“Creating a Third Space: Wrestling with Deep Issues of Art, Faith and Culture”
— Makoto Fujimura
Geneva Forum 2010. Sat, 6 Feb.
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As the final talk of the Geneva Forum 2010 in Madison, WI a few weeks ago Makoto Fujimura spoke with a group of artists and church leaders about the importance of creating Third Spaces in society in order to preserve and create culture and the voice the Church has in the formation of these centers of healthy societal development.
IN THE LATE FALL of 2009 we connected with International Arts Movement (IAM), a global network founded by artist, author and former council member of the National Council of the Arts, Makoto Fujimura, and with the turn of the new year we have joined with the IAM community by hosting a local IAM Readers Guild in Madison, WI.
The IAM Readers Guild is designed to allow readers to interact with others in their own community as well as the wider IAM global community, and to learn a “deeper empathy” through experiencing great writing that wrestles with big ideas in many cultural contexts.
Each month, groups around the world will meet to discuss the book of the month, beginning with a list of questions that will be sent to all groups and welcoming spontaneous discussions as they arise. A member of each group will take notes and blog a brief summary of the group discussion after the meeting, allowing all the readers a wider experience of the book. [IAM – Readers Guild] Read the rest of this entry »
From Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows to the subversive leak of melting-pot project Dark Night of the Soul, musicians are making headway in the next generation of their industry. NoiseTrade is pioneering the economic viability of free-online distribution for those of us who aren’t already famous.
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In 2006 singer/songwriter Derek Webb made his then-new album Mockingbird available online in exchange not for money but for information: your name, email address, zipcode and a referral to a few friends.
” In three month’s time Webb gave away over 80,000 full downloads of his record and collected valuable information for as many new fans. In addition, Derek has since seen many sold out shows and increased merchandise and record sales, including a curious spike in sales of the very record that was given for free. ” – NoiseTrade | About
Inspired by the success of this distribution experiment, Derek Webb has since (in partnership with some other friends in the music business industry) launched NoiseTrade, a public platform for this style of word of mouth trade-and-barter system of music distribution. Read the rest of this entry »
Purchase from Amazon.com
Literature Review — Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation by Josef Pieper
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I am the sort of man who likes his book in one of two conditions, either crisp and new as the dawn or as battered, old and smelling of must as the forgotten chests and other antique relics which crowd the attics of our grandparents homes. The middle ground between these two is unbearable to me, there is nothing in me that appreciates a dog-eared page, a scribbled note, or a scuffed cover warped from old coffee spills and yet my copy of Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings is in just that sort of condition.
I suppose it has been unavoidable; I have read, re-read and loaned out this book to others with such frequency that it is not surprising that this, of all my books, would be the most scruffy piece of literature I proudly own. At first I fumed and locked the book away in the vain hopes that darkness and the company of better cared-for tomes would coax it back into a pristine condition through some sort of benevolent osmosis but I am unable to keep this book on my shelf; it seems perpetually to be napping in my satchel or traveling abroad through my friends hands so I have learned to love its continually degrading state. I have kept this book mobile throughout the past years of my life because, like few other books I have ever read, it expresses — with remarkable brevity — a conceptual basis of living which deeply supports the value of celebration and creativity. Read the rest of this entry »
Sufjan Stevens is searching for answers...
NPR Interviews and Profiles – Sufjan Stevens: Finding Inner Peace In Traffic. 5:59
Sufjan Stevens has been making news in the past month, just a few weeks ago on Oct 20 he released what can be called an operatic tribute to a stretch of asphalt, The BQE: The Motion Picture Soundtrack — once only the title of the traffic-plagued Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, BQE now boasts itself as an indie music title (isn’t that the way indie works?) — and in some of the interviews and news from Stevens leading up to that release a dark, exhausted theme emerged from the quirky inanity—or brilliance—of making a musical tribute to a highway: Sufjan Stevens may be questioning the nature and purpose of music and thinking about hanging up his guns. (well, maybe it’s not that extreme…) This is what spending 9 months of your life driving in New York traffic jams will do to you. Read the rest of this entry »
The MATCHBOX : a Journal of Art & Faith 