Karen Russell, Magic Realism and the Kingdom

If you haven’t heard of Karen Russell you should take yourself down to Powell’s and pick up a copy of her debut short story collection, “St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves.” I borrowed a copy from Van around this time last year and have read and reread it so many times I’m hoping to claim ownership. The short stories which make up Russell’s collection are the most captivating, beautiful, imaginative little nuggets of joy I’ve stumbled across in the last few years. They draw deeply from an immense creative reserve and introduce us to the most incredible characters including a class full of werewolves in training for suburban life, a camp of kids with various sleeping disorders, a minotaur and his family making their way along the wagon trail and an ice skating Yeti. So far so classic fantasy but the thing that makes Karen Russell’s writing so uniquely intriguing is the fact that all these fantastical stories are couched in terms of reality.

Karen Russell is the latest in a long line of modern writers loosely associated with the genre of Magic Realism, (including Aimee Bender, Jonathan Leathem, Jonathan Saffron Foer and the wonderful Japanese writer Haruki Murakami,) who have drawn first my attention and upon closer investigation, my ongoing devotion. Magic Realism as a genre hangs upon the basic need for the suspension of disbelief. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, writer of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and many other pieces of fantastic imagination stretching literature once admitted, “my most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." It is this blurring of realism and the fantastic that draws me to Magic Realism and drives me as a writer to create stories which most easily fall into this genre. Where fantasy creates entire new worlds; kingdoms, creatures and languages, Magic Realism is set in the real world with a realist view of the possible and impossible. However the lines of possibility are quickly smudged, blurred and often done away with entirely as weird things happen, the unlikely becomes increasingly likely and an odd kind of magic bubbles to the surface of the real world. Reading Murakami or Saffron Foer for the first time one might be fifty odd pages into a straight up piece of fiction, comfortable and relaxed with the status quo, when a talking cat or disappearing villages pops up to unsettle your resolve. The effect is both disarming and intriguing and more often than not leaves the reader hungry for a fresh miracle.

I choose to read and write Magic Realism because it appeals to the little girl in me; the part of my soul not yet world-weary enough to have developed presuppositions about what is and is not possible in this world. As I read some of these novels and stories I am constantly reminded of Christ’’s desire that we become like little children, not so we are overly simplistic or ignorant about the world we find ourselves in but so we can once again have a limitless sense of the possibilities afforded to us by the Kingdom of God. To read these texts and enter into them is to understand a little of the world view Jesus established when he pointed out the mountains and said how easily they could be moved with his help, when he stood on a fishing boat and controlled the storm or threatened to build and rebuild the Temple in three days. Christianity is a kind of Magic Realism in itself. We live in this world with all its temporal limitations, fully aware of the possibilities of God’s infinite power and creativity.

Moreso I have come to love Magic Realism because of its need to suspend disbelief. Nick Drake, the folk musician, once sang of, “straightening our new mind’s eye,” and this line has always made me think of Jesus’ command to repent and believe. I believe that this command though encapsulating our need to turn from sin, goes beyond right and wrong, to a place where God desires us to believe in an entirely new way of seeing the world. The Kingdom of God is with us now, hovering over the surface of everything we do and see, just waiting to break in and startle us with the amazing, miraculous, bigness of God. As I read these books I am challenged to “straighten my new mind’s eye,” and begin to see the beautiful possibilities for miracles, for wild imagination, hope and transformation just waiting for an opportunity to break into our reality.

Jan Carson blogs at http://specialfriends7.blogspot.com

Dangerous Art

The following is an article from David Taylor, the Austin-based playwright and pastor who is speaking at our Artists' Retreat in April. He is doing some research for a symposium on the theme of art and danger and would love to get some feedback from you guys so all his information isn't coming from the South. You can reply by commenting directly on his blog at http://artspastor.blogspot.com/2008/02/nasty-ghastly-dark-disturbing-dangers.html or by commenting here and beginning a conversation with our readers and contributors. We're really looking forward to getting to know David and his wife in April.

I am beginning my research for my talk at the symposium. My given title is: What are the dangers of artistic activity? and I would covet your opinions and perspectives. Here are a few areas for exploration.

1. Think of your personal experience. What experiences of art for you have been negative or destructive or debilitating or stifling or confusing?

2. Think of your church setting. What are dangers in high church settings and in the low church settings? High art practices and pop art practices?

3. Think of sins of commission and omission. In what ways are dangers things done or things left undone? In what ways is a danger a "too much" or a "too little"?

4. Think of cultural and societal patterns. In the advance and proliferation of media technologies, how are the arts being enlisted to serve ends that do not contribute to the well-being of humans or communities or cities?

5. Think of the artist and the audience. What are dangers peculiar to the artist, separate from the work? What are dangers peculiar to an audience--from a mass audience to a select audience?

Think whatever you want. All I care is to hear what you think are dangers--past dangers, present dangers, future dangers, actual dangers, potential dangers, fantasy dangers, small and big, yours and theirs.

Lastly, for fun, in addition to any of your observed dangers, tell me a way in which you might become the one to produce something dangerous; and by dangerous I don't mean daring, prophetic, "people just aren't ready for me yet" kind of dangerous art, I mean good old fashioned, "produced by a fallen creature" dangerous art.

David Taylor blogs at http://artspastor.blogspot.com

The Cobalt Season comes to Portland

So I sat down to write this review because one of my favorite music groups is coming to town this week, and I wanted to pimp the show. How’s that for shameless? Here goes: San Francisco-based Indie Art Folksters, The Cobalt Season will be playing at Enterbeing Thursday night, February 28.
Who is The Cobalt Season, you might ask. I figured someone wouldn’t be in the know, so when I started considering how I would go about prostituting their music ("pimping"? "prostituting"? alright, this motif has to end), I thought I would just throw out some links to other online reviews and call it a post. In my review-writing laziness, I came across something interesting; I discovered it’s impossible to describe an artist without comparing them to someone else. Have you ever noticed that? Brian McLaren, compared TCS to the Weepies and Sigur Ros, among others. Mark Van Steenwyk likens them to the Arcade Fire and Copy (I don’t see that connection myself, but, to each his own). Had I to do it, my instincts call to Iron and Wine, a dash of Sufjan Stevens, and perhaps a less ambiguously enunciated Thom Yorke. But you can hop on iTunes and draw your own conclusions.
The musical styling isn’t the only reason you should check out The Cobalt Season; their live performance is compelling and provocative (ok, that’s a third racy-descriptor, but this one is not gratuitous). The front man, Ryan Sharp delves into critical issues of faith and living, and doesn’t settle for the cliché-ed, quick answers. As many of the live performances I have seen have been in small faith communities, often connected with Emergent Village, prepare to sit on a pillow and engage in some story-telling and culture prodding.

I’m not familiar with Enterbeing myself (the venue/community hosting the event), but the show is at 7pm and you can find out more about The Cobalt Season at www.thecobaltseason.com.

Glenn Krake writes sporadically for the ImagoDeiArts blog when he's not browsing iTunes for artists that sound like Martin Sexton.

A Name Inflames

"A name inflames peoples' ideas and expectations. It's a cultural defect" Jonathan Shahn, sculptor and son of Ben Shahn.

For a year, my family and I made and displayed our art under the pseudonym, Saint Anonymous. It was an experiment with a few key goals. I wanted to be immersed in an atmosphere that nurtured a purer form of worship. I wanted to make collaboration a priority. I wanted to save my family--but that's another blog post.

The main tenet of Saint Anonymous was pure worship. It wasn't until the Renaissance that artists began signing their work. Before then, artists who made works for the church were not interested in defacing the pieces offered to God with their signatures. Considering this, when contemporary artists make worshipful pieces, I wondered if it is indeed a pure offering if we are signing our work. It's kind of like saying, "Here God, this is the very best I have to offer to You, but HEY PEOPLE, I've made a false idol of needing your approval and affirmations, too." Aside from casting down idols, I figured that our narcissistic MySpace profile-building generation needed a dose of humble anonymity to be mystified by. You see, when we come together to worship the Lord, all eyes should be on Jesus, but we are too easily distracted by our own creativity, our fellow worshipers, brand-name preachers, and denominational awareness. So, showing my family's art, which we make as an act of worship to our Creator, seemed best done in anonymity (at least it did at the time). We wanted to draw the viewer in to sharing our worship of God, and help them to not consider us, the sub-creators, as a factor in their worship.

We had a month-long solo exhibition under the nom de couleur of Saint Anonymous. It was an uncomfortable experience. We were invited to a celebration of the show, and drove 7 hours over to Nampa, Idaho so that we could pretend to not be the artists who made the work. There were lots of questions about the pieces, with nobody to ask. It became a game for the students to find out who Saint Anonymous was. They speculated preposterous notions about the art into the air, hoping to see if there was a troubled reaction on anybody's face. I struggled with casually milling around the gallery and not engaging with their quandary. I wanted to strip away identity from ourselves in order to more purely worship God, but I was finding that the side effects of our experiment were alienation and misunderstanding from the rest of society, who seemed unable to connect with the work that had no identifiable maker.

This experiment led me to ask a key question: what is more pleasing to God? "Pure" worship that causes isolation and confusion? Or messy, communal worship that leads to reconciliation and truth? I came to the conclusion that the identity of the artist is essential for the work to build community, and as you guessed, I am certain that God desires unity far more than well-intended, but alienating praise.

The quotation at the beginning of this post is from Jonathan Shahn, a sculptor. He has some gripes with critics who can't resist comparing his work to his father's. I agree with the intent of his sentiment, but I suppose he's going to have some more gripes, because I've included his words so that I could take them out of context.

"A name inflames people's ideas and expectations."

Imagine if God came not in the form of Jesus Christ, the human, but as an unknown property of physics such as anti-gravity. We certainly would take notice when, let's say, the toilet starts flushing backwards, but then, we also would feel no relationship or emotional bond to it. We might feel fear for sure, and quite possibly the shame of soiled clothing, but it would be hard to love even if "it" might be our Creator demanding our attention. Once Adam died, humanity lost firsthand knowledge of what it is like to walk with God in the cool of the morning. We were alienated from our Creator and His art. It is hard to deny the existence of God when we are awed at the complexity and order of the macro and micro universe, or when our guts get all tingly at seeing a beautiful sunset, but this amounts to anonymous, unrelatable majesty. It is art that we cannot connect to because we don’t know the Maker. It leaves us confused and isolated. We don't know how we relate to this creation, and we feel so skeptical about people who claim that they do. We loathe those people speculating wild notions into the air about religion and God, and we detest it to the point of proposing back that there is no Artist, this gallery, and the work inside of it, came into being on their own.

I've often asked the question, "Why Jesus?". Why this scheme of an Only Son, a blood sacrifice, an all-powerful God in a helpless baby's body at the mercy of His own creation? Maybe you've come to your own conclusions about this. Here are some of mine. I think that this Creator recognized that we could not know Him unless we raised Him as our own. We had no reason to believe Him when He said that His creation was good, until He proved it, and placed Himself in the care of it. We could not appreciate and be unified by the art until the Artist ripped open the curtains of anonymity. Of course, that was 2,000 years ago that Jesus walked among us with as normal and unassuming a name as Josh might be today. But, this face in the crowd was also the face man for God the Artist, and has left a growing and indelible mark on society. His name has not faded away and it truly inflames ideas and expectations. Just like most artists, He suffers through misinterpretations and fallacies about His work, but the power and essence of His work is His name, His identity as the Son of God and the Son of Man. He is a reference point, juxtaposing humanity with their Creator. God's face is no longer unknown to us, and through our relationship with His Son, we too, should no longer feel anonymous.
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Christopher Dennis heads up his family’s art blog, Dennis Family Art Collective, and is the founder of Click Patron, an organization whose goal is to provide cash assistance to emerging artists.

Image: Detail from Blue Heron Foils Snake's Plans For The Valley

Sting's "Message in a Bottle"

I heard Sting’s classic song “Message in a Bottle” on 94.7 driving into work recently and was struck by his brilliant metaphor for contemporary isolation and fragmentation. The castaway, alone and isolated on an island, throws a bottle out into the ocean hoping for rescue, but instead of a 747 coming to rescue him, or a passing cruiseliner that caught his note, he instead receives a hundred million responses from others who are likewise castaways alone and isolated on islands out at sea. The line that really struck me was “Woke up this morning, can’t believe what I saw, hundred million bottles washed up on the shore.” We reach out for connection and community thinking we're alone in feeling isolated and others out there must have the connection we long for: if only we could be drawn in. Instead we awake to the realization that most out there feel as lonely and isolated as we do. What's keeping us apart?

It was a real “Lost in Translation” moment, how we’re so often walking through cities filled with people yet emotionally feeling the disconnect of castaways on islands out at sea. When we reach out to find connection, hoping for rescue, we find instead the realization both comforting and disturbing all at the same time: that everyone else is in the same boat (no pun intended), similarly lost on islands out at sea. Sting takes on the classic "no man is an island" with the critique that we may not have a choice.

I love Sting’s brilliant and honest observation, “Seems I’m not alone at being alone, hundred million castaways longing for a home.” Its got me thankful for the family of Christ: that Christ is drawing us castaways out of our islands-at-sea, into a depth of communion (rich united life together) with the very life of God (filled with his Spirit, united to Christ, adopted into the Father’s family) and each other (the diverse body of Christ: across race, class, across history and around the globe) in the hope of God’s restored communion with creation (heaven come to earth in fulfillment of his kingdom). I'm grateful that the gospel is drawing us out of our islands of isolation into communion with God, humanity and creation. We’re clumsy and awkward trying to figure it out, and we experience it imperfectly now in anticipation of what’s coming, but we’re growing in knowing & being known by God together—a bunch of castaways drawn together into an awkward, clumsy, and beautiful family.

Why I love country music

1. Because country music reminds me of open roads, mountains, rural areas, places where you glance out the window and can see for miles and miles. In short, country music reminds me that I am very, very small. When I’m at my wits end worrying about [insert issue here] it’s comforting to recall that there is there is an enormous, all-knowing, all-powerful God who controls everything. We miss out on that feeling when we live in cities, a mere bowling ball’s throw away from our neighbors. Country music reminds me how big God is.

2. Because, as my friend Las Frijoles once said, San Antonio in country songs is always just San Antone. I've always loved that.

Music and Place Photography Project

Hello All,
This is going to be a somewhat short and business like blog. I just wanted to call in favors and hook ups outstanding with all of you. My good friend Melanie Brown and I are embarking on an exciting art project to explore the relationship between place and the music which comes from that place. We're beginning the project with a ten piece exhibition of five photos and short interviews with Portland musicians and five similar pieces from Nashville musicians who we'll be interviewing in Nashville at the beginning of next month.

If the initial exhibition goes well we're keen to expand the project and interview/photograph musicians from other music rich cities (eg New York, Dublin, London, Seattle, LA etc.) Unsurprisingly we don''t have a huge budget for travelling all over the world so we'd love to shoot people as they pass through Portland on tour. We're looking for anyone who has contacts or knows people who know people who know people we could take pictures of. In the next few months we'd really like to shoot Bell X1, David Bazan, Rosie Thomas, Mark Kozelek, a Crib or several Cribs and anyone in the greater Portland/Nashville/Seattle area. If you might be able to help us or pass us on to someone who could we'd love to hear from you. We have lovely professional resumes and you can check out mel's photography at www.melanibrown.com. she's an excellent photographer.

the whole project hangs around the idea that community affects music and so we'd love this to be a community effort getting the shoots set up. all help will be rewarded with wide smiles, mix cds and hot mugs of stumptown, much love,

mel and jan (jan@imagodeicommunity.com)

Jan Carson blogs at http://specialfriends7.blogspot.com