Click

October 2nd, 2009 § 5

Last night it clicked. Sitting in homegroup, discussing something not at all related to my epiphany, I moved a step forward in understanding how art fits into Christianity.

It’s obvious to say, and to say it makes it sound more simple than the nuanced revelation it was, but last night I understood that art is powerful because it reminds us that there is goodness, truth, and real beauty to be obtained. Good art inspires, it moves us to continue on our united journey to put the world back into working order.

As Christians we live with the knowledge that things will never be put back into perfect order while we are alive, that it is a hopeless pursuit to expect perfection here on earth.

Still, we are required to hope in what is to come and to work towards bringing it back, it is our daily task. This is the command of Loving God and Loving our Neighbors that we are so clearly given by Christ.

But the art thing was a big thing I’ve been struggling with. How can we live out the gospel and still have time to pursue things like art? How does art fit in Christianity?

That’s why last night was a big revelation for me. I don’t fully understand it, but here’s some things I’ve gathered so far from this step forward:

  • There is still a big place for “dark” art – Flannery O’Connor’s novels and depressing films and such – because they tend to remind us of how broken the world is. In fact, in painting the world honestly, we are often inspired to work more towards the goal, challenged to continue in our efforts. I find that often times I get tired and build this small bubble to live in where I’m convinced the world is doing ok. It’s really not, and good art can remind me of that.
  • Artists, in their artistic pursuits, are actually working towards redeeming the world. Just as in the Old Testament rituals and icons were used to signify abstract truths and constantly remind the Jewish people of God’s constant presence in their lives, so art has multiple levels that work to bring us fully alive and remind us how intertwined the spiritual is with the physical.
  • There’s some thoughts I’d love to bring out about sentimentality in art, especially art from Christians, but those thoughts aren’t fully formed.

That’s all I’ve got for now. It was a simple revelation, mostly just I finally figured out how the pieces of the puzzle I’ve stared at for years fit together, and now that I seem them together in front of me it seems at once obvious, barely worth mentioning, and somehow revolutionary.

I’d appreciate any thoughts and critiques of these ideas – nothing is permanent in my mind as I pursue Truth.

For Those of Us Just Starting Out

September 30th, 2009 § 0

The National Library of Congress has a site with a poem a day for American Highschoolers. Why foreign highschoolers can’t enjoy them either I have no clue, but either way it’s a cool site. Poetry 180 is the name of the site, and here’s poem number seven:

“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?”

Ron Koertge

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It’s all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author’s name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, “Shhhh.”

Then start again.

The Decemberists (and Autumn’s imminent descent)

September 29th, 2009 § 0

The wife and I saw The Decemberists in concert at the Ryman on Sunday night. The timing could not have been better as every time I go see a good concert I inevitably listen to the band on heavy rotation for the next few weeks. And the very day that they played their show the first true day of Autumn decided to sweep into Tennessee.

So I’m at work right now, storyboarding for a new video that I conceptualized, helped write, and am now animating, and who should be providing the soundtrack in my headphones but The Decemberists. I put on The Crane Wife, their album of a few years ago that was pretty excellent. I listened to 9 of the 11 songs before I really paid attention, but as soon as track 10 came on – The Crane Wife 1 & 2 – I had to stop and be a little sentimental.

There are songs attached to memories, song attached to emotions, songs attached to periods in our life or times when we were erasing the preceding period of our life. But this song is something else. As this digital copy of a recording of Colin Meloy’s voice begins to play, I am transported to an unknown place and time in a very concrete season.

The acoustic guitar is the lapping of a bonfire, and as the organ slowly rises in the background I feel the heat from the cup of hot chocolate I’m holding and the fire on my legs. The lyrics are small at first; so is the circle nearby that the fire illuminates and as the lalala’s build at the end I see all the stars above and the blackness around. But most of all, the rhythm of the song, the slow, melancholy tone that it is sung in makes me feel the cold of winter, the dead of the world as it hibernates and holds still for a season.

The return of the crisp, cool air in the evenings this week has been wonderful. Sunday after the concert we walked with some friends to the Walking Bridge and took in downtown Nashville. Last night we sat on our deck with good friends and drank hot chocolate and smoked pipes and enjoyed that we were chilly, reveling in the way the night air actually caused us to shiver and bundle and appreciate the warmth of the house.

After the new year, a few months from now, the winter chill will be at its worst and the grayness of the world will be crushing and every breath will be cut short because of the way your lungs freeze. Then we will once again long for spring, for warmth, for specks of green in a world of browns, and sometime after that those things will arrive.

But this week, right now, there is the first arrival of Autumn and after the lethargy of late summer and the monsoons of the past few weeks the cool air in my lungs is more entrancing than the very best fireworks display on our national birthday. And the Decemberists are doing their part to excite me about the impending chills.

Why Blogging is so Hard

September 8th, 2009 § 0

As you can see below, I saw some (all?) of the works of Shakespeare last night in the park. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing the same three actors plus a bevy of amateurs perform The Taming of the Shrew in its full form.

I subscribe to The New Yorker and Wired, and while they are far different types of writing and the topics rarely overlap, each issue is filled with excellent writers writing about interesting subjects. I read about 80% of all long-form articles in the New Yorker and typically read Wired cover to cover.

And it turns out that reading all of this – plus the books and quarterlies and blogs that I occasionally manage to fit in – has a detrimental impact on my confidence as a writer. It might be that I have the ability to write, it might be that I could say something of value in a manner that isn’t blatantly amateurish in quality, but the bevy of good literature I read becomes an obstacle to overcome.

True I learn and the words I do write are immensely improved simply by the quality of literature I regularly expose myself to.

But that’s just it – I read lots of incredibly good literature. Just like with films (and my wife and friends will tell you that I’m a big film snob), if given a choice I will avoid any and all bad writing because there is so much good writing that I’ve never even read. And that really bothers me.

But this snobbish choice of mine – to avoid bad writing so I can explore more of the good – serves to cripple my fingers when presented with a blank page, an open document or a blank blog entry box. I just cannot bring myself to create bad writing.

These days my only strength as a writer is my complete willingness to throw a sentence out. Except I throw EVERY sentence out. I start down one path, then a few paragraphs in decide it’s cliché. So I try from a different point of view. But it’s cliché too.

Cliché, I am increasingly being forced to admit, is simply a blindness to the fact that you are not revolutionary. Yes, what I am doing has been done before. Yes, what I am writing resembles other people’s writing – it turns out English sentences have only so many forms that actually make grammatical sense. No, my name is not David Foster Wallace. Or Flannery O’Connor. Or whomever the author is that I am excited about at the time.

And if I could grasp this glimmer of wisdom like an umbrella, open it up and step under it, I would find that it just might protect me from this insidious desire to be a genius.

But no, no, why would I embrace wisdom? My response is a synthesis of resignation and frustration – a tendency to spew sarcasm and snarkiness and cynicism. So I twitter a lot of smart aleck remarks and push peoples buttons with my blog posts and facebook statuses but meanwhile, have no body of work that actually tests the idea that I have an ability to write. Thus my epiphany.

I have  become a really pretentious troll. And frankly, I am ashamed.

My modus operandi in “real life” is happiness, exuberance, passion, and a constant curiosity. And if you’ve found that in my online persona, well I applaud you because obviously you’re reading between the lines of what I say into, wait, no. I don’t applaud you. Rather I’m worried about you because you are obviously crazy.

Will this change now? I hope so. I really do. The thing is, and this is ultimately what I was getting at with the title of this post – I want to write well, and when I write now I am not well, and thus what i write is not good.

Here’s hoping that changes. Blogging is hard, but I think what is even harder – and what has kept me from doing it the most is how finding worthwhile, interesting subjects I can write about in a constructive, interesting manner is much harder than being a sarcastic cynic.

I know I’ll never be Shakespeare, and I have no long-term goal of writing in the New Yorker or Wired or really even being published at all, but my intention with this blog is attempting to add to the bevy of good writing that is available for you to read so that should you decide to read it, your time at wnstn.com might be worthwhile.

Shakespeare in the Park

September 8th, 2009 § 2

The wife and I went to see  the Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged in Centennial Park tonight. It was rollicking good fun. I was crying from laughing so hard – pretty much the whole way through.

On our way there, driving down Eastland passing RosePepper and Ugly Mugs we were confronted with this glorious sight, so I had to get out and stand in the road and take a picture!

Sunset

Sunset

And then after parking, the Parthenon was looking quite glorious so I had to capture that as well, all before the show even began.

The Parthenon at Dusk

The Parthenon at Dusk

Only three actors were involved in the production.

Bradley BrownBradley Brown (As a humble narrator)

Christopher CampbellChristopher Campbell (As Julius Caesar? It was hard to keep track)

Benjamin ReedBenjamin Reed (Giving the second most famous speech from Hamlet)

There was a great deal of cross-dressing, editing liberties, misinformation, more editing liberties, some choice dialogue from across the Bard’s plays, and all the comedies condensed into one section because as we all found out, the Tragedies are much more comedic than the comedies.

For the full set of pictures, hop on over to my Flickr, where I uploaded 12 more pictures of the actors performing their wonderful trade.

The Tennessean’s Plan to Save the Newspaper

August 28th, 2009 § 0

I don’t even know what to think about this. But I couldn’t help but point it out. If only they were as on top of telling me to avoid roads that are closed due to the BarBQue festival this weekend as they are on top of finding out where women are parading around in bikinis, I might actually find their content worth reading.

Good grief.

Good grief.

One of those days

August 24th, 2009 § 0

There are these days that I get euphoria. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like depression – everything in life just combines in the right combinations to push my personality over the top. Rather than being down and lethargic and reclusive – symptoms of depression – I become boisterous, energetic, and super-confident. I feel like I could take over the world, in a benevolent and all-loving sort of way.

Today I’m filled with dreams of being a freelancer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely happy with my job; other potential jobs do not tempt me and you’d be hard pressed to get an actual word of complaint out of me about work. But this isn’t where I’m going to be forever. There is a time and a place for everything. And one day, I’ll get my skillsets in order, I’ll get my online presence in order, and I’ll know that it’s now or never, and I’ll take the leap to start out on my own. And today I’m just thinking about how that’ll be. It’ll be good, I hope.

But I’m also thinking about all the dreams Freya and I share together. Dreams of vacation coming up soon – a weekend hiding out in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains where we’ll spend our time painting and writing and soaking in a hot tub drinking champagne. Dreams of adventure in the near future – our road trip around the US that will be the adventure that makes everyone else jealous (8-10 months going wherever we want, doing whatever we want).

Then there are the dreams of who knows how far off – our dream of starting some sort of commune or collective; a place where artists can come and live for a few months (or longer) as they work on their various projects, a place where we can attempt to put into place the ideas about community that we are continually shaping. We drive past large buildings all the time and discuss its merits for being that place – we’ll find something some day.

Freya has a dream to start a homeless shelter here in Nashville aimed at families and children – the fastest growing aspect of homelessness in America today (see here). She has no clue what it will look like yet, that’s one of the things we want to research on our big road trip. But it’s an admirable dream, and I can’t wait to be there as she finds out how to carry it out.

But then there are the small things, the actual things. There’s the ability to roll down the windows on this majestic day, to sing aloud to a song that actually celebrates the glory of being alive (check it out, it’s on repeat as I type), to see the clouds floating along.

Yeah, it’s euphoria, and it strikes me occasionally and I love it. Today is a good day. Every day is a good day, even if you don’t quite remember it.

From "My Name is Asher Lev"

June 10th, 2009 § 0

I’m rereading Chaim Potok’s excellent novel My Name is Asher Lev right now, and last night I stayed up way too late reading. These two passages really caught my attention and merit putting somewhere that I’ll be able to find again.

He said to me one day in the second week of July, “Asher Lev, there are two ways of painting the world. In the whole history of art, there are only these two ways. One is the way of Greece and Africa, which sees the world as a geometric design. The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower. Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso paint the world as geometry. Van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Chagall paint the world as a flower. I am a geometrician. I sculpt cylinders, cubes, triangles, and cones. The world is a structure, and structure to me is geometry. I sculpt geometry. I see the world as hard-edged, filled with lines and angles. And I see it as a wild and raging and hideous, and only occasionally beautiful. The world fills me with disgust more often than it fills me with jooy. Are you listening to me, Asher Lev? The world is a terrible place. I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculpture and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world. You do not understand me yet, Asher Lev. My little Hasid. My sanctifier of the world. My half-naked painter with dangling payos and a paint-smeared skullcap. One day you will understand about the truth of feelings.”

Then, two pages later.

The following week, the third week of July, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We walked through centuries of Byzantine and Western crucifixions. He showed me the development of structure and form and expression, and the handling of pictorial space. I saw crucifixions all the way home and dreamed of crucifixions all through the night.

I told him the next day that I did not think I wanted to see any more crucifixions. He became angry.

“Asher Lev, you want to go off into a corner somewhere and paint little rabbis in long beards? Then go away and do not waste my time. Go paint your little rabbis. No one will pay attention to you. I am not telling you to paint crucifixions. I am telling you that you must understand what a crucifixion is in art if you want to be a great artist. The crucifixion must be available to you as a form. Do you understand? No, I see you do not understand. In any case, we will see more crucifixions and more resurrections and more nativities and more Greek and Roman gods and more scenes of war and love – because that is the world of art, Asher Lev. And we will see more naked women, and you will learn the reason for the differences between the naked women of Titian and those of Rubens. This is the world you want to make sacred. You had better learn it well first before you begin.”

These passages stand alone – but that last sentence was a dagger to my heart. Do I have the strength to learn the world well? Most Christians do not. They do not see the reason to expose themselves to the horror of the world, but in being afraid to do that, they are never able to speak to that world.

I want to avoid that. It sounds like a long long path, but I’ve already taken the first steps…

500 Days of Summer

April 17th, 2009 § 1

Marc Webb’s debut film finally made it to Nashville last night, as part of the Nashville Film Festival (which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, very cool). The trailer bills the movie as a story about Boy Meets Girl, but not a love story, and the trailer is accurate, thank goodness. We don’t need another romantic comedy, and this film doesn’t attempt to give us more of what we don’t need.

Instead, the film, in its light-hearted and whimsical style, is concerned with what exactly love is in modern times. Both of the main characters come from homes with divorced parents, but Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) believes in true love and finding “the one” while Summer (Zooey Deschanel) does not believe in any of that stuff. Their story; told in a great non-linear fashion that examines the 500 days that Summer is in Tom’s life, examines whether either of their ideas about love hold up in reality.

Much has been made in early reviews about Webb’s experience with music videos, probably because there is a dance scene and the music is heavily tied to the visuals in the film (look for a great split-screen sequence with Regina Spektor’s song Us), but I think most of those reviewers missed the subtle touch that Webb brought out in the post-film Q&A last night. The narrator that we hear in the trailer is the narrator of the film as well; a deep, soothing voice that sets the tone for a storybook-ish movie. By beginning with the narrator giving us the setup – Girl doesn’t believe in love, boy does believe in love, and boy knows that girl is The One at first meeting – the film gives the viewers the normal cues of a fairy tale story.

But the film isn’t intending to be a fairy tale, nor is it intending to subvert fairy tales by setting your expectations and destroying them. Rather, it is questioning and wrestling with my generation’s takes on love – the fear of labeling relationships, the generation of kids who’ve grown up after divorce, the desire for some concrete idea of love but the complete lack of any model or definition. By using fairy-tale aspects, 500 Days of Summer did well to ask the questions that I’ve heard lots of friends ask (that I myself asked), and while the film didn’t really have any good answers, it wasn’t willing to forsake all hope in the idea of love.

I identified with the movie a great deal because I’ve been in those positions before; finding someone who I thought was the one, being with a different someone who just really really wasn’t the one, and finally finding The One who I’m now happily married to. I still don’t know exactly what love is; but I’m a lot closer and I do know a litany of things that it is definitely not. This movie, rather than being a “happy ending all things tied up neatly but nothing of substance provided” Hollywood film, successfully (to me) asked some questions and wrestled with them in a way fitting its characters and story, then ended on a note of hope. It wasn’t a perfect film, but it was far better than anything that Hollywood normally produces on the subject of love, and I hope it has a great deal of success at the Box Office.

Off Topic:

And I think that somewhere down the line there is a critical essay waiting to happen about how this film identifies another shift in culture; with Summer being representative of this generation’s wrestling with the 70’s generation (which might be defined as Spring – the birth of free love and love as a self-centered, self-seeking concept). If I were to write said essay, I would place the modern generation right at the end of 500 Days of Summer (which I won’t spoil), and explore the themes of the film as suggestions of ways that culture is changing. But that’s just me.

Monsters Vs. Aliens

March 30th, 2009 § 0

Many critics have already railed against this film for being gimmicky. I’m here to tell you they are right. But most of those critics saw the film for free, meaning that they didn’t get the full experience that I had last night. Freya and I decided to see the film on the IMAX screen in 3D, and we might have rethought that if we’d asked the price before purchasing the ticket. The tickets were $14.50 apiece – $6 more than your regular movie ticket.

When you go see 3D movies on IMAX, the theater gets to add two upsell fees – $3 for IMAX, and $3 for 3D. If the film were good, if it were interesting, I’m fairly sure I’m ok with paying $6 extra dollars per ticket to enjoy the film on the biggest screen possible. And 3D on IMAX was definitely cool.

Monsters vs. Aliens was not good or interesting though. I guess when one takes inspiration from B-Movies and then attempts to write a kids movie, one cannot make anything more than a B-movie. And when a studio undertakes the effort, with its legions of writers and focus on the bottom-line, and when the film becomes the Studio-head’s seminal effort to show off the awesomeness of a new technology, well you can guess that there are a couple things that fall to the wayside in making that film.

Those things are plot, characterization, plot, and refinement of plot. Monsters vs. Aliens is, when it comes down to it, a demo-reel for 3D technology. There are some funny gags and a few laugh-out-loud lines or scenes, but overall, there is very little substance to this movie.

You shouldn’t misunderstand either; I love a good kids movie. I was all about suspending some disbelief and having some fun with Monsters Vs. Aliens. But the writers through every possible idea they could come up with into a bucket, and it just kind of came out looking like mud. Here’s some of my main complaints:

  • The monsters are lame. The supporting monsters are all cardboard characters that we don’t really get to know at all. The filmmakers couldn’t decide if they should be “realistic” (meaning they could be explained by “science”) or if they should be monster-ish, so they are both. And it doesn’t work.
  • The humans vary between cartoonish (see next point) and attempts to be real (like with the monsters). The President is a pointless character as are the general and Susan’s parents, but Susan herself is an attempt to bring a moral to the movie so they can’t make her too cartoony. It just feels stupid.
  • The General is a clear mish-mash of every General in every war film that was already a parody – most obviously that I saw was Gen. Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove. Apparently when you parody a cartoonish character by making him more cartoonish, no one finds it funny.
  • And last of all, the battles were lame. I mean, with a title like Monsters vs. Aliens, there’s an expectation that you’ll have a battle of epic proportions, something like the old Godzilla movies. Nope, no go.

But honestly, I think I would have enjoyed the movie more if not for those ticket prices. It just wasn’t worth it at all.

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