Posts tagged horizons of the possible

Not all charities are created equal—or offer equal benefits to the giver. I suppose it feels a little depressing to read this sort of blunt analysis, but calling it what is is probably a good first step in both considering less-self-interested realms of generosity and service—and in recognizing and celebrating the goodness and possibility, such as they are, of cultural places and spaces like the Frick museum.

charity, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, museums, philanthropy

Nate

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Nonetheless, a few months ago I became a ”Young Fellow” at the Frick museum ($500 per year; “all but $340 is tax deductible”). I’ll admit I felt slightly ambivalent about it. As much as I enjoy going to museums and sincerely believe they help to make the world a better place, giving to them is not quite on a par with giving to a cancer hospital. Cultural institutions are a luxury in our society. Surely there are more pressing concerns.

My agenda was to join an organisation that promotes community. In my research, I found that cultural institutions have a monopoly on providing frequent, affordable events that also, frankly, seem fun. My hard-earned, limited income could instead go toward feeding starving children in Africa, which is surely a worthier cause than maintaining the art collection of an old mansion on Fifth Avenue. But starving children do not provide fun parties. Point: museum.

What does your neighborhood beauty salon make possible? What new forms of culture are created in response?

community, crime, horizons of the possible, neighborhoods, scope, violence, women

Nate

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The police have tried doing outreach to victims by, among other things, setting up domestic violence education tables at community events, only to find that no one wants to be seen near them. But the atmosphere is different in the safety of a beauty salon.

“The salon may be one of the few places women might be without their abuser around,” said Laurie Magid, a former state prosecutor who is acting United States attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “This program really addresses a need. You don’t have a case unless you have a crime reported in the first place and that is the difficult area of domestic violence.”

While Cut it Out trains stylists offsite, the Washington Heights workshops, conducted in Spanish, take place inside beauty parlors during the hours that clients are served, which not only makes it easier for people to participate, but also enhances the comfort factor.

“The salon is a place where everyone already feels at home,” said Sharon Kagawa of the Administration for Children’s Services, the agency that recruits salons for the program. “So they can be more honest.”

It's easy to think of the hermit as someone who chooses to remove themselves from culture. While I suppose by Andy's definition it's difficult to make a culture of one, few hermits are truly that alone—nor should they be. There is culture-among-hermits, as in even the most removed contemplative orders; but the hermit's place in the larger culture has often been one not of culture-rejecter but culture-keeper.

community, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, monasticism, thomas merton

Nate

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Buddhist-Christian dialogue seems awfully passé to me in an era when positive dialogue seems all too scarce among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, on the one hand, and between crusading atheists and theists of all stripes, on the other. But I do appreciate Thomas Merton’s appreciation of the hermit life—the need to get away from it all—even though he may have been one of the most outspoken Trappists who ever lived (as my father is one of the more talkative Quakers I’ve ever met). The editor of Buddhist-Christian Studies, however, thinks Merton ignored one vital class of hermits (p. viii, n. 5):

“Merton’s model of the hermit life does not exhaust the phenomenon within Western Christianity. Historically speaking, the hermit life was embraced by far more people than the limited number of professed monks whose spiritual growth had taken them beyond the life of the coenobium. For example, hermit shrine keepers were numerous throughout Christian cultures for centuries; most of these were simple laity without whom many pilgrimage sites would simply not have existed, and their identity has not yet found a modern voice. The massively popular pilgrimage churches of traditional Catholicism had at their heart the hermit-sacristan who tended the lamps and swept the floors. The professed hermit monk, the monastic hermit order, and the shrine hermit all found expression in the legal and the architectural boundaries of medieval and early modern societies.”

Perhaps lay bloggers, photographers, and Wikipedists can be considered the hermit-sacristans of this information age, quietly tending our quirky little shrines that attract pilgrims who seek to escape the self-referential obsessions of the cloistered academies and the hourly tolling of alarm bells from the cathedrals of the major media.

One of these days I really must read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Till then, here's a short piece by Lawrence Weschler, about his 25 years of discussions with two of Los Angeles' most significant artists, Robert Irwin and David Hockney—who have never met, but always seem to want to talk about the other when Weschler drops by for a chat.

art, california, horizons of the possible, photography

Nate

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“I mean,” Hockney continued, “I’ve observed his progress, though at times that was by no means easy, and for the longest time I felt that his position on the photographing of his work”—a flat prohibition, as it happens (which is one of the principal reasons he was so much less well known among the public at large)—“was pretty preposterous, and somewhat fetishistic.” Irwin for his part accounted for that absolutist injunction by arguing that a photograph could capture everything that the work was not about (which is to say its image) and nothing that it was about (which is to say its presence), so why bother?

Hockney paused and took a drag on a cigarette before going on to confound me entirely: “The thing is,” he now said, “with time I’ve come to see that Irwin was right about that ban on photographing his work; I wish I’d imposed a similar ban regarding my own from the outset.” (This from an artist whose work was more photographed and more ubiquitously visible in the world than that of just about anybody else, with the possible exception of Andy Warhol!) “I mean, no one can come upon one of my paintings in a museum, say, and simply see it; instead they see the poster in their college dorm or the dentist’s office or the jacket on the book they are reading, all sorts of second-rate mediations getting in the way of experiencing the work as if from scratch.”

From Rebecca Solnit's wonderfully peripatetic book-length meditation on walking. A few years back I was struck by what exactly it might mean that at the time my favorite writer was Walker Percy and my favorite photographer was Walker Evans.

horizons of the possible, landscape, thought, travel, walking

Nate

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Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts….

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.

Unintended consequences of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, music

Nate

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Equal temperament, Duffin says, suited the conditions of the 20th century. It jibed with capitalism because it enabled manufacturers to mass produce pianos, which all now had the same tuning, and which, since the piano was the chosen instrument of the middle class, determined the tuning of other instruments. It also was “democratic,” a politically correct system in which all keys were created equal. Finally, it was “scientific,” if by that we mean that it brought the inexplicable (the comma) within the domain of mathematics and under the sway of a single, universal, rational system.

But is ET suitable to the conditions of the 21st century? Duffin was motivated to write his book because he thinks the compromises of ET do harmonic damage, especially to major thirds, “the invisible elephant in our musical system today,” he says. “Nobody notices how awful the major thirds are.” I confess I am one of those nobodies who doesn’t have the ear to notice. But I’m intrigued by Duffin’s book for another reason.

By stressing the unnaturalness and the historical contingency of our music system, Duffin forces us to consider the place of Western music in world history, and how it relates to that of other cultures. Bach, Mozart and Beethoven may be great, but they are not great in any absolute sense because they are servants to tuning systems of their particular time and place.

Earlier today in Kenya, my friend Megan hosted the Nairobi launch party for her new non-profit, ZanaAfrica, which (in development-speak) focuses on "simple, sustainable business solutions to solve complex health and social problems throughout Africa to alleviate poverty." Or, to quote the page of Culture Making where Andy mentions Megan's work: "So where are we called to create culture? At the intersection of grace and cross. Where do we find our work and play bearing awe-inspiring fruit—and, at the same time, find ourselves able to identify with Christ on the cross? That intersection is where we are called to dig into the dirt, cultivate, and create."

africa, horizons of the possible, kenya, poverty, power, technology and change, women

Nate

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This organization, and this sanitary pads project, comes as a result of many years of working with girls in Kenya, seeing problems, and searching for solutions. And it comes from living in Kenya for more than seven years now, and revising the way I see the world in light of new information and new experiences.

When I worked for five years with former street children, our organization’s biggest costs per child were bread and sanitary pads. I realized this was a national problem, that girls across the country went through horrible things during their periods.

This to me was a question of social justice. The poverty that mires 64% of Kenyans is unjust. To allow girls and their future families to sink further into poverty because they lack the funds necessary to stem the flow of their monthly menstruation and sit out of school four days a month—I cannot be the person who knows but remains on the sidelines. I believe the words of my high school mentor, Denise Fuller, who said, “the easiest words for someone to say are ‘I don’t know’. Because, once we know, we are required to do something.”

Here's one Kansas mechanic-savant's technique for bridging the red/blue state stereotypes: huge cars with great mileage.

horizons of the possible, kansas, technology and change, transport

Nate

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This is the sort of work that’s making Goodwin famous in the world of underground car modders. He is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil—all while doubling their horsepower. The result thrills eco-evangelists and red-meat Americans alike: a vehicle that’s simultaneously green and mean. And word’s getting out. In the corner of his office sits Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 Jeep Wagoneer, which Goodwin is converting to biodiesel; soon, Neil Young will be shipping him a 1960 Lincoln Continental to transform into a biodiesel—electric hybrid.

His target for Young’s car? One hundred miles per gallon.

A prescient projection of cultural change, from Edward Bellamy's late-19th-century utopian-futurist novel Looking Backward. The protagonist is a wealthy Bostonian who accidentally sleeps through the entire 20th century. If you keep on reading, it gets more amusing: in the year 2000, professional music is on tap 24 hours a day, not via recordings but over dedicated phone lines hooked up to performance spaces throughout the city.

futurism, horizons of the possible, music, performance, recording, technology and change

Nate

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‘Are you fond of music, Mr. West?’ Edith asked.

I assured her that it was half of life, according to my notion.

‘I ought to apologize for inquiring,’ she said.

‘It is not a question that we ask one another nowadays; but I have read that in your day, even among the cultured class, there were some who did not care for music.’

‘You must remember, in excuse,’ I said, ‘that we had some rather absurd kinds of music.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know that; I am afraid I should not have fancied it all myself. Would you like to hear some of ours now, Mr. West?’

‘Nothing would delight me so much as to listen to you,’ I said.

‘To me!’ she exclaimed, laughing. ‘Did you think I was going to play or sing to you?’

‘I hoped so, certainly,’ I replied.

Seeing that I was a little abashed, she subdued her merriment and explained. ‘Of course, we all sing nowadays as a matter of course in the training of the voice, and some learn to play instruments for their private amusement; but the professional music is so much grander and more perfect than any performance of ours, and so easily commanded when we wish to hear it, that we don’t think of calling our singing or playing music at all.

I have to say from the examples I find the Western version of the holy fool a bit more attractive than the more common (and more exceedingly counter-cultural) Eastern counterpart. But holy foolishness is certainly a posture of culture-making, mixing elements condemnation and creation.

cultural worlds, fools, gestures and postures, horizons of the possible, humor, saints

Nate

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It is not necessary to be Russian in order to appreciate holy fools however it seems to help.

There is a long tradition of fools for Christ’s sake in both Western and Eastern Christendom, containing both real fools and fools ex officio. In the West for example, St. Francis of Assisi exhibited some of the characteristics of holy folly, as did the order he founded. But it is Eastern Orthodoxy especially in Russia, that has produced the richest collection of holy fools. In the case of Russia the argument could actually be made that holy folly became a major theme in the national culture, both oil the popular and literary levels Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot being the undisputed literary climax of the tradition). Holy folly in the Eastern church may go back to the early days of the desert saints of Egypt, but the phenomenon became prominent in the sixth century Famous cases are those of Theophilus and Maria of Antioch, and of St. Symeon of Emesa Theophilus and Maria came from aristocratic families. They were engaged to be married, instead decided to become fools for Christ’s sake. They roamed the streets of the Syrian metropolis, he dressed as a jester, she as a prostitute, outraging the populace with bizarre and often obscene behavior. Gradually, it was recognized that this behavior was an expression of unusual piety. St. Symeon was an anchorite in the lands east of the river Jordan. He too began to roam through the towns and villages of this area. He would throw walnuts at people in church, overthrow the stalls of street vendors, dance with prostitutes in the street, burst into women’s bath houses and conspicuously eat on fast days. At first, of course, the reaction to this behavior was outrage. Then it came to be accepted that the behavior symbolized great religious mysteries…