Ai Weiwei, Cosby milestone, new Leonard Cohen

A few summers back, I remember coming home from work in the still-light evenings to read John Cheever short stories in my bedroom, maybe with a gin cocktail in hand, until twilight forced me to use an electric light.

 

This summer proved quite different. Most of my writing energy was focused on contributions to a series on race and faith that my friend Amy Julia Becker planned, in an extended response to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic cover story on reparations. I got involved after telling her about the June Project Peace event on race and faith, which I initially planned to write about. Instead, I ended up writing a piece on confession and then helping to develop a Lord's prayer for reconciliation intended for churches to use.

I say all that both to commend Amy Julia's series to you, but also because my small contributions to it stem from an important shift in my creative process this year. I know those reading this are in various places spiritually -- and artRecs probably emphasizes art more than faith -- but I've found prayer to be an incredibly powerfully influence on my writing, especially in recent months.

For the past two years, several of us at Christ Church have been meeting monthly to practice what's variously called listening/healing prayer. These can be separate practices, but I find it rare that I listen to God without old wounds coming up. Through the listening/healing prayer process, I then ask God to show me where the pain started, what I came to believe (usually a lie or distortion) and what the truth is.

Up through this point, it's probably not so different from some counseling/therapy methods, but you then go on -- if you're comfortable doing so -- to renounce and repent of believing the lie(s), which I find incredibly powerful. Sometimes you may also find that you need to deal with other related issues, like unforgiveness of others, yourself or God, etc.

Prayer always improves my writing, but praying through my sin and baggage with a topic before I start writing seems to make an even bigger difference. If you're interested in trying listening prayer for yourself, the next meeting is Oct. 4 at the Christ Church Berkeley site (2138 Cedar Street), 10 a.m. to noon.

Whether or not you can come this month, I'd encourage you all to think about it. Generally I avoid promising "results" from any given spiritual discipline, but everyone I know who's tried listening prayer has had something really good happen. Many of us even consider it life-changing. To get on the event-reminder mailing list for listening prayer, email heal.pray.ministry@gmail.com. You can also get an overview of the basic listening process here.

:: events ::

• Sept. 27-April 26: Ai Weiwei's @Large exhibit at Alcatraz
• Oct. 2-12: Mill Valley Film Festival
• Oct. 10-18: Litquake

:: your stuff ::

• Dave's new mural in downtown Oakland was recently filmed for a segment on ABC 7. No link to the video yet, but I'll be sure to share it when it's posted.

:: poetry ::

• This response to Michael Brown's death and events in Ferguson is really remarkable.

:: visual art ::

• Ai Weiwei at Alcatraz: In The New York Times account, this looks to be one of the most exciting shows in San Francisco this fall. The show will include Lego portraits of "176 portraits of prisoners of conscience and political exiles." Because of government-imposed restrictions on travel, the Times reports he relied heavily on assistance from the curator and dozens of volunteers, those this raises questions "to what extent are installations like this — which required more than 100 volunteers in San Francisco and For-Site staffers on Alcatraz Island helping with assembly, as well as Amnesty International contributing research — truly Mr. Ai’s work?" In another special arrangement, the National Park Service opened part of Alcatraz that's usually off-limits to visitors for a sound piece that includes the music of Fela Kuti, Pussy Riot and others.
  
• Ronnie Goodman's art: I think his website's fairly new, but you can now see more work by the homeless artist who ran the San Francisco half-marathon.
  
• "Incredible photos of secret abandoned palaces": I really dislike headlines that tell us how to receive the subject matter, but I have to admit that Polish artist Patrycja Makowska's interior photos of abandoned buildings really awed me. I daresay she's done a lot of Photoshop work -- which sometimes seems quite heavy-handed -- but some of her photos stirred a keen wonder and a new desire to visit this part of my past. I assume my Polish ancestors were working-class people, but I've never really explored that line of my forebears; maybe it's time I explored it more. View more of her photos here. She's definitely strongest with the palace interiors, but she also has some interesting shots of Iceland.
  
• Repurposed records: Paste reports on one artist's creative reuse of old vinyl.

:: dance ::

• WSJ interviews Pharrell on his musical goals and runaway single "Happy": "I want to make music with something extra to it—a holistic property. I want to make it feel good. I'm not the only one doing this. Kendrick Lamar's music feels amazing. Adele's music feels amazing. Alicia [Keys]'s new album feels amazing. The distinction between sounding amazing and feeling amazing—that's the thing. People, I think, are looking for a feeling." I confess I've only paid attention to Pharrell recently, but I'm so intrigued by the joy that comes through in all the fan videos. See for instance the "Supercut" video embedded in WSJ's piece. The joy reminds me of that viral video a few years back of the guy filmed doing his crazy dance all over the world. And musicals where people break into dance. Is there another art form that conveys joy quite like that? I'm not sure. Only dance requires we use our whole bodies like that.

:: tunes ::

• Leonard Cohen's new album Popular Problems comes out Tuesday. Stream the album on NPR for a few more days.  Ann Powers writes, "The tarpit-voiced raconteur's songs unfold like dirty canticles, with room for both jokes and profundities."
  
• I've never really gotten into hip-hop, but this NPR interview with Cormega had some fascinating discussion of changes in the industry -- especially the expectations for artists -- and in his own perspective as he's gotten older.
  
• Musician Blake Mills' second album got a pretty positive review from the New York Times ... and then part-way through this piece, I realized Carolyn and I had seen him on his tour with Fiona Apple! I guess I should finally listen to that CD of his I bought.
  
• Despite Beck's emphasis on fan interpretations of his sheet-music album Song Reader, he recently contributed to a complete recording that features Moses Sumney, Jack White, Jack Black, Norah Jones, Fun., Tweedy, Laura Marling, Lord Huron, Swamp Dogg and, yes, one performance by Beck himself. To their credit, the album even includes the two instrumental songs. Stream Song Reader on Spotify or buy it on Amazon. I'm liking it the more I listen to it.
  

 

• The latest videos from Postmodern Jukebox include a soul version of Radiohead's "Creep." They're posting about one song a week now and touring the U.S. later this fall -- so far, mostly East Coast date, but they're promising more shows.
• 
  No Depression explores the house concert trend from the perspective of local house-concert organizer Kevin Oliver. I've yet to attend one of the Olivers' shows, but I always appreciate the human element of house concerts.
  
• Arhoolie Records founder and the owner of my old neighborhood record store, Down Home Music, is the subject of a new documentary that looks at his role in exposing music fans to many unknown blues and other musicians. I haven't heard Chris compared to Alan Lomax, but he's evidently quite a legend. This Ain't No Mouse Music opened at select Bay Area theaters this weekend and runs one week. Some shows include live music.

:: film & television ::

• Jimmy Fallon continues to make good use of his musical chops, as couple recent clips attest. 
• In a recent duet with Barbra Streisand, he impersonated Elvis Presley, Blake Shelton and Michael Buble ... I think.
• His lip synch-off with the real Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani featured decent tap dancing from Blake and an impressive Spike Jones from Jimmy, full of rubber-faced moves.
• Robin Williams' death prompted an outpouring of comedy and remembrance. Though I'd seen more of his films than I realized (if not classics like Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting), I appreciated this NYT tribute that pulled together several notable television appearances and clips. We didn't have a TV growing up or see many movies, but Aladdin has always stood out as one of my favorite Disney movies (and, actually, I'm not sure there's any other Disney film that made anything close to the same impression). In retrospect, it's clear my attachment was far more to Williams' work than Disney's. He even did his own singing for "Friend Like Me" and "Prince Ali."

:: reading/food for thought ::

• A few years back, I tried to get a co-worker to pull a prank on our boss and claim he'd given up email for Lent. (He wouldn't do it.) But as part of work on his new book The End of Absence, author Michael Harris quit the whole internet for a month. As he told Quartz magazine, "One of the things that concerns me about a media diet that is overly online, is that we lose the ability to decide for ourselves what we think about who we are.” If the book's anything like the interview, it sounds like a thought-provoking read.
• 
  
• File under just plain fun: Readers of The Toast know that Mallory Ortberg periodically imagines the texts of various famous authors, including William Carlos Williams and William Blake. The results are usually hilarious. This fall, she's releasing a book version, Texts from Jane Eyre. Christmas gift idea for some of the literary sorts in your life?
  
• "That was the first time I understood that when there is something wrong in writing, the chances are that there is either too much of it, too little of it, or that it is in some way backwards." - Michael Crichton on what he learned from working with legendary editor Robert Gottlieb. (This from a long, but excellent, 1994 interview in The Paris Review.
  
• Christianity Today has launched a new biweekly publication, The Behemoth, focused on marveling and pondering.

:: comedy ::

 

• This month marks the 30th anniversary of the Cosby show's launch, prompting a new Bill Cosby biography by Mark Whitaker and a highly praised assessment by the The New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh. Even as I've heard some sobering recent stories about Cosby's life off mic, it hasn't shaken my deep affection for his comedic work. Sanneh's piece encompasses both the brilliance and clay in Cosby, providing an almost biblical portrait of him. Some snippets:
  
  "It’s a shame, in retrospect, that Cosby had to spend so much of his comedy career making records, which forced listeners to focus on his lines, instead of on the facial expressions that he uses to animate them. them."
  
  
  "Cosby was skeptical of sitcoms, too. He hired the psychiatry professor Alvin Poussaint, a frequent collaborator, to make sure that the scripts weren’t too jokey. 'Sitcom writers like to use a lot of put-down humor,' Cosby told him. 'I don’t want any of that.' "
  
  "It is tempting to think of Cosby as a comedy idealist, insistent that his act should remain unsullied by the dirty business of politics. But, if anything, it seems that he took politics more seriously than comedy. Whitaker relates an explanation that Cosby once gave to Poussaint: “‘The Cosby Show’ was a comedy, and he didn’t want to trivialize serious problems by trying to make them funny.” Unlike Pryor, Cosby didn’t believe that a routine could encompass all of life’s joys and sorrows. For him, comedy was smaller than life."
  
  I've already binged once on old Cosby Show episodes; I may end up working my way through the whole series on Youtube. Related: Hear the song Cosby wrote with Quincy Jones as the theme for The Bill Cosby Show.
  
• The New York-based comedy show Sweet has only reached its 10th anniversary, but as someone there for the first few shows, I wanted to share this write up and slideshow of the recent 10th anniversary show. I didn't love all the bits I saw at Sweet, but Seth Herzog's line-up always gave a sense of the camaraderie among New York comedians. Even those starting to see greater success (notably Paul Rudd and Eugene Mirman) weren't above stopping by to do a short bit in their friend's show.

:: food ::

• The New York Times has launched a new cooking section, in which they're evidently making all recipes from their archive available. It's got a great, apparently mobile-friendly new layout, too.
• The next City Church artists dinner is Sept. 28. RSVP to Minna Choi to attend.

Shared meals, sugar sculpture and functional graffiti

I don't know about all of you, but I'm in denial that August is almost here. Though warm overnights aren't my favorite part of summer, I do love the late-evening light in my kitchen ... and I love sharing it with others. So, for those of you in the Bay area, here's an open invitation inspired by the essay on communal meals below.

Any Sunday night that you feel like eating dinner with others, you're welcome to come and eat at my place. All I ask is a little notice: ideally a day, but I could work with a few hours, too. Let me know! I hope to see and sup with at least a few of you soon.

:: our stuff ::

• Theresa Donohoe, whom some of you know, has two upcoming performances of her monologue (?) "The Girl Who Fell Off Bikes!":
• July 28 at Berkeley's Marsh Theatre, 2120 Allston Way. $7, doors open at 7.
• Sept. 15 at SF's Marsh Theatre, 1062 Valencia. $7, 7 p.m. doors there, too.
• One of Matt's recent projects involves Oakland pastor Rev. Harry L. Williams. As he recounts, after officiating a funeral for a homicide victim, people came up to him afterward and asked for his number, in case they needed him for future funeral services. That experience gave birth to a project called Gone, which he's raising funds to support.
• "To Sleep, Perchance to Grow": My latest piece for the Art House Blog looks at gardening, naps and structured spiritual practices like the Daily Office and walking the labyrinth. The blog is a project of musician and Civil Wars producer Charlie Peacock and his wife Andi Ashworth. Over the years, they've let me write descriptive, more meditative essays on sabbath (and bourbon); knitting; guitar and the senses; and providential street-finds. I'm always grateful to write for them.
  

:: visual art & design ::

• Chinese artist Han Bing takes a cabbage for a walk as part of a traveling game that challenges our notions of value.
• Banksy left his mark here a few years ago (I think I often see a piece at Broadway and Columbus, for instance), but the Chron reports some works are in jeopardy of being removed and resold.
  
  
• Artist creates work in sugar factory: Before an old New York sugar factory gets razed, artist Kara Walker was asked to fill it with a temporary show. The result: "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant." NPR reports.

 

• Several recent pieces explore and challenge cultural norms for beauty. In the first, a Mills College grad sent a photo of herself to people in several countries, asking them to retouch her so that she's beautiful. In the second, a California singer's hilarious music video "Older Ladies" challenges both our standards of beauty and what sort of bond really draws us to the young and fertile. The one I found most moving, though, surprisingly, was the video for the Colbie Caillat song "Try," in which she and other women gradually go from made-up to the faces they woke up in.
   
• What makes a photographer? This NYT assessment of a new Garry Winogrand show that features several photos only discovered after his death raises questions I haven't heard discussed much since my art-school days. "If the photographer doesn’t engage with that image — doesn’t even select it — does it qualify as artistic expression?" If you like this sort of thing, it's a fascinating discussion of posthumous editing and the role of the photographer more broadly. 
• A drawing of World War I becomes a mural in the French Metro: "The Metro mural [link in French] blows that out to nearly 500 feet — “almost double the length of the Bayeux Tapestry,” observes the Telegraph — stretching the length of an underground corridor. It’s massive, overwhelming … which is, of course, the point."
• In what some have called "functional graffiti," a Brooklyn designer has started posting simpler, redesigned parking signs that visually explain depict a block's schedule. Here's hoping a change like that catches on.
  

:: film & television ::

• Film reviews don't usually give me chills, but Manohla Dargis' review of Richard Linklater's Boyhood for the New York Times did. I suspect we'll hear a lot about this groundbreaking film in the coming months. (Linklater filmed the story over several years, so that you actually see the child actor and other cast members age, the young boy becoming a man.) Let me know if any of you are interested in seeing this. I probably won't get to it unless I make plans, but I'd like to see it.
• Biola grad Matt Wilson's new film, The Virgins, about a couple trying to consummate their marriage before a deployment, tries to be a "Christian" film" that "show[s] you what being a Christian is like" rather than trying to convert viewers.
  
  
• Alissa Wilkinson now has a blog on the Christianity Today site, aptly named Watch This Way (yes, that's an Aerosmith reference).
  
  

 

• "Selflessness is not exactly the coin of the realm for late-night talk-show guests. ... Letterman's ratings would no doubt be better if he booked someone with a big movie or TV show more prominently than [Kyle] Carpenter. But he didn't. Instead, he coaxed Carpenter gently through an interview in which Carpenter, in a matter-of-fact manner, told his story. It was great television of a kind we don't see much of anymore. What's more, it was on TV only because it interested Letterman (his interest was genuine to anyone who saw the conversation), and he thought it might be interesting to us, as well." - Bill Goodykoontz  on Letterman's interview with a medal of honor recipient.
  
  This clip covers Carpenter's call from the president. As best I can tell from a rough transcript, Letterman next had him recount the attack and describe his injuries.

:: tunes ::

• A dear friend from New York is raising funds to finish her album of folk songs, Wide Awake Dream. She has until July 31. If you like Aimee Mann, St. Vincent or Gillian Welch, check out Cordelia Stephens' music and consider supporting the project.
• The wonderful Gregory Porter on current music: "I don’t like when people are trying to grab for a cheap reaction in a way. I can pull my pants down and the audience is going to go crazy. You can do things the hard way and say something that intrigues the heart, brain and soul. I’d like to see that. Sex is great, but is that the only thing you got? It can be empty. I’d like to hear things go deeper. I want to hear about your mother, father, nature, you know? Don’t rush just to say something outrageous." (Seriously, if you haven't heard him sing yet, I can't plug his music enough. Such a great voice.)

:: poetry ::

• Marilyn Nelson's biography of George Washington Carver (which I mentioned last time) was so good I decided to try another of her books. It turns out she used poetry to tell her own story, too, in the memoir How I Discovered Poetry. I'm not far into it, but her meditation on church (as understood in childhood) gave me a good laugh:
  
  "Why did Lot have to take his wife and flea
  from the bad city, like that angel said?
  Poor Lot: imagine having a pet flea..."
  
  I won't spoil the end, but you can find it in Amazon's preview of the book (which you should buy!). Nelson's a front-runner for my new favorite poet.
• "With puns, cartoony satires and asides, Lockwood skewers over and over the idea that sex is the key to happiness, or to the natural, or to the real." -New York Times review of Patricia Lockwood's new poetry collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. (You may remember Lockwood from last month's artRecs.)

 :: reading/food for thought ::

• How many meals in the last week have you eaten alone vs. with others? If you're single, communal meals may be the exception, but this Atlantic essayist argues that shared meals offer many important benefits. I didn't need a hard-sell on this, but it was a good reminder and challenge to find more ways to share my meals with others.
  
  
• "The Place of Our Affection": Andi Ashworth muses on restlessness and home for the Art House blog.
• I can't imagine what it must have been like for this reporter to visit the scene of the Malaysian Air crash in the Ukraine, but her article describing the crash scene provides almost a master class in detail. I found it an especially effective way to take the reader there without graphic photos or disrespect for the yet-unidentified dead and their families. Interestingly, Megan Garber reports in the Atlantic that the NYT initially included one photo of a body in its coverage, but later took it down.
• "Masters of Kindness": This article focuses primarily on relational dynamics within healthy and unhealthy marriages, but some of the insights about what does and doesn't foster intimacy with others -- especially how we apply to their good news -- could apply to other contexts, too.
• "If you think about your work only in terms of what is generating income for you, I think that work would probably die on the vine." - Teju Cole in an NPR interview on his creative use of Twitter.
  
  
• "The Benefits of Failing French": NYT essay on the cognitive benefits of adult language acquisition.

:: food ::

• It's a good week when I drink a green smoothie every morning, though co-workers love to tease me about the green to brown concoctions. The Chronicle's Amanda Gold recently reported on the increasingly popular smoothies, comparing blender options and sharing three recipes from local green smoothie purveyors.
  
  
• Each time I write these, I try to share mostly new things (or at least new-to-me things), but Eric Felten's one of those writers I can't help myself coming back to, just because his old Wall St. Journal cocktail columns are such gems. I own his book How's Your Drink, mind you, but sometimes it proves surprisingly brief on cocktails I've had thought for sure he'd write about it.
  
  Turns out he didn't cover some standard cocktail recipes like the Side Car and margarita until post-book. For the margarita column, it's quintessential Felten, pulling together arcane educational history with D-Day trivia and a skosh of linguistics. How can you not love a writer like that? I still may have to piece together and print out a set of every "How's Your Drink" column he ever wrote; the book doesn't substitute.
• Weary woman's semi-gourmet pasta: For some reason I've been struggling to find a good meal routine lately — both at work and in the evening. When I do cook mid-week, I gravitate toward the simplest, quickest thing possible. My new favorite is this easy, tasty, QUICK and flexible pasta dish you can pretty much make while the noodles cook.
  
  Salt and boil water for the amount of pasta desired. While the noodles mince a small handful or so of fresh herbs (I've used a combination of sage, marjoram, thyme and oregano, depending on what I have, but basil would work well, too). Coarsely chop a few spoonfuls of oil-packed sundried tomatoes and a few pitted olives. Once the pasta is done and you've drained it, stir in the add-ins along with a few cloves of minced garlic and enough goat cheese to make a light, creamy sauce. Stir with a fork until the cheese is mixed in and no large clumps remain. Season with salt, pepper and maybe a little lemon juice to taste.