number of months to live, and so he says “what the heck, I’ve got nothing to live for.” And he finds a remarkable freedom and becomes a full version of the person he can be. I see something of that in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. As well as specifics. They’re both love stories. Doubt doesn’t fit those things. It’s about the uncertainty – well, doubt – about things. The central character, Sister Aloysius, is either on a horrific witch hunt, because she’s a closed-minded, frightened, almost McCarthyist, maybe anti-homosexual. Or she’s right, and she’s a proto-feminist woman, protecting helpless victims of a pedophile in a male hierarchy where she has no voice. And Shanley swings you back and forth between these two things until you’re completely dizzy. If in one scene you think that Father Flynn is being persecuted, in the next you go “no, he’s a monster,” and the next thing you go “no, he’s fine.” And Shanley does it with complete mastery. That play is about certainty and faith, the danger of faith, the need for faith, the nature of truth. But it’s more relational, it’s about…is she destroying a man’s life who is innocent, or is she bringing justice? If you want to go way back to the question you asked before about my themes: Justice in a dialectic with mercy. That’s huge for me, and Doubt is absolutely there.

Interestingly, Guirgis and Shanley both grew up Catholic, both I think let that go, and then it cropped up tremendously in their playwriting, more and more progressively, to the point where Stephen Adly Guirgis, in the introduction to A Jesuit Off Broadway, makes it very clear that he has come to, at the very least, honor his Catholic faith. And Shanley – I don’t know, but last year he spoke at a big conference of Christian universities. He doesn’t seem to be the least bit shy about questions of faith. So there are some favorite playwrights. And I should throw in Shakespeare, not as an obligatory “well you have to have Shakespeare” but truly. [I can tell from his bookshelves.]

RP: In 1984, you founded Pacific Theatre, which exists as “a non-propagandist professional theatre where [actors, etc.] would be free to explore work having particular meaning to them as Christians.” How do you do this? How is the work meaningful to Christians? How does it avoid any appearance of being propagandistic to someone outside the Christian community?

RR: Well, I can’t speak to whether it appears propagandistic to anybody. But I know it’s not there to propagate the faith or to persuade anyone to believe anything in particular. There might very well be actors in certain plays who pray every night that people will become Christians by seeing the play. I’ve prayed that. But that’s not the intention of the work. I’m an evangelical Christian, but I’m not a Christian evangelist. My work as an artist is to explore, to push the boundaries. I don’t make plays about what I already understand. I make plays about what I don’t understand. Fundamentally our mandate is to explore spiritual experience. As Artistic Director, I choose works that interest me. Most of them deal with questions of faith, spirituality, those kind of things. Now and then there’s a play that doesn’t have any apparent spiritual content. But actually, there’s usually a way in which some element of that play speaks to what is for me a spiritual or Christian theme. I sometimes program plays that don’t absolutely fascinate me but that round out our season. That’s another job as Artistic Director. If I’ve got a nasty, dark, challenging piece, there’s gonna be something very light and reassuring and sweet and wonderful; and if I’ve got a musical, there’s going to be a piece that’s somehow experimental in form. I’m always looking for things people haven’t seen on our stage before.

We do not call ourselves a Christian theatre. It’s such a problematic adjective. We never have hidden the fact that our company is about spiritual questions, spiritual experience of people, particularly from a Christian perspective (though we’re not limited to that). It meant that for a decade, funding was almost impossible. People hardly even saw our work, but assumed it must be propagandistic. We’re way, way past that. In the last five seasons, my great delight has been how many people from the theatre community will see a play like The Woodsman, Grace, Prodigal Son, Mourning Dove, and go, “Nobody else is doing plays like that! It’s edgy; it’s challenging, ethically complex, and provocative, and asks these questions that are so hard to deal with.” I respond, “Oh sure they are!” Prodigal Son was a co-production with Touchstone Theatre in Vancouver; in fact they initiated the play. So clearly other companies are doing that. But we do have a track record that every season there is at least one play that is going to be a challenge at an ethical, philosophical, spiritual level. Refuge of Lies last season, Jesus Hopped the “A” Train this season. Balanced by, this season, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is no trite superficial play. But it’s not going to offend people. We don’t usually put up something that’s just plain dumb but will sell tickets. We’re small enough that we don’t have to.

RP: How do you think what Pacific Theatre is doing is typical? In one way, its spiritual vision sets it apart from mainstream theatre. Are there other theatres with a similar Christian vision? If so, what are they, and how do they compare to Pacific Theatre? (I’m thinking of Chemainus Theatre on Vancouver Island, Taproot Theatre in Seattle.)

RR: There’s also Rosebud Theatre in Alberta and Lamb’s Players in San Diego. Those companies have a core mandate that is very closely aligned to PT’s, but in each case is very particular to the community out of which they sprung and/or the vision of the artistic director. Chemainus puts on plays that go well with dinner theatre, that serve tourists. They rarely put on a play that has Jesus in it. For a while they called themselves “theatre with good taste.” Nobody’s going to smoke, nobody’s going to swear. I don’t mean to trivialize it. They need to sell a lot more tickets than we do, so they need to go for things with wider appeal. And they are going for tourists, among others. So it does tend to make their choices a lot more mainstream than PT’s would be. That said, they every now and then do something very substantial. The past Artistic Director and the current one are very much Christians of faith; and there are a lot of Christians in the company. Not exclusively. Not exclusively at our theatre either. Not exclusively at any of the theatres we’ve mentioned. There is almost no overlap between Chemainus and PT, except for the works of Lucia Frangione, for various reasons, mostly relational. The one of her plays that is the most explicitly Christian or spiritual is Espresso which they have not done, because it’s too religious for their mainstage, and it’s too provocative, the language and the sexuality. So we’re lucky. We’re an urban theatre, and we can be as edgy as we want. We’ve had to build that up. We’ve had to educate and win the trust of an audience over almost 30 years. But we have done so. It’s been a long time since we’ve worried at all about putting up a show that was way over the line for most companies, Christian or not. Read the opening monologue of Jesus Hopped the “A” Train and decide how many theatres with a mandate like ours could do that. Lamb’s Players is the longest established of any of those companies, and they have to play it pretty safe because they are the biggest of all these companies. They are apparently one of the 50 largest theatres in America. So they have to put plays up that will sell lots of tickets. That means there are shows that they can’t take the risk on that we can do. So it’s another benefit of the size of our company, and the reputation or the style we’ve built, the expectation of our audience.

Those are companies that have been around for 15 years or more. And that was kind of the end of it. When all these companies started, evangelical Christians had recently emerged from a sort of separationist stance toward culture. If you were an evangelical and a creative person, what did you do? Theatre was one of your best options. Or music. Hence the burgeoning of the whole Christian music, Christian rock thing. In the past decade or so, evangelical culture is much more engaged with the broader culture. Not always – sometimes it can be very separationist – but far more so. Nowadays you can buy a HD video camera and editing software and make a movie. So a lot of the folks who would have made theatre headed toward film. That said, there have been some new ones. There’s Firebone Theatre in New York City founded by Steven and Chris Cragin Day, and Fire Exit Theatre in Calgary. There’s also a new company in Orlando. So I guess it is bubbling up again. That could be because there will always be a hunger to be in the same room as actors who are living out a story. I love film, and I wouldn’t rank one above the other. There’s so much of what they do that’s the same – that need for story. But a play is people literally breathing the air you breathe. In my theatre, you have your feet on the stage, if you’re in the front row on either side, where the actors are walking. You feel the vibrations in their feet treading on the stage. If they stand close and turn the wrong way, you might get spit on. It doesn’t happen too much. But it’s that visceral and close. And when a real person’s standing in that room with you, if they’re working the way I described, immersed in that world, and they’ve just found out that the person they love will die, and they weep, it’s almost unbearably tender. I have a friend who won’t sit in the front four rows of the theatre, it’s too much for him, too intimate. I know movies can do that, sort of. I’ve sobbed through many movies. It’s still just a little different when it’s a real person. And there will always be people who want to see that and people who want to do that. When I put on a play, every night I get to tell a story from the beginning to the end. When I make a movie, as soon as they’ve got a good take, good coverage for the sound, and the light was right, they move on. I will never do that scene again. As the person living in the story, there are two kinds of actors that are shortchanged by filmmaking. One is the performer who lives to share the experience with the people in the room. The film actor doesn’t get that. To a slight degree, the audience is the crew, the director, whatever. But it isn’t the same. And the other kind of actor that is shortchanged is the storyteller – that’s me. I’m not about performing for the audience. The big deal for me is living in it, like make believe. To be caught in that world and live in it and imagine myself in it. That’s what I live for. The world is so chopped up when you make a movie. I don’t get to tell a story from “Once upon a time” to “…and they lived happily ever after.”

RP: Where is theatre going in the future, from your vantage point?

RR: Well, it’s not going away, that’s for sure. I think that’s important to be said, because with the dominance of television, film, and then the convergence of those on the Internet, it would be easy for people to think that’s it for live theatre. But the fact is, the obituary got written in the 1930s, when radio took over, then television. Now you can have DVDs in your home. But you know what? We kind of reached rock bottom as far as our share of the cultural marketplace, and that’s where it will stay forever.

Where will it go? Who knows. It is a plant with regional varieties. It needs to be highly adaptive to survive. Two things happened in Vancouver that created a specific emphasis in the theatrical art that’s created here now. One is the fact that there was a tremendous shortage of performance spaces. (That’s being rectified to some degree.) Secondly, back in those postmodern days, there was a fascination with highly theatrical, non-narrative performance. So it gave rise to site-specific work, plays performed in a parking garage, in a closed factory, under a bridge, in a forest, you name it. Survival technique. Can’t do it in a theatre? Do it somewhere else. Also what a great pace to have 30’ high puppets hanging from the trees and project light and have someone come up through the earth. So in fact, Vancouver has become a source for a tremendous amount of site-specific work that happens outside a theatre. I suspect that’s becoming more and more common in other cities as well. And that could be because of the need to get the public’s interest, to ask them yet again to come into a theatre and sit in a chair and watch a play. If you can say the play moves from the top of this tower to five stories underground in a parking garage, the response will be “Really? Oh, that will be cool!” So there’s a novelty factor too, I suppose. There was a movement, again with postmodernism, away from narrative, and that’s now kind of part of theatre culture, I suppose. I may be betraying my biases, but I feel like narrative has returned very strongly. It might be splintered, scenes might not be in chronological order. Playwrights will play with that, but a strong commitment to dramaturgical structure has returned. Film has gained a new prominence in the culture in the last 20 years. And film, except for certain European film, certain independent film, is predominantly narrative, story. It may be told more visually. Live theatre may be told more in dialogue, but they’re both fundamentally, in the North American mind, storytelling media.

RP: That’s a good segue to talking about film.

(To be continued…)

2011-10-08T06:00:00.001-05:00

Earlier this week, I posted a review of Marco Calderon's photography exhibit. Marco sent me some photos to supplement my review, so here they are! I hope they encourage you to stop by Muhlenberg College, Baker Center for the Arts, between now and Oct. 23rd. Enjoy.

This show consists of portraits of small-business owners in Old Allentown.

Here is a view of the entire show (or just about).

A patron viewing the photographs.

Another patron taking in the art.

Here is the subject of one of the portraits together with
his picture and with the photographer.

Here I am enjoying the photos and the descriptions.

Here I am with Marco.

Curator: Three Sorrows

2011-10-07T11:27:00.005-05:00

My bimonthly piece, this one entitled "Three Sorrows," is up on Curator. It is an examination of three works of art, all of which depict torture:
*1984, the justly famous novel by George Orwell (published in 1949)
* “Name,” a short story by Tony Woodlief, first published in issue 58 of Image journal (2008) and recently reprinted in Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE (2009)
*Of Gods and Men, a Cannes-winning French film by Xavier Beauvois (2010).

Please read the article, then come back and comment here!

Interview with Bruce Herman part 5

2011-10-07T06:00:00.005-05:00

Please read parts 1-4 of this interview, which are available on the sidebar of past posts. Your comments are welcome!

Interview with Bruce Herman
Part 5: The Global Picture

One of Bruce's earliest works: an undergraduate self-portrait

IA:We were talking earlier about titles and labels and what critics might call your work a hundred years from now. Well, let's not go there with your work; let's look at what is happening in North American art right now. So we've gone through what we called the postmodern period; some theorists say we're in the posthuman period now. Economically, a lot of the strength of the economy is going out of America and manufacturing is heading to Asia. Christianity is coming to life in Asia. What do you see happening in American arts right now? Do you see the arts responding to these economic and theoretical movements? What big changes do you see going on in North American visual arts right now?

BH: Two things come to mind in response to that question. First, a disclaimer: I don't think I can answer that very well. I'm not the most hip, the most current person on the planet. The older I get (and I think this happens to a lot of us as we get older and more deeply involved in what we're doing) we don't always pay attention to what is going on. You get rather focused, in other words. I am kind of focused these days. I am not paying attention to every last new thing that's being explored in the visual arts. On the other hand, I noticed a couple of things that I can comment on.

One very positive thing in my view, is the so-called “postmodern turn,” which looks at history with a certain kind of suspicion about metanarrative. Let me tell you why I think that's positive. I think history is always a whole lot more complicated, messy, wonderful, and complex than anyone could ever report on accurately. A number of filmmakers are representing this, such as P. T. Andersen’s work. He did Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love--he's done a bunch of great films. Magnolia is a great film, because it shows a day in the life of a about a half-dozen people who are apparently totally randomly chosen, supposedly, but in the end you see that their lives are deeply interwoven in a mysterious fabric. I think there are a lot of filmmakers who are exploring that technique: trying to look at narrative from the standpoint of a multivalance, rather than a univalent narrative. In other words, instead of having one story taking place, multitudes of stories are happening at once. And that is the way life really is.

When you write history, or art history in the case of the question you've raised, when you write art history as if there is only one linear narrative of growth and development and you end up with the Great Artist theory of history where you have someone like Pablo Picasso being called “The most important artist of the 20th century”—I am very skeptical of that. Skeptical, not that Picasso is a great artist, but that he is the greatest artist, or that someone one can even make that pronouncement about anybody! Or write a linear art history that seems to inevitably lead to someone like Picasso. Because while Picasso is making his paintings, there are any number of artists who are still working in what could be considered retrograde or traditionalistic modes by the art historians who are trying to make the case that art history moves only in one direction: forward. It can move sideways, and backwards, and it may sound silly but it can move is spirals. It's all over the place. In a round-about way, I'm trying to respond to your question about “What is the most important art that's being made right now?” My simple answer is; I haven't got a clue! But I want to say, I don't think anyone else does, either. It's a mess, and that's what's so wonderful about it. History and life are a lot more wonderful and complex than anybody could ever adequately and accurately record. As a case in point: walk into a room of, say a hundred people. If you had the time to look at their faces carefully the way a portrait artist would, you would be astonished at the fact that no two faces are anything like each other. The histories behind those faces are in every wrinkle on every face. The stories of those lives and the lives they have affected, their family history—it's just unimaginably complex. To just decide arbitrarily that one person in that room of a hundred people is important and the rest of them are unimportant! It's just silly! So I have a hard time with the whole–I'm not jumping on your question, but I think it's a question that has to be examined from the standpoint of, well, who determines what is important? What criteria does one use? I can't begin to impose my criteria on the current art world to decide what is important.

I hope that what I’m doing has some validity and that someone a hundred or two hundred years from now might look at it and say, “Wow! Bruce Herman was trying to communicate with this person, that person. Oh, I see Rembrandt, here; yes, I see Pierre della Francesco. Oh, I see Picasso! I see T. S. Eliot!” I would love for people to be able to see those things, because I am constantly in arguments with Picasso. I'm constantly in conversations with T. S. Eliot.

IA: I love that, and I love that you are able to find something so positive in the postmodern turn, because a lot of Christians are still feel threatened by everything postmodernism offers.

BH: This is going to sound really bold. I think postmodernism opens us up to a much more humble hermeneutic that actually allows us to see Christ more accurately.

IA: That is bold.

BH: When He washed the feet of His disciples and He said, “Don't be like the Gentile overlords who stand over their subjects in a domineering way. This is how you lead people; this is how you become great.” And He took off His clothes and He washed their feet. What He was doing was dethroning the “Great Man” theory of history. He was completely unraveling that hermeneutic, which says, “We understand history by looking at the great men.”

IA: That's brilliant! Wow! I love that.

Now, you said there was a second thing? You said you had a second point besides the suspicion of metanarrative?

BH: I guess I would say, this is my hunch, it's just a hunch, mind you: I think what may come out of this confusing period of globalization, as people are calling it, the multi-cultural, multi-valent, multi-narrative approach to art and knowledge and human life: what might come out of it, and I hope that the Holy Spirit is behind this, is a new kind of humility being exercised towards one another. When I saw “one another,” I mean Christians towards Muslims, and Muslims for Jews, and etc. Where we might actually learn from one another. It's not that I don't believe in the preeminence of Christ: I do. But i think His love and His humility reaches out to heal the nations. It doesn't reach out to become a nation. I don't think Christ leads us to become a kind of chauvinistic group who decides what goes and who writes the history books. I think it's quite the reverse. I think if we really followed Christ, we would be more interested in other people than we are in ourselves, and maybe that will be the outcome of the postmodern period, that we will say, “Enough, enough, enough!”—Of this beating of the tom-tom and beating of one's chest and making a big deal out of your nation, saying “America the beautiful.” America is beautiful, but so is Islam. So is Sri Lanka.

IA: So how does, or how will, that express itself in art?

BH: One way that it is expressing itself right now is a profusion of possible styles all being honored, all being accepted, all being appreciated. Modernism or Abstraction doesn’t have a dominant role. There are a many kinds of art as there are people. And that's fine. Just do it the best you can, and do it without using it as a means of making yourself feel important, but do it as a form of service. Do it as a form of foot washing.

one of Bruce's most recent works: from the Presence/Absence series

Arts Count 2011

2011-10-06T19:52:00.003-05:00

I'm here at the Allen Organ world sales center for a Lehigh Valley Arts Council event. This place is really great; the huge public foyer is a little museum of the history of Allen Organs and, thus, of the electronic organ itself. Randall Forte, the executive director of the LV Arts Council, told me one reason they decided to have the event here is that “Many people, like yourself, have lived here and always wanted to visit this place.” Well, I'm glad they held the event here, and that I'm here.

In 1939, Jerome Markowitz invented the first electronic organ for commercial sale—right here in the Lehigh Valley! It was bought by and installed in a church in Allentown. From there, Allen Organ business grew impressively. I am most interested by the fact that in 1970, Allen Organ made a custom “four manual solid state oscillator organ” for, of all places, Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church! Robert Elmore was the organist there at the time, and he was called “The organist's organist” (which I gather was not an insult ). I've visited 10th Pres a few times since moving to this area, and it was my home church when I was a toddler! So I feel a warm person connection to this place through its music, its ingenuity, and its work with 10th Pres.

In 1971, Allen Organ created “the world's first digital musical instrument” using technology that had been developed for the Apollo Space program!

….

Now we're moving into “Octave Hall” for the evening's presentations. As we walk in, what is organist Barry Holben playing but the overture to The Phantom of the Opera--my favorite musical and some of my favorite music. Now he's into some really jazzy ragtime-inspired piece, and I wish we would all get up and dance!

Allen Organ hosts about tweleve special events a year.The factory ½ mile from here is the largest organ-building facility in the world. They build “theatre organs” with a horseshoe console, made to accompany plays, movies, dance, etc. “Just entertainment machines.” Digitally sampled and reproduced drums, pianos, lots of fun sounds.... At this point, he paused the presentation to press a button, and, VOILA! The stage began to rotate, and another organ came to the front! Whew!

The other type is the “Classical” organ. You can “pull out all the stops,” quite literally. Barry Holben played two snippets to show the diversity of the instrument: a Bach aria, a trumpet tune (Jeremiah Clark's “Voluntary,” I do believe), and a toccata. Wow. Great showmanship!

Now, Randall Forte executive director of the LV Arts Council, has gotten up to introduce the evenings' ceremonies with a brief talk emphasizing the people who are the creative force of the arts—not buildings, not (just) institutions, etc.

Three arts-supporting businesses are represented here tonight: Allen Organ, Just Born candy company (makers of Peeps!), and Air Products. The lady from Just Born talked about a current trend in corporate sponsors of the arts. Companies used to patronize the arts in order to improve their reputation in and relationship with their community; now they are only interested in promoting visibility in order to improve the bottom line. Make arts accessible to people, especially young people. Balancing between supporting initiatives that meet basic human needs and those that promote the arts. Choose ones that enhance education. The lady from Air Products talked about a commitment to making sure communities are healthy and strong, and that this will not happen without the arts. She adjured us: “We're in the world to change the world.”

Now the presentation of grant award checks! I'll write another post in a bit about these Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts Project Stream grants. I had a good talk with someone from the council who answered my questions about Who funded these grants? What was the nomination/application process? What was the selection process? What are the standards by which these are judged? etc. So keep an eye open for a post on that topic later.

Many of the organizations that were honored are focused on youth: educational initiatives, masterclasses, inner-city events, etc. Many are based on networking: drawing together existing organizations into larger cooperation.

Here is a full list of grant award recipients:
Anita Shapolsky Art Foundation
Ballet Guild of the Lehigh Valley
Community Action Development Corporation of Allentown
Dancelink
David Leonhardt, pianist
Easton Garlic Fest
Jim Thorpe Art Weekend
Lydia Panas, photographer
Mock Turtle Marionette Theater
Muhlenberg College Piano Series
The Nurture/Nature Center, “exploring visions of land use as modern art”
Penn State Lehigh Valley (for an exhibition called “Reaction and Healing: 10th Anniversary of 9-11”)
Peter Schmidt, “The Teddy Bear Awards”
Sally Wiener Grotta, photographer
Shelley Oliver, dancer, & her tap dancing group
Tabitha O. Robinson-Scott, dance choreographer
Two Part Invention concerts
WDIY, the local radio station, for a program called “Musings”
Young People's Philharmonic of the Lehigh Valley

It's nice to note that Marco Calderon is the official photographer for this event; please read my review of his current exhibit!

Interview with Bruce Herman part 4

2011-10-06T06:00:00.003-05:00

Please read parts 1, 2, and 3 of this interview (see the sidebar of archived posts). Your comments are welcome.

Part 4: The Kataphatic and Apophatic Paths

IA: There are many obvious spiritual parallels to what you're describing. One thing I’ve been thinking about recently are the two traditional ways of understanding God: the “Affirmative Way” and the “Negative Way.” Both are valid approaches, and they need to balance each other out. It seems as if you are describing the Affirmative Way, the Way of Images, the way of learning about God by means of what He has given us to see and to touch and to taste, and the people He has given us to interact with, rather than just learning about Him in silence.

BH: The Via Negativa, the Apophatic Way, is a way that I think is very real and valid and it's something, actually, strangely enough, that is in my most recent work. I don't know if you picked up on it on my website there, the Presence/Absence paintings.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been exploring a kind of Apophatic approach. There is an absence of the human figure, an absence of any overt narrative of any sort in those paintings. There's one painting in that series of an unclad male figure with his back to the viewer, and the title is “Witness”:
He is the one figurative element in a series of more than 30 paintings in which there are no figures, there are no recognizable objects. He is the Presence, as it were, and the rest of the body of work is the Absence. I actually think I learned as much or more in doing that series of paintings than I have ever done in more overtly narrative works. The Apophatic approach, the Via Negativa, is not only valid but really necessary to ever really rediscover the Via Positiva or the more positive approach.

IA: That's absolutely fascinating because visual art, by its nature, you think of it as having to use the Affirmative Way, because it is by means of images. But as you said, the figurative images have been working their way out of your paintings recently. It is like the dilemma that every writer faces: how do we write about silence, and how do we write about that which is beyond description yet do it in words.

BH: Yes. You know, Virginia Woolfe's book To the Lighthouse is an example of that, I think.

IA: Of writing beyond what language is capable of expressing?

BH: I think she's trying to push it there. The story, anyway, not the language necessarily, but the story. The whole middle section of the book has no human story at all. There's nothing unfolding in the narrative that has to do with people. It's in an empty place. That emptying is maybe analogous to times in my faith as a Christian, even very recently, when there was an emptiness, an internal darkness, where I met God. It was a surprising way of meeting God. It wasn't anything I was looking for. It was when my parents died, two years ago. They both died within two months of each other. It was such an unexpected occurrence. Neither one of them looked close to death. That threw me into a time of introspection. I'm only now, two years later, just beginning to emerge from it. During that time, I wasn't able to do a lot of painting, practically speaking, because I was the executor for both my father's and my mother's affairs, and so I was wrapped up in trying to care for my mom after my dad died, and then she was hospitalized and died, and I had to take care of all the practical affairs. So I didn't do a lot of painting. But over the course of the last eighteen months I did a portrait of my father:

portrait of the artist's father

and a portrait of my mother:

portrait of the artist's mother

In many ways, they are very like Rembrandt paintings; they are very traditional-looking in many ways, compared to other work I have done. Fortunately, my wife and my friends all tell me that they still look like my paintings, so I’m sort of now turning a corner and wondering what I am supposed to do next, after the Presence/Absence paintings. And what I actually have done next is these portraits. So right now I’m working on a self-portrait:

portrait of the artist

And I just did a commissioned portrait of the retiring President of Gordon College, Judson Carlberg:

portrait of Judson Carlberg

And so I find myself, interestingly, doing very traditional portraits. Although they're traditional in only one sense, that there's a very great likeness, a specific kind of likeness, that I’ve achieved in this painting. Both coloristically and in terms of the paint quality, they feel like my other work. They still participate in that body of work, but they sort of surprised me by taking me in this direction. So I’m still a little bit raw about that. I'm not sure what I’m supposed to be doing next, and I’m working it out.

IA: It's not completely dissociated; you have done portrait work before.

BH: Yes, but, for instance, I haven't done a self-portrait since I was an undergraduate, and I graduated from college in 1977. It's been a while! I guess if you look at some of the figures in my paintings, you could say they look like portraits, but very few of the figures in my paintings, until fairly recently, were particularized. They were more generalized figures. When I started doing the Mary paintings, that is when I started doing more particularized figures, in which you can recognize an actual person. But it wasn't until I did the portrait of my father, after he died, that I felt I was doing an actual portrait. It's new and old territory.

In My End is My Beginning

BH: T. S. Eliot says, towards the end of The Four Quartets, “The end of all our exploring will be to return to the place where we began and know the place for the first time.” I feel that's what I’m doing, in some ways. What motivated me to want to become an artist, as a little boy, was trying to make portraits of my parents and my grandparents. I loved drawing faces and hands when I was a kid. When I was in art school, I desperately wanted to learn how to draw and paint well enough to do a really good portrait. By the time I got to grad school, I kind of had either lost interest in portraiture, or because of my exposure to modern art learned that I had to get into a much more complex and problematic conversation, as it were, then just learning how to do good portraits. So it has been a long journey, but here I am again, back doing portraits, which is really strange! But I feel that I have brought with me everything I have learned along the way, so these portraits have certain resonances; I hope, anyway, that they carry the rest of that work along with them.

IA: Charles Williams, the writer whose work I'm studying right now—

BH: I love Charles Williams!

IA: Oh, good! I'm so glad to hear that, because he is far too overlooked, I think.

BH: An amazing writer.

IA: He talks about that. He says that some of the greatest poets in their time of maturity, when they have mastered their art and gotten deeply into it, that they often return to their earliest style, but with a revised approach. He actually laments the fact that he thinks some of the greatest writers started to do that and then died unexpectedly, or for whatever other reason were not able to completely live through their earliest style again. He mentions that Hopkins did this, he mentions that Dante did this. I think he says that Wordsworth began to. And then he says that he was just starting to do this; he was writing an eighth novel and a third—or actually a fourth—volume of Arthurian poetry, and he wrote to his wife that he was starting to go back and bring his mature style into his older style. And then of course he died very unexpectedly and did not live to do that.

BH: That's so interesting! I didn't know that about Charles Williams. Now that you mention that, Sorina, I remember Philip Guston, my mentor in graduate school, saying that if a painter lives long enough, he regains almost a second innocence. I think that may be what Eliot was talking about when he says that the end of all our exploring will be to return to the place where we began and know the place for the first time. I think that's true. If you live long enough, you begin to realize that the thing you think is so familiar is very strange and mysterious. The thing we take for granted, that is right in front of us, is actually fraught with mystery and unimaginable depth and value. This is why I grieve over the divorce rate in our country. People don't stay together long enough to find out that the person they're married to is an amazing, living wonder. That's sort of what I’ve found out after being married to my wife Meg for almost 40 years. I'm married to an amazing human being! There have been times over the last 40 years when we couldn't stand each other!

I feel the same way about art: I'm just beginning to understand something that I began doing 40 years ago.

IA: Well, I hope you're not saying you're coming to the end! I hope you have another 20, 25 years of paintings in you yet!

BH: I hope so too! I'm excited about this new, unknown territory of what was once so familiar: portraiture.

IA: I look forward to seeing what you do!

"Prospero's Tempest" from the Presence/Absence series

Ekphrasis Report #13

2011-10-05T20:58:00.005-05:00

Have you ever seen a work of visual art used successfully as an integral part of a worship service?

On this past chilly Monday evening, a few of us gathered at my home church for the first "official" Ekphrasis of the year. Our Sept. meeting was mostly planning, although we did some good workshopping as well.

Anyway, SPB, MB, NI, JF, ES, JA, and I gathered to share works and talk. This was the first workshop meeting that was also open to "interested observers," and a couple of the newcomers were just that. This is part of our slowly unfolding campaign to network with a large number of churches and to get involved with the whole Christian community in our area.

MB began by reading the first chapter of a novel-in-progress: a gripping, fast-paced, visually stunning tale of fairies, mystery, and murder.

SPB then shared an ink (pen and inkwash) landscape drawing whose intricate detail drew much praise. We had a brief little discussion (with much jovial ribbing) about our ability to read meanings into a visual work with frightful dexterity.

JA then shared a poem, a tightly-knit personal lyric, full of careful word choices and interesting modifiers, ostensibly the tale of an ending love, but really a more domesticated account of a small marital dilemma. A very beautiful, understated work.

Between and among workshopping these pieces, we had an excellent discussion about visual arts in church. Hence the question above: Have you ever seen a work of visual art -- painting, drawing, sculpture -- used in a worship service? Not just displayed in the sanctuary, but mentioned by the pastor, used as inspiration for music, developed as the basis of a sermon? How did it work? Did it enhance worship? Did it distract? What kind of work was it? Was it explicitly biblical, or abstract, or what? Please share your experience!

Interview with Bruce Herman part 3

2011-10-05T06:00:00.001-05:00

Please read parts 1 and 2, which are available in the sidebar of previous posts. Your comments are welcome.

Interview with Bruce Herman
Part 3: Teaching Art

IA: As a teacher, as a professor, what do you think are the most important lessons for student artists to learn, or areas of mental growth for young artists, either conceptually, spiritually, or technically?

BH: I actually started the art program at Gordon College almost 30 years ago now; there was no real formal art program at Gordon before I got there. When I drew up the first art major curriculum at the college, it was very much based on observation. It was kind of a traditional approach to learning drawing, painting, and sculpting from life—from direct observation—rather than working strictly from the imagination or working abstractly or strictly approaching it from the point of view of design. It was very much based on observation. I am still very committed to that kind of curriculum. One way of saying it succinctly would be to say I tell my students that looking comes first. Visual art starts—I believe it should start, anyway—with looking at the beauty and the complexity and the mystery of the visual world, the actual physical world around us.

There is a corollary to that in writing. The poet William Carlos Williams once said “No ideas, but in things.” I love that. I love the idea that you ground your knowledge, you ground your craft, in actuality, in the way things actually are. Another way of saying it for writers is, “Write what you know.” I tell students, you can't become a visual artist unless you spend a long time studying the world around you and trying to record it somehow faithfully. That being said, I don't think there's one style of art that is superior to others, like realism vs. abstraction. But as a starting point for any student, they need to learn to observe carefully because the best lessons about color, the best lessons about light, about form and space, about texture: the best lessons about those things can be had by looking at the Creation that God has made and responding to that! I think later on as you get older and more mature as an artist, you can take liberties and play with that. Not only when you get older – I always gave my students plenty of latitude to play and experiment.

In some ways, in the 20th century, modern art was a long long experiment, trying to see what can be done, what the possibilities are. A lot of great stuff has come out of that experimentation. But you can't experiment only, forever. At some point you have to settle into a pictorial language of some sort, and then communicate. I gave away my prejudice earlier: I believe that art is a form of communication. Communication is a bedrock of what we do in order to be in community and make things that mean something to other people. It's not enough just to express yourself, in other words: you've got make something that means something to someone else.

IA: It's not just an internal discussion; it has to be an external dialogue as well.

BH: Dialogue, not monologue, I guess is another way to say it.

IA: In connection with that comes your commitment to working from live models as well, right?

BH: Yes. You can't draw what you can't see.

"Persistence of Vision," 2005

Otherwise you're just responding to your own drawing, the marks you're making on the page, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do from time to time. Some painters, sculptors, and other kinds of artists who work abstractly, in some ways that's what they are doing: responding to their own work. But ultimately you run out of gas as an artist if all you're doing is responding to your own work, the marks that you're making on the page, the splashes of color that you're moving around on the canvas. At some point you have to look at something else in order to refresh your visual memory and stoke your imagination.

There are spiritual and psychological components to all of that. If you're just in monologue mode, you really don't learn a whole lot. George MacDonald once said that the only religion that the better you practice it, the fewer the converts, is self-worship. I think there's a corollary to that in art. If the art is only about your own art, and it's not in communication with anything else or anyone else, eventually it becomes so stale and formulaic that it is virtually meaningless.

An elegy for St. Sebastian

Marco Calderon exhibit opening

2011-10-04T12:02:00.010-05:00

It is a perfect fall day: bright sun, cold wind, colors easing into the trees; boots, tights, plaid skirt, beret. A lovely day for a walk, or a drive, or an art show. So here I am, at Muhlenberg College, at the opening of photographer Marco Calderon's solo show "Block by Block: The Merchants of Old Allentown".

This show is an excellent, fascinating combination of art, documentation, and living community. Each photograph is a portrait of the owner(s) of a small business in the old part of Allentown (Liberty, Chew, 9th, 10th, Linden streets). Each is accompanied by a lively little history of the person, when s/he bought the business, interesting biographical background, etc. So they are visual and textual, immediate and vested with psst/present stories and personalities.

Barry Houser

I think it's the personalities that jump out. Calderon has captured joyful, expressive facial expression and has depicted these colorful local characters each in the midst of business, wearing the clothing or carrying the accoutrements of their trades. There is exciting diversity here, representative of Allentown's demographic: people from the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Mexico, Greece, and of Thai, Italian, and various other European ancestry. The pictures are colorful in more than ethnic ways, as well: replete with grocery goods, beauty supplies, and the tools and trappings of landscape design, law, cuisine, floral arrangements, motorcycles, and formal wear.

Heidi (Roth) Semmel

I'll list each of the merchants here, in case you live in the area and can patronize their businesses. It would be great to walk into one of their shops and let them know I saw their portrait in the Calderon show!

Louis Belletieri of Cheesesteak Louie's
Martin Karess of Maress, Reich & Furst
Candida Svirovsky of Candida's Bar
Barry Houser of 12th Street Barbershop
Christian Brown of Brown Design Corp.
Ana Pena of Las Palmas Restaurant
Carlos Rodriquez of Rodriquez Mini Market
Heidi (Roth) Semmel of C. E. Roth Formal Wear
Peter Phrom of Kow Thai Take Out
Fred J. Moery of Fred J. Moyer Plumbing
Jorge Rosales of La Placita Mexico Deli
Iftekhar Ansari of A1 Mini Mart
Chris Farkas of Bossman Studios
Mery Garcia of Las Calenitas Unisex Beauty Salon
Bill Boberski of Dan's Cycle Service

Christian Brown

I think my favorite is the one of Christian Brown. It's dynamic, enthusiastic, and it works on a limited palette of simple, clear colors. The delight on Brown's face seems to me to be the passion of a person who loves his work. That's how I felt yesterday, reciting "Kubla Kahn" to my students as they sat in the dark watching a slide show of beautiful images illustrating the poem. That's how I felt expounding upon the eternal nature of art as we read "Ozymandias." That's how I felt discussing "true myth" with a student who is writing a paper comparing Oedipus and Jesus. That's how I imagine Christian Brown must feel in this picture, as the flame of joyful work, the flame of fulfilled human[ism], burns through him. And he gets to share that through this photograph, just as I hope the artist's I've interviewed got to share it in their talks with me.

Fred J. Moyer

There's also a "Norman Rockwell" quality about a few of the photos, especially the one of Fred J. Moyer. Again, there's a limited color palette (although the majority of the pictures are vibrant with many hues). It is a close study of his face, lined and kind, in his work environment, where he belongs, with the accumulated stuff of a long life of work around him. It's very American. This whole show is very American.

When I met Marco Calderon at a Lehigh Valley Arts Council event this past summer, we had a great talk about the nature of this area. I expressed the ignorant, self-perpetuating stereotype that is exactly what he hates to hear: "Allentown is such a tough place to live, with only a small arts community, high crime rates, high poverty rates, and not much beautiful to look at." He immediately, but politely, jumped into a passionate denunciation of this misconception. On the contrary, he asserted, Allentown is a beautiful, colorful, rich place. Sure, you need to open your eyes and not just walk through with head down, clutching your purse (that's my interpretation), but there are fascinating people to see all throughout the most "troubled" areas. And he's out to prove that, camera in his hand, enterpreneurial energy in his spirit, photo by photo.

His other big project in this area was Welcome, Neighbor, a series of portraits of immigrant residents of the area. For each of these endeavors, Calderon has employed his considerable charm, talent, and energy to secure commissions or grants. The first series was the result of a commission by the ACLU of the Lehigh Valley. The current show, "Block by Block," was "made possible by a grant from the Rider-Pool Foundation, the Allentown Economic Development Corporation, and the Old Allentown Preservation Association."

Art can have a transformative influence on the community in which it is created, for sure, especially when it has such personal connection with individuals, organizations, and particular spaces in its area. This is, perhaps, yet another aspect of the recent resurgence in public art. Artists are opening their process to public view. Artists are speaking for, about, and into current events, national/international situations, human rights crises, etc. Art is coming out of the garret and into the street, the school, the shop, the home again. I am on the lookout for ways it is coming into the church. But that's another story.

Interview with Bruce Herman part 2

2011-10-04T06:00:00.000-05:00

Please read yesterday's post, Part 1 of this interview.

Interview with Bruce Herman

Part 2: Christians in the Visual Arts

"Annunciation"

IA: Let's shift a little bit now, if we could, talk about CIVA, Christians in the Visual Arts, if we could. It's housed there at Gordon College, right? How long has it been housed there?

BH: It's been at Gordon almost ten years now. It has its offices there. It's not affiliated with Gordon in any special way any more than it is with another college, it just happens to have its offices there. We're happy to have them there. We've had students serve as interns in the office from time to time. And I recently accepted a position on the board of CIVA a couple years ago, so I’m now on the board, but I wasn't on the board for most of the time that they've had their office there.

IA: As I understand it, CIVA's mission—well, it has several missions. It's to provide spaces for artists to show in, to have exhibits and traveling shows, and so forth. But also when it began, it was trying to fill a gap, that visual artists felt like they didn't fit in either world: that they didn't fit in the Church because the Church was so uncomfortable with the visual arts, but that they didn't fit in the mainstream world because they were “too religious.” Is that true that this is one of the dilemmas CIVA saw when it began?

BH: Oh, definitely. I think that's still true to some extent, but I think a lot of younger artists who are Christians now-a-days may not feel that double alienation, that double homelessness that some of us felt back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Partly that's because the whole concept of Christians in the Arts has gotten more sophisticated. For example, you can be a member of CIVA, Christians in the Visual Arts, and not necessarily be making religious art, or quote-unquote “Christian art”: you're just making art. And you're also a committed Christian. I think many of CIVA's members early on may have felt particularly drawn to the sacred art tradition and wanting to make religious art or make imagery that had some specific contribution to make relative to religious symbolism or the Bible or their Christian faith, and for that reason they found a kind of a cold shoulder in the art world. I think the art world is just as cold today as it was back then to very obvious Christian imagery. I don't think they're any more hospitable now than they were 20 or 30 years ago; I just think a lot of Christian artists have a different emphasis in their work. They're not particularly interested in the sacred art tradition or making religious paintings. Whereas, I’ll speak for myself, I still am very committed to that. That is my main interest as a painter, is to try to get at that, to participate in some way in that tradition, in that conversation with Fra Angelico, with Piero della Francesca, with Michelangelo, with Reubens, with Rembrandt, with Durer, all those artists who hundreds of years ago were making sacred art.

The difference, of course, is that in our day and age, I don't really have a job [as a painter]: the Church hasn't employed me to do this. The Church employed someone like Michelangelo or da Vinci. So it's a little bit different. That's a question that comes up a lot: “Why are you doing these religious paintings if no church is buying them or commissioning you to do them?” I’m not sure that I have a really clear rationale, other than that I feel compelled to.

IA: Now even though churches are not directly patronizing or commissioning these works, is “The Church” as a broader entity less cold towards the visual arts than it was, say, 30 years ago?

BH: I think that's unquestionably true. And in a lot of ways, thanks to CIVA. One thing that that CIVA has done really well is beginning to familiarize Protestant and Evangelical Christians with art and the possibilities of visual art for worship and for inclusion in the life of the church. A lot of churches have art galleries now; lots of churches have art galleries and have regular rotating art exhibits. Many churches, but probably not as many as have galleries, incorporate visual art into their worship now. There have been a number of books written about this, and you are probably familiar with them, but I think CIVA has played a pivotal role in informing the Evangelical community anyway, and warming them up to visual arts.

Here are a few examples of such books:

Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch

Beholding the Glory: Incarnation through the Arts by Jeremy Begbie

For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts by W. David O. Taylor

detail from "Betrothed"

IA: You have had a least one experience where a church has installed a series of panels of your work.

BH: Yes, I have had several.

IA: Are those permanent installations that become part of the sanctuary, just like stained-glass windows?

BH: No, actually. Nothing of mine has become a permanent installation anywhere. I have one very large, ambitious project of eight 11-foot tall vertical triptychs for the Lanesville Congregational Church here in my hometown in Gloucester, Massachusetts. I worked on those over a two-and-a-half year period, collaborating with a Bible scholar who at that time was the pastor of that church. His name is Gordon Hugenberger; he's now the senior minster at Park Street Church in Boston. At the time, he was the pastor of this church and I collaborated with him on that project. Those paintings were up for probably 3 or 4 years and then they were taken down. They were put up again for about 6 or 8 months and then they were taken down again, and they are not up at the moment. In fact, they are not going to be up; the church has decided not to install them again.

The Lanesville Installation

That was the longest, I think. I have these other large paintings called Magnificat, the Mary paintings. Those were up for 2 ½ years in a chapel in Orveito, Italy, in the monastery of San Paolo, which is the home base campus for the Gordon College in Italy program. Those paintings are now sitting in crates, here in the States. They're going to be exhibited again this fall, 2011, in Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. And then they’ll be exhibited again at the College of the Ozarks next winter. But other than that, they haven't got a permanent home. They're just being exhibited.

installation of part of the "Magnificat" series

IA: With either of those, or especially with the Lanesville Church, were the paintings incorporated into the worship service directly when they were there? Was there a sermon series around them, or was there discussion around them in the worship service?

BH: Yes. There was an ongoing sermon series, I think it was 20 sermons, on the book of Judges, then the book of Exodus. The actual theme to this series was “Christ in the Old Testament,” in other words, pre-incarnational manifestations of Christ, or adumbrations of the Messiah in the book of Judges and the book of Exodus.

IA: That's beautiful! I wish I would see more of that, that churches would continue to incorporate art like that. But they are, more and more.

"Second Adam"

Interview with Bruce Herman part 1

2011-10-03T06:00:00.002-05:00

Special edition! Here is another interview, the penultimate one, in the “Where are we now?” series! We're offering this particularly wonderful interview now, long after the others, to begin wrapping up the series. It was an amazing journey; I got to talk to many artists, authors, musicians, arts promoters, actors, directors, professors, students.... I learned much from these delightful conversations; here is one summary of a theme that ran through the series, and here is another idea that came from what I learned. Please take a moment to peruse the INTRODUCTION AND INDEX to this series, to leave me a comment, etc.

Interview with Bruce Herman, artist and
Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in the Fine Arts
at Gordon College, Wenham, MA.
Edited from our phone conversation on 20 April 2011

Bruce is one of the finest painters working today from within the Christian tradition. His reputation among the [Christian] faith-and-arts community ranks with that of Makoto Fujimura and others who are ushering in a rebirth of Christian humanism. Even wikipedia recognizes this resurgence: on its “Christian art” page, there is a sub-heading entitled “The re-birth of Christian fine art,” which claims:
The last part of the 20th and the first part of the 21st century have seen a focused effort by artists who claim faith in Christ to re-establish art with themes that revolve around faith, Christ, God, the Church, the Bible and other classic Christian themes as worthy of respect by the secular art world. Artists such as Makoto Fujimura have had significant influence both in sacred and secular arts. Other notable artists include Carlos Cazares, Gary P. Bergel, John August Swanson, Deborah Sokolove.
I added Bruce's name to the list.

His works are a stunning combination of Medieval mystical vision with postmodern human sensibility. I have written about him before on this blog: at the end of this post about “layers of revelation” and at the beginning of this Ekphrasis report.

Although our conversation back in April was providentially apposite to my own thoughts, concerns, and interests at the time, I have had to save it for now due to my other writing and publishing deadlines. His insights remain permanently relevant and essential. As an added blessing, Bruce recently edited the cover image for my upcoming poetry collection, Caduceus, which is due out from David Robert Books in February of 2012. Please enjoy this interview all week; I'm posting it in 5 parts for your reading pleasure.

Part 1: Tradition and Communication

"Meditation," 2001

IA: I've been looking around at your website; I like how the paintings are arranged chronologically (under “catalog”). It was really fun to look around and see how your work has developed over time. It seemed to me as if you have worked your way into your distinctive style. I would describe your style as looking like a combination of the Medieval and the Modern: the way you have the gold backgrounds and sacramental settings, and yet the people feel immediate to me. I feel an immediate connection to the characters. Is that what you're going for, a combination of the timeless and the contemporary?

BH: Well, sure. One way of framing it for me is that I understand tradition—whether it's poetry or paintings or music—I don't think of tradition as being a body of work that's in the past that needs to be preserved and “museum-ized.” <.b>I think of tradition as a living conversation. As G. K. Chesterton once said, “Being dead should be no disqualification for voting.” I want to be in conversation with Rembrandt as much as I want to be in conversation with Brice Marden, the important contemporary/living American painter. That is the nature of art and the arts in general: because they touch on perennial human themes and deal with the big questions, the first-level questions (Who are we? Why are we here? What went wrong? Where are we going? What's our destination? etc. etc.)—because it deals with those first-level question, they are always alive. It doesn't matter if it was made 500 years ago or 1000 years ago or 15 minutes ago! If it is a genuine work of art, it participates in that larger conversation, which I think of as tradition.

IA: Is this also true in terms of your technique as well as in terms of the content? Can you describe how you create that? How do you create that gold, shiny effect?

BH: That's a very traditional technique. I use the same technique that icon painters have used for over a thousand years. I work on a wooden panel. They didn't have plywood back then, but I have high-quality plywood panels that I cradle on the back with regular lumber in order to make them stiff and rigid so that they don't warp. Then I prepare the surface of the plywood (it's usually birch wood) with what's called traditional gesso, which is a hide glue, in my case rabbit skin glue, mixed with marble dust and calcium carbonate (which is chalk). That traditional gesso is put on in many, many layers, sometimes as many as fifteen to twenty very thin layers. It's white, a very luminous color white, and it gets polished and sanded to a glasslike surface. Then I employ what's called a water gilding. I use actual gold, 23-carat gold that comes in microscopically thin sheets. I lay it over the top of the wet surface of the gesso. Sometimes I’ll go over the gesso with another substance that's called bole. It's a gilder's clay, a highly refined terracotta clay that's fixed with a hide glue and turns into a kind of soupy runny red paint. And then that's polished and sanded in many layers, and then the gold leaf goes over the top of that.

All that process can take a long time, as you can imagine. During that whole time, traditional icon painters used to pray all the time that they were doing that preparation so that when they begin to paint the icon, the panel is so prayed-into that it's imbued with a kind of spiritual quality to begin with. And then the figure of the saint, whether it's a Christ figure or a Madonna, that figure then is given a holy place, as it were, to be, to live, in the space of the icon: the emotional, psychological, spiritual space of the icon, which is also a physical space.

By the time I actually begin painting on the gold leaf, I have put in a lot of time loving creating a space on the surface that my figures, or the narrative, or even some of the abstractions that I’ve been doing, which have a kind of spiritual intention behind them, if I had to summarize it quickly I would say, the gold itself, expensive as it is, and the labor-intensive process of preparing the surface for the image I’m going to paint is so costly both in terms of time and actual value of the gold, that it actually puts me into a place where I know that this is a sacrifice. Here's the thing that's hard. It's very hard for anybody. Once you've done all that, you kind of wreck it by painting on it!

IA: Really?!

BH: Really! Because unless you are like the icon painters, which I am not, icon painters have a formula that they follow for applying the paint in just the right way to create just the right image. But I find my image in the process of painting the way modern painters do, like abstract painters or expressionists, or whatever. I find the image in the process of painting. So there is a kind of wrecking that goes on along the way. I paint, scrape it out, repaint.... Over the course of 25-100 hours, I lose and find the image dozens of times. If anyone actually x-rayed one of my paintings, they wouldn't find a painting underneath, they'd find a bunch of paintings underneath! That's why there's such a textured quality to the look of the paintings.

My painting process is very rigorous. I add and subtract layer after layer after layer of paint. I scrape through the layers, and I sand; sometimes I even take out an electric sander and sand through layers of the painting. That excites me visually, because I see those vestiges of the former image that's being painted over top of, coming through again; they kind of re-emerge, like a palimpsest. I find that fascinating, that old writings that have been scraped off the parchment reemerge hundreds of years later as kind of ghost words. I see that happening in my paintings, with under-layers breaking through again. That gets me really excited to keep working on a painting.

"Annunciation," 2002

IA: Do you read each step of this process metaphorically? You said at the beginning that there are layers of prayer worked in. and then each of the materials and each of the surfaces seems to me to be spiritually significant, and also each process: like you said, it's sacrifice, it's layers of meaning... Do you read the whole process spiritually?

BH: Absolutely.

IA: Is that why or how you worked your way into this method?

BH: Well, yes. That's how I understand the whole meaning of what I’m doing all together. If it isn't costly and if it isn't a real sacrifice, for me it's just merely self-expression. And honestly, Sorina, I might have started off when I was in my teens as an artist very concerned with self-expression, but as I’ve gotten older and over the nearly 40 years I’ve been painting, I’ve lost interest in self-expression. I don't really care to express myself. For me, my style, my self-expression is automatic. I can't help it. But that's not what my art is about. For me, my desire is to communicate, to have people look at my paintings and to be in communication with them as well as with the “dead poets”—with Dante, with Blake, with Bach, with Rembrandt. For me that's what the tradition is. And I’m part of that tradition. I'm in that tradition. I'm standing in the living tradition. So self-expression is inevitable, but that's not the point of it. The real point is dialogue. The point is entering into real communication.

I also find it interesting that the word “communication” shares a root with the word “communion.” They used to say that someone who participated in the Lord's Supper was a “communicant,” and they would “communicate.” To “communicate” meant to participate in the Communion. I find that really interesting and compelling and very much what I’m trying to get at with my work as a painter.

IA: So it's dialogue, and its conversation, and it's also community, as well?

BH: Communion and community. Yes.

IA: So it's the community of all the previous artists who have gone before, and all the ones who are working now, and the audience?

BH: Right, and all those who have not yet been born.

IA: And in communion and communication with God, as well?

BH: Absolutely. In fact, in some ways, I think that what Jesus did when He instituted what we call the Last Supper or the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist—when He instituted that meal, it's interesting He that chose the most common elements: bread and wine. In that day, those were the most common foods. The word “common” also shares the root of “community” and “communion.” That's actually where the words “communion” and “community” come from, from the word “common.” The idea that we can share something in common, all of us human beings, not only with the living, but also with the dead, with that communion of saints, that cloud of witnesses, as the book of Hebrews put its, for me that's just absolutely compelling. That what makes me move as an artist: the idea that there is a continuity with the those who have gone before us.

IA: Would you go so far as to say that your method is sacramental?

BH: All that great cloud of witnesses, those who are listed in that chapter, at the very end of that chapter the writer of Hebrews says, “All of these died without having received the promises.” Because they were waiting until we should be born, because they were waiting for a better thing to be given so that we would participate with them. So I have thought that it is so profoundly simple, actually. When heaven finally comes to earth, wen the bridegroom comes to the bride beautifully prepared for her Husband, all of us will be there. In that moment, all of time is consummated. So past, present, and future become one thing.

IA: Are you expressing that in any one given painting, or would you say it is more like you are participating in it?

BH: I'm just participating in it. I'm just a little tiny part of that bigger conversation. I would say that's true of every one of my paintings. Each single painting is a small part of a larger body of work that I’ve been doing now for many years and so in one sense ever single painting is about that larger conversation, just as the whole body of my work from when I first began until when I finally die and stop working, that whole body of work will be part of the conversation as well, I hope.

Like every artist, I make a lot of really bad paintings. I tell my students, “Don't be afraid to make mistakes; that's how you learn.” If you're always insisting that every painting has to be perfect, you’ll never make a single work of art.

IA: How long does one painting take you from start to finish?

BH: Oh, gosh, I have no idea! I'm sure it varies a lot. My response, when people look at a painting with me and say, “How long does it take to do this”? I sort of smile and say, “Forty years.”

IA: Right! Exactly. So it must be hard for you to part with a painting when you sell it.

BH: No, it isn't. I'm very happy for a painting to go where it belongs. It doesn’t belong in my studio.

IA: But unlike me with my writing, I can sell thousands of copies of my writing (I wish I would!) and I still have it—there's no “original,” with writing. Whereas with you, there's the original, the piece itself, and a copy has no soul.

BH: It isn't hard for me to part with it, but what's hard for me (and I haven't figured this out yet, and I don't think any painter has) is that I wish everyone could have the original. If someone sees a photograph of a painting, or sees it on the internet, no matter how good that photograph is or that digital facsimile is, it's nothing like the original in its real presence. The surface of the painting is the skin of the painting. It's like the difference between a real person and a photograph of the person. I guess one thing that bothers me is that I can't make enough paintings to give to everybody. That's why I think museums are wonderful. Once an artist has been dead for a long time and even the people who originally owned their paintings have been dead for a long time, that painting often ends up in some public space where anybody can come and look at them. I love to visit the large museums. There are some favorite ones I go back and look at all the time. I think, “Wow, someone owned this great Rembrandt self-portrait, and then someone else owned it, and then someone else owned it, and finally the last person who owned it gave it as a gift to this museum, the Metropolitan or whatever, and now I get to have it.”

IA: We've all had that experience that there's a painting we have known very well in copies, in prints, and then we see it “live” and it's overwhelming.

BH: Yes, that's true.

IA: Now, are there many other American painters who are using this time-honored icon-painting tradition?

BH: There are lots of icon painters out there, but do you mean contemporary artists like me using it?

IA: Yes, contemporary artists using the methods: the gesso, the bole, the building up of layers and then painting over top of that.

BH: I honestly don't know. I think there probably are some. I don't personally know any, but there may be.

IA: So you are working in this exhausting, time-consuming method, and it's almost unique.

BH: I wouldn't assume that it's unique, but it may be. When we first started talking, you said something about my style. Whenever I hear the word “style” I kind of wince, because I think an honest style is like the way you walk or the way you talk. It's just natural to you. It's not something you self-consciously decide to do. If you started thinking about the way you walk, you'd get very awkward very quickly. It's more natural to just honestly pursue something in your work and then the style emerges. As a writer, you probably know this too. Your style of writing isn't something you decide to do; it's the natural way that you end up writing. Your voice ends up coming through what you write, correct?

IA: Yes. But you do grow into it as you move from being an apprentice to mastering the techniques.

BH: Yes. There are no shortcuts for getting to the point when your voice as an author gets heard in the text. I think that's true in painting. It takes years and years of painting, of trial and error, to get to the point where you get over your self-consciousness and begin to paint unselfconsciously. That's when your style really emerges.

IA: Do you think of yourself as belonging to a certain school or movement of painters? Do you have a title for what you do? Do you call yourself, I am a such-and-such type of artist? Or to say it a different way: A hundred years from now, when people are looking back and describing your work, how do you think they will categorize you?

BH: Oh, gosh. I think you'd be better equipped to answer that than I would. When historians or critics or people who analyze a work of art look at it, I think they see it more clearly than the actual artist or the author. For instance, I don't think Flannery O'Connor thought of herself as a “Southern Gothic”; she just wrote her stories.

IA: And she's a famously bad critic of her own writing.

BH: Oh, I believe that. I don't trust my own assessment of my work.

IA: You're so close to it, you're living in it, that you don't step back and analyze it.

BH: Right. And if I wanted to join some self-consciously styled title like, We are the Boston Neo-Religious Expressionists or something, it would end up being a glib, forced, self-conscious label and it wouldn't be honest.

IA: Well, we'll wait a hundred years and then we'll look at that question again.

BH: I'm happy to wait with you.

"Memory & Origins," 2005

Five-minute Beauvois

2011-09-24T13:29:00.003-05:00

Instead of a "five-minute book review," here's a five-minute film review.

Xavier Beauvois's 2010 film Of Gods and Men (des Hommes et des dieux), which won the Cannes festival prize that year, is one of the best movies I have ever seen. My favorite movie before this was another foreign film, Babette's Feast (in Danish and French); Of Gods and Men trumps it. It is gloriously beautiful, but slow, quiet, peaceful, and gently terrifying. It transforms horror into beauty and joy. I won't say much here, because my upcoming Curator piece compares it to 1984 and a short story by Tony Woodlief and goes into plot, etc., in some detail. But I just want to say that it is one of the most moving, most beautiful, and most well-made films I have ever seen. For someone who usually loves the huge blockbuster fantasy films, as I do, this is good. This is high praise. So, get it from Netflix right away!

Curator: There & Back Again

2011-09-24T13:24:00.003-05:00

Here is a selection from my latest Curator article:

We humans make sense of our lives by shaping them into narratives. Childhood is the exposition; romances, tragedies, and accomplishments soar up the slope of conflict to peak at the crisis of marriage, death, divorce, a degree, promotion, or publication. We organize little experiences like short stories: beginning, middle, end. Maybe this is why fiction is addictive: each new beach novel or young adult fantasy offers another compelling visualization of that neat arc. Maybe my life will make sense if it matches the triangulation of a fairy tale, novel, or epic.

You can read the whole article here. Your thoughts are welcome.

Ekphrasis Report #12 part three

2011-09-15T11:33:00.000-05:00

please read partone and part two

Finally, we started to work on a VisionStatement or Statement of Purpose. We have asked my church for use ofthe building once a month, and they requested to see some kind ofstatement of who we are and what we're about. So we're working onit.

Here's what we have so far (very rough)

EKPHRASIS: FELLOWSHIP OF CHRISTIANSIN THE ARTS

Striving for technical excellenceand orthodox profundity

[maybe thatshould be “theological profundity”?]

Ekphrasis is a Greek word that translates "to express, enunciate, detail, phrase, signify." We are a group of artists seeking to translate, express, and signify Christian faith and human experience through the written, visual, and performing arts.
We are not "Christian artists." We are artists. We are Christians. Our primary goal as artists is skill in our chosen fields.
Our concept of “art” is informed by history, tradition, and training. Any cultural product that is created without education, practice, and a past is suspect.
We are a community of professionals, semi-professionals, and serious amateurs (actors, choreographers, composers, dancers, directors, filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, writers...) and appreciative observers. At regular monthly meetings, we workshop each other's pieces and performances. While our critiques are constructive, they are incisive.
Appreciative observers are also welcome to attend meetings, listen to the works, and provide constructive feedback.
We believe God, the Creator, is is the source of our creative abilities: He crafted a beautiful, complex world full of pain, glory, and subtlety, and gave His human creatures the amazing gift of “subcreation”--we can, in turn, create little imaginary worlds full of pain, glory, and subtlety. Art is not merely mimetic nor merely diegetic; it is also subcreative, generative, and potentially redemptive. As Andy Crouch has it, we must be culture-makers.
We are conscious of what Gregory Wolfe calls a “tragic sense of life,” due to the Fall. We try to communicate in a mode that does not shamefully speak of the things that the wicked do in secret (Eph. 5:12) and yet exposes the unfruitful deeds of darkness (Eph. 5:11). We sympathize with Flannery O'Connor, who used violence to shock readers into an encounter with sin. We commiserate with T. S. Eliot, who believed modern literature needed to be complex and allusive to communicate truth. We are not afraid of content, lest the secular world have nothing to fear in us.We abhor cliches.
We want to reach into the local Christian congregations, find the artists therein, and provide them with a place where they can grow artistically and spiritually in their vocation. We want to reach into the established local arts communities, find the Christians therein, and invite them to share their expertise and receive nurture in a faith-based community. We want to network with established faith-and-the-arts groups and learn from them as we grow.
We desire to help the Church reclaim the arts. The Church, broadly speaking, was once the center of patronage and creativity. We believe She can be so again.

Ekphrasis Report #12 part 2

2011-09-14T10:55:00.000-05:00

(Please read part one first).

After we finished workshopping pieces of writing, we turned to discussing the promotion and growth of "Ekphrasis:Fellowship of Christians in the Arts." We talked about making the group more open to those who just want to observe and appreciate the arts but who don't have works to share. We will plan to do that, and to promote art appreciation by starting each meeting with a little chat by one of the long-time members on how to appreciate some genre (poetry, drama, modern painting, etc.).

We decided to reach out to three communities, thus:

1. First, we want to reach into the Christian community to find the artists. We would like to request local churches to run an announcement in their bulletins. We'll be typing up such an announcement and sending it out soon. It will read something like:

"Ekphrasis: Fellowship of Christians in the Arts" invites artists of all kinds (actors, choreographers, composers, dancers, directors, filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, writers..) and appreciative observers to attend a congenial evening of workshop and dialogue. Ekphrasis is a Greek word that translates "to express, enunciate, detail, phrase, signify." We are a group of artists seeking to translate, express, and signify Christian faith and human experience through the written, visual, and performing arts. We are committed to technical excellence and orthodox profundity. We meet on the first Monday of every month at Living Hope Church, Allentown, PA, 7-9 pm. Please join us! For more info: iambic.admonit@gmail.com.

2. Secondly, we want to reach into the local arts communities to find the Christians. We thought one way to do that would be to design a poster and see if museums, concert venues, colleges, the Lehigh Valley Arts Council, and other institutions of that nature would allow us to hang such a poster and/or share our meeting announcement. We're going to postpone this step until after our next meeting. More later.

3. Thirdly, we want to tap into the faith-and-arts communities that already exist. I'm going to investigate IAM membership and other organizations of that nature. Any other suggestions are welcome.

tune in tomorrow for a discussion of our vision statement

Ekphrasis Report #12 part 1

2011-09-13T10:32:00.000-05:00

Things are about to change! Our Ekphrasis meeting last night focused on how we can change, develop, and improve to embrace more people, more genres, and a wider vision. Here's what happened.

First, we spent some time in our usual workshop mode (which has actually been on hold for the summer while we had larger, performative-style events). Sharon Barshinger read a new monologue she has written as part of a series. These monologues are quite varied: Biblical, allegorical, mythical, fantastical, realistic. Last night's was spoken in the persona of Haddaseh (Esther), reflecting on her awful marriage and her place in God's huge, painful plan. We discussed the dilemma of a writer who "writes in the blanks" of the Bible: how to balance fidelity to the Biblical text with literary originality. Sharon has also set herself a challenge: the piece was really a dialogue between Esther and Mordecai, with Mordecai's lines left out. So we talked about how difficult it is to write one side of a conversation in such a way that it both sounds natural and recreates the missing half of the discussion.

Next, Marian Barshinger shared a piece of creative writing she composed in connection with performing in the play Shall We Join the Ladies by J. M. Barrie. This murder mystery drama ends indeterminately: the audience has to decide for themselves whodunnit. Well, one time when the Barshinger's drama company was producing this play, the cast was encouraged to write their characters' "backstory": what happened to them before the play began. They decided Marian's character had committed the murder, so she wrote why and how she did it, while the rest wrote up their alibis. Marian's piece was brilliant. She has a great sense of character development, dialogue, and timing/pacing. The story was delightful. I think she could publish it as a short story to accompany Barrie's play.

Next, John Alexanderson shared one of his lovely, well-crafted poems. This one is set in Sante Fe, and is a crafty description of the landscape in the narrative frame of the narrator and another person doing a crossword puzzle. The language plays with the idea of crosswords, bringing strikes, squares, pondering, and hints into the landscape and the relationship.

tomorrow: part two on how Ekphrasis plans to grow and change. Thursday: part three on the crafting of a vision statement for Ekphrasis

Report on the Glen Workshop West

2011-08-23T09:24:00.005-05:00

This report was written by guest blogger and Ekphrasian John Alexanderson. Thanks, John!

I returned from Santa Fe, NM and the Glen Workshop [West] on August 7. We had a fulfilling week of open reading, meaninful interaction with other poets, and even quality entertainment provided by Over the Rhine.

I have attended the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe for 6 years and have met many other poets and instructors of exceptional ability. This has led to positive input on my poetry (as well as that of others), constructive criticism, and even disagreement. In my case, I have learned how to view my poetry more critically, yet to be selective about what of others' criticism is appropriate. I believe this is a part of the growth in my craft that I seek.

In addition, other arts are workshopped for the week. For example, there are workshops in painting, film, memoir, songwriting, film, play/screenwriting, and others. The latter would be a good place to workshop Nor Ever Chaste, Sørina’s fine play. The focus of the Conference is Christ, but Christianity in a more ecumenical sense than other conferences I have attened. Nor Ever Chaste would be welcome in the playwriting group, and would probably be praised/criticized respectfully but honestly. Nor Ever Chaste possibly would not be welcome in some secular conferences but might be overly praised in many Christian conferences.

This conference is somewhat costly [see website] but is worth it. In addition, a Glen East conference began this year at Mt Holyoke College in Massachusetts. I will continue to attend Santa Fe because I have relatives there. But, the nearer meeting in South Hadley, I’m confident, is equally valuable to artists of numerous disciplines.

There is a question that is common at most conferences I don’t remember hearing at the Glen Conferences. It is: “are you published.” The tenor of the Glen is ’way beyond just being published. It is clearly focused on an artist’s craft as opposed to his or her “getting off the ground.” The Conference doesn’t directly consider the first steps that many conferences do. For those that are considering writing as an avocation or even a career The Glen may not be the right experience. For those who have been writing for years, or study/teach it in a place of learning, The Glen has a refreshing and mature focus.

For more info, write me at john dot alexanderson dot ja at gmail dot com.

Ekphrasis Report #11

2011-08-21T09:07:00.003-05:00

This post is written by guest blogger and Ekphrasian Marian Barshinger. Thanks, Marian!

On August 7th, Ekphrasis held a special meeting where Sørina Higgins’ five act play Nor Ever Chaste was read. The reading went extremely well. It was an interactive night of fun as many of us got to get up and engage in the reading. There was a large group (24 people), with many attendees invited outside of Ekphrasis. We were joined by members of Living Hope Presbyterian Church, and also many members of Sørina’s family.

Nor Ever Chaste starts out with the attack of 9/11. With this setting as the backdrop, the play invites us to see how the disaster alters lives and brings lives together. There are many themes of the play: love, marriage, sexuality, differences, and our need for God. Naiant, a nurse, and Stansby, a cop, meet soon after the disaster. Naiant is tired of men, and rejects him at first, surrounding herself with “same”: her female friends, two of whom who are lesbians. Stansby similarly lives in a male community, and two of his friends are gay.

Soon, however, Stansby meets Naiant, and the two of them grow closer as they discuss the meaning of all the themes of the play: specifically marriage and the role of submission in it. In a beautiful montage of scenes, we see the relationship unfold as they both realize that “same” is not ultimately fulfilling, and they both leave their friends.

Sørina was inspired to write Nor Ever Chaste after reading To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time by Sharon Barshinger (see Ekphrasis report #10), but decided to tackle homosexuality. Sørina does a very good job of portraying realistic characters and the shaky ground of the lives they had chosen.

This subject came up quite a lot in the post-reading discussion. There were conflicting views on the gay weddings, which were performed at the same times in a nonsensical manner. Some agreed that the ridiculousness was good, and showed that “shaky ground” that Sørina was attempting to portray. Others disagreed that the display might be considered mocking, especially in light of the recent New York passing of the homosexual marriage law. There was much talk of ways Sørina could improve the wedding scene that would get her point across vividly, without coming across as mocking. Although Sørina pointed out that “I’m not afraid of offending people. One of the points of this play is that they (the secular theatre world) can be extremely offensive, why can’t we (Christians)?”

Another topic of discussion was “Is this play mainstream material?” and “How will audience react to this?” One unique quality to Nor Ever Chaste is that it is written mainly in verse, which is definitely something our current culture is not used to. Again, Sørina stated, “I want this play to be both watched and read.” I myself was able to follow the reading with a script in hand, and found that Sørina is right. The play will be beautifully visually, but is a true work of literature, and deserves to be read carefully. The subject matters of the play are certainly relevant to today’s society. Naiant and Stansby start out as honest, confused characters to whom many audience members can relate, and learn from their journey.

All in all, the reading and discussion were a success. Nor Ever Chaste makes us want more Ekphrasis meetings and more masterpieces from Sørina!

my review of "Harry Potter"

2011-07-23T13:53:00.001-05:00

Here is my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. It's a long review, but the best stuff comes at the end, when I drag in Kierkegaard. :) I would love to know your thoughts!!

Ekphrasis Report #10

2011-07-18T12:19:00.001-05:00

On July 6th, members of Ekphrasis gathered to read through a one-act play by Sharon Barshinger entitled To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time. This was an amazing meeting! The idea of reading one large-scale work each summer meeting has been going very well. They have been better attended and have led to great inspiration, discussion, etc. This one, especially, included the best group conversation we’ve ever had at an Ekphrasis yet. It felt very Inklings (which was, after all, my drea). Present were Sharon, myself, RTT, MD, AR, JL, SP, MB, JH (the mom) and JH (the son).

As Sharon reported in her ”Where Are We Now” interview, the gist of the play is about the symbolic and spiritual values and meanings of virginity (of the body and of the soul). The play opens in a coffee shop where two friends meet. Winter tells Rose (the main character) that she’s pregnant. Rose is extremely upset about this, acting judgmental and flaunting her physical virginity over her repentant friend. Winter storms out and a surprising character pops up. He’s call “the Janitor,” and he acts as chorus or conscience at important moments of the play. He confronts Rose and reveals her hypocrisy to her.

This confrontation leads Rose to re-visit all the stages of her past that have led her to her current state of hypocrisy about her physical purity. As she remembers certain scenes from her childhood and teen years, she sees that she has used her status as a virgin to rate other people, to make herself feel better, and has twisted the actual reality of what virginity is supposed to be about.

Sharon began writing this play as a defense of virginity (and originally intended to call it The Virgin Monologues before it developed into a multi-character play), but as she wrote it, she realized how easy it was even for herself, especially when surrounded by non-Christian peers who talked about their sexual conquests and/or sexual victimization, to think that she was a better person because she was a virgin and most of them weren’t, and how hypocritical that attitude was, going against the essence of spiritual purity.

So after the play, we had an extended conversation about many topics. It was one of the liveliest, most valuable conversations we’ve ever had at an Ekphrasis. I guess the main topics were: how the church has failed to equip Christian to deal with sexual temptation, how the Church (on the other hand) has focused on sexual sin almost to the exclusion of discussing the danger and seriousness of other sins, and has upheld the “double standard” of treating women as if they have less sexual drive than men.

Those are some of the most valuable points in Sharon’s play. Her characters face sexual temptation in a way that’s realistic and relevant. And the Church, although it talks on and on endlessly about not dating until you’re ready to marry, or just “courting,” and not getting into dark rooms or backseats of cars, doesn’t give young people (or anyone) advice about what to do if you do find yourself in those situations—or even (especially) how to fight off sexual temptation when you’re alone. A very few thinkers have offered suggestions towards a kind of sublimation, in which physical desire is channeled or transformed into spiritual passion, but it mostly hasn’t gone very well. Charles Williams of course comes to mind here; RTT suggested Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk in this connection.

We all agreed that Sharon’s play would be an excellent piece for youth groups to watch, or, even better, to perform. It’s just so much more realistic, honest, and relevant than the cheesy superficial garbage most youth groups consume. That’s all worthless. This is real. This is relevant.

One participant in the evening’s events, SP, said: “I feel that the reading and discussion was a great experience. I am hard pressed to pick a ‘most memorable’ part of the evening—having the opportunity to read the part of Rose [the main character], meeting a group of intelligent, interesting, and kind people, having an open dialogue with constructive and encouraging comments for the playwright as well as a philosophical discussion of themes...wonderful. I look forward to more meetings!”

Next up: a reading of my play, Nor Ever Chaste, on August 7th.

Please email iambic dot admonit at gmail dot com if you would like information about future Ekphrasis meetings. Cheers.

Five-Minute Wolfe

2011-07-09T10:55:00.004-05:00

Here's another "five-minute book review"; well, not really a review, since I'm officially reviewing this book for Books & Culture. So, this is more of a quick explanation and recommendation. Enjoy!

“Five-minute” review Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age
by Gregory Wolfe
(a recent "Where Are We Now?" interviewee)

This is a collection of essays that Wolfe has written throughout his career as editor of Image Journal. While they cover a variety of topics from theoretical aesthetics to autobiography to literary reflection, they are bound together by the theme of Christian Humanism. This is the concept, which Wolfe sees in resurgence, that imaginative and beautiful cultural products are perhaps the best way to communicate truth and goodness in our postmodern times. This is not a book you need to read straight through, although it is excellently well organized and makes most sense that way (introductory ideas, theoretical/autobiographical chapters, then chapters on individual writers and artists). You can just pick you the chapter, say, on Shūsaku Endō and learn a lot that way. This book is packed with recommendations of authors to read. There's also a subtext that recommends conversion to Roman Catholicism, since the majority of the artists and writers studied have done just that. Indeed, Wolfe makes a subtle but persuasive case that it has been Roman Catholics who have stewarded the arts in America (and elsewhere) while Evangelical Protestants have locked their doors to sing horribly cheesy and poorly written songs and look at ugly clip art. You know, he's got a point there. He's got a lot of points. But go and read it for yourself and see what the rest of them are.

Vancouver Maker Faire 2011

2011-06-27T20:40:00.006-05:00

This past weekend I attended the first ever Vancouver Maker Faire, which was a ton of fun! It was a gathering of creative artsy/techy/geeky types, all showing off their work and inspiring others. Here's my photo album from the event: Maker Faire Vancouver 2011.

A "maker" is anyone who puts things together, blending art and technology, for the sheer fun of it and/or for aesthetic or utilitarian purposes. "Makers" are generally counter-cultural, even anti-establishment, often kind of social misfits or nerdy. The "maker" concept goes beyond putting paint on canvas, and also doesn't seem to include literary arts as far as I can tell (sorry, you painters, poets and novelists). Pure computer programming without any messing around with hardware is also not really part of it. Think DIY home projects, Popular Mechanics, arts & crafts, installation art, robot hobbyists, even guerilla knitting and guerilla gardening, and you're on the right track.

The Maker movement grew out of such predecessors as the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The flagship publication of the "maker" movement is Make Magazine.

Some of the highlights of the festival included the Panterragaffe, a pedal-powered walking machine,

and Mondo Spider, an electric walking vehicle.

I was inspired by all the cool things people had invented. There are times when I feel that doing/creating something with technology just because we can or because it's cool is not enough reason, but that it has to have some purpose, to make the world a better place (and most definitely not to allow it to become a worse place). But there is truly something fundamentally human and joyful about creating things for the sheer wonder of it. After spending the afternoon enthralled by the exuberance of the atmosphere at Maker Faire, I'm leaning more towards the Existential Pleasures of Engineering side of the balance.

Concert Invitation

2011-06-22T19:30:00.004-05:00

You are invited to attend a Schubertiade!

The Soiree Society of the Arts’ Carnegie Room Concerts presents
Part II of their Schubertiade series:
Die schöne Müllerin with
Nadine Kulberg, mezzo-soprano
&
Yoni Levyatov, piano

Saturday, June 25 · 7:30pm - 8:30pm
Nyack Library 59 South Broadway Nyack, NY

General admission: $25
young adults ages 35 and under: $15 for!
Tickets are available at the door

Nadine Kulberg, mezzo, recently completed a Master of Music in Opera at SUNY Purchase, where she performed six opera roles. She has collaborated with Berkshire Opera Company as a chorus member, Lake George Opera as a Studio Artist and as pianist for their “Opera-to-Go” touring season, and with the Fanfare Consort as alto soloist in Handel’s Messiah. Ms. Kulberg holds a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from Nyack College, where she sang the title role of Carmen and Maddelena in Rigoletto. She has presented concerts of art songs and staged opera scenes in various venues from Vermont to North Carolina. Currently, she teaches piano and voice lessons throughout Westchester County and is a frequent soloist at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Rye, NY.

Medieval conference report

2011-06-22T13:30:00.002-05:00

The college where I teach is helping me out financially with the expenses of my recent trip to Kalamazoo, and I wrote a little summary of the trip upon my return. Here are some bits of that report; I hope to write a more detailed report of each paper, etc., but we'll see. Sorry this is a bit self-absorbed; I had to prove that this trip was worth the college paying for, which it was!

My recent travels to Kalamazoo were centered around the 46^th International Congress of Medieval Studies. This conference ran for four days and included panels of papers read by scholars, a plenary session by a pre-eminent expert on Byzantine art, a concert of music on reconstructed historical instruments, and fellowship with other teachers and academics. Here are some benefits I gained from attending this conference:

1. Improving personal scholarship: I presented a paper entitled “Double Affirmation: Medieval Chronology, Geography, and Devotion in the Arthuriad of Charles Williams.” Because I spent three days researching at the Marion Wade archives in Chicago in preparation for this paper, it is by far the most rigorous (from a scholarly point of view) paper I have yet written. I know that preparing it honed my skills as a writer, researcher, and communicator. Reading it out loud was good practice in public speaking/lecturing. I have already seen, in the summer course I am teaching, that I continue to learn how to teach organized writing, honest research, and clear communication. This also added to my ease at speaking in front of a group.

2. Adding to my professional resume: The organizer of my panel, Dr. Cory Grewell of Thiel College, is co-editing a volume to contain all of the papers from our panel, as well as others on the topic of “Medievalist Fantasies of Christendom”; my chapter in this book will be my first official academic publication (although I have published many reviews and short articles on arts and culture).

3. Increasing my awareness of contemporary cultural and academic trends: I attended a panel on 21^st-Century Medievalism, which discussed films, novels, and video games in light of Medieval scholarship. This added to my growing study of contemporary movements in the arts. I wrote an article upon my return that reflected on some aspects of this knowledge; it will be published soon in the Curator online journal, so keep your eyes open there. All the knowledge I can gain about current trends helps me to understand my younger students and their generation and to connect learning to the wider culture.

4. Adding to my knowledge of the Inklings: I believe that the timeless value communicated through the Arthurian story and the writers of the Inklings, as well as a knowledge of history, can help to transform the lives of students. The panel in which I participated was called “Medievalism as a Christian Apologetic in the works of the Inklings.” The Oxford “Inklings” are a group of writers particularly relevant to today’s young people, enamoured as they are of fantasy literature and film. I find that references to The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia ring true for many of my students. I also attended two panels on the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and one on the work of C. S. Lewis, all of which added to my growing knowledge of this group of writers.

5. Inspiring further work: Moving about among over 3,000 scholars and over 600 sessions of papers, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops, and performances, and listening to presenters talk about their methodology and discoveries was challening and inspiring. I was encouraged to continue my studies of the work of Charles Williams and received information about how to begin preparing for a PhD programs.

I would LOVE to teach an elective course on the Inklings or Arthurian Legends in Litearture and Film on the college level sometime! Maybe I can approach my department with this suggestion…

Church Patronage of the Arts - a follow-up

2011-06-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

As you know, I had a little article about church patronage of the arts published in Comment a short while ago. In preparation for that article, I contacted many artists and churches to ask about their experiences. Some replies are still coming in, so (with permission) I'll be posting those responses here. Your comments are welcome either here or over at Comment. This response is from:

Paul LeFeber
Associate Director of Worship Arts
Blackhawk Church

You will notice how his advice ties in with the suggestions I received from many other sources.

PLF: Every year we do a project called "The Artist Showcase." Artists are invited to create a new work around a given theme. This last year our theme was "Love Where You Live." The types of works range from visual art, music, dance, and spoken word. The event centers around a one night gallery showing and performance. The visual works stay up through Sunday services.

IA: Who initiated the project, the church or the artist?

PLF: The project is initiated by our worship arts staff. None of us are visual artists, but we feel the visual arts are an important and often underrepresented medium in our churches, so we've worked to bring them to the forefront. All of us are songwriters, so the music side comes more naturally to us.

IA: How much creative control did the church have over the project?

PLF: We give all creative control to the artists. Meaning they do their work entirely on their own. However, we do have a jury process where we ask to see the work ahead of time and not everyone is guaranteed a spot in the show. We rarely turn people away though. We also help with the hanging of the works to ensure that everything hangs well together in our space. In the case of music we did spend some time with individual songwriters to coach them through some potentially weak parts of their composition. We also put together a house band to accompany the artists on their songs.

IA: How was the show used; in a worship service, in the church building, or in some other way? Did the pastor announce or discuss it from the pulpit; did he incorporate its themes into his sermon?

PLF: The theme "Love Where You Live" was picked because it a big theme that we've used in our teaching all year long. So there was a strong connection to the pulpit in that way. It was also talked about and announced from up front. We've found it's important for the speaking pastor to endorse the event and cast some vision.

IA: Were the artists paid for their pieces or performances? If so, just for time/materials, or the going sale value of the work?

PLF: The artists are not paid for this event. It's entirely volunteer.

IA: What advice would you give to artists seeking church commissions?

PLF: I'm not sure I have any advice here. Perhaps maintain a servant heart. If you can develop an attitude of wanting to serve the church and what the church needs or desire that will go a long way. Also, start with your home church. That's going to be the most natural connection.

IA: What advice would you give to churches looking to work with artists?

PLF: I would encourage churches to give artists lots of time. Often artists work better if they've got the time to really develop their work. I would also encourage churches to have a compelling theology of the arts. Meaning they should take the time to discuss and study why it's important and what value it has to a community of Christ followers and to people's spiritual lives. I would encourage churches to remain open to artists. Often times artist feel as though they're not welcome in church. Perhaps the biggest thing is that I would encourage churches to no simply think about what artists can "do" for them. How can they "use" the artists. Rather I would encourage churches to think about how they can disciple and develop artists, how they can create a creating environment for artists to flourish.

Form & Content

2011-06-21T06:00:00.000-05:00

I've had a little article about form and content published on the blog of the BioLogos Forum. There's a place at the bottom for comments, so yours would be much appreciated. I also thought about starting up a conversation here about the BioLogos Forum itself and its ideas -- it exists to try to bridge the apparent gap between faith and science by using the arts -- but first of all I have no time, and secondly people so rarely comment here that it wouldn't be much of a conversation anyway! So, read the article if you like, leave a comment if you are moved to do so, and have a lovely day.

~ Sorina

Ekphrasis report #9

2011-06-16T10:36:00.004-05:00

Last Tuesday, a few Ekphrasians and some others gathered in a lovely little gallery space in the lower level of the Re-Wired Café in Bethlehem to read from John Alexanderson's 2006 poetry chapbook, When Least Expected: Poems From Faith. People came and went, with a total attendance of only about eight, but the small number allowed for a more intimate and casual event, with good conversations about each poem. So, John read about the first five poems in the book, then I read several, then Ruth Green read, and then John finished up. We read right through the entire chapbook, discussing each poem. We asked John about the inspiration of some pieces, talked about the concepts and techniques of several, and generally enjoyed giving intense attention to a book in a way that rarely happens.

John’s chapbook is excellent. It is well structured and each poem is carefully crafted. The book moves from poems that are explicitly Christian to ones that are more obviously personal, exploring life-long love, father-daughter relationships, friendship, and love for a pet. Each poem is poignant and clear.

One of the poems in the book is dedicated to John’s sister, who just recently passed away, a victim of Alzheimer’s. John is selling copies of his book as a fundraiser for an Alzheimer’s foundation. If you would like to purchase a copy of the book, please email alexjt4 at comcast dot net

Here is a sample poem from the book:

WE, AS ONE

by John Alexanderson

   This cup is … my blood,

 which is shed for you. [Luke 22:20]

It’s far too real.

He bled, a slit heifer.

And, for me?

Well, I think blood

is sticky, gross, and ghastly.

It spooks me, like a sparrow

I might startle in my backyard.

Lord, please.

Take it easy.

Let’s just be spiritual.

I‘ll pawn my prayers,

my worship wan, even as it

bloats and swoons upon the pew

from which it tries to rise.

Yet, the nub remains:

Might I have to bleed myself?

Great Friend, Only God,

your life, which flowed in love,

fill, at last,

your child’s Sundae heart.

Melt it deep into your cup,

that we might drink as one.