The dream of white picket fences is turning into a suburban nightmare as a result of the sub-prime mortgage scandal. McMansions may soon morph into apartment buildings. The face of suburbia is changing, as is the American dream. Younger generations, this CNN story reminds us, are opting for New Urbanism. I’ll elaborate on this in a later post. Via the Wolfeden.

Green Inventions Central explores the idea of meals and liturgy. She looks at two books in her post, Margaret Peterson’s Keeping House and Mark Galli’s Beyond Smells and Bells: The wonder and power of Christian liturgy. From Peterson’s book:

In the modern American culture, in which ‘busyness’ can seem simultaneously like the badge of a good life and like a curse that is impossible to escape, finding time to eat or to feed others can become a challenge. People eat on the run; they feed their children in the car; they skip breakfast, eat lunch at their desks, and panic when it is dinnertime.

She contrasts this with Galli’s classification of Sunday morning services — “gathering, word, sacrament, dismissal” — and seeks to apply Sunday liturgy to the evening dinner table.

Bob Barker is at odds with Iraqi culture. Neutering dogs is a foreign idea to people in Baghdad, where veterinarians are more like matchmakers than caretakers.

I’m perusing videos uploaded to YouTube detailing the storm and resulting damage from Friday’s tornado in Atlanta. It’s fascinating to me how websites like Flickr and YouTube allow for such dynamic and more or less real-time citizen journalism. These websites foster an organic creation of a veritable archive, of sorts, recording important, interesting and personal events. The founder and director of ArtsLink lives near downtown Atlanta but, thankfully, was unharmed; the house her and her husband just signed a contract one day before on is just blocks from a badly damaged neighborhood, however.

I’ve mentioned in one or two previous posts — posts probably more than two years old now — my own monumental run-in with tornadoes. Seven of them, in fact, all in one night. I was three years old and distinctly remember huddling in the basement with my mother. My father was galavanting around town with his sister, trying to rouse their aunt who they were worried wouldn’t heard the civil defense sirens. They were trying to do this without getting shot, knowing their aunt kept a .38 in her nightstand.

Even though I ended up with my first Big Wheel from a pile of rubble following the storm that devastated Grand Island, Nebraska in June 1980, I was terrified of tornado sirens for years afterward. I dreamt of the yellow noisemakers bouncing down the basement stairs of my home coming to get me. When the sirens would blair and storms were near, I would race into the house.

Somehow I overcame this phobia around the age of 12 or 13. By then I’d seen two other twisters in my hometown of North Platte, Nebraska, one as a funnel right over my little league game.

I can’t, unfortunately, lay out exactly how these powerful storms, with or without a tornado, went from being so frightful to so captivating for me. I would like to be able to understand how this shift occurred in order to better articulate the fascination I now have for thunderstorms, a fascination that impels me through my artistic processes.

As I’ve said before, I find storms both beautiful and powerful. They are beautiful when viewed from a distance (easily done on the prairies I grew up on); the textures, the forms and the light are stunning. They are powerful when upon you, which goes without saying. This combination awes me, how something so visually wonderful can also be so terrifying. Perhaps the best word to describe such a phenomenon is sublime.

Though I often lament living in Northwest Arkansas on account of it’s trees and hills obscuring the horizon, I still look forward to this stormy time of year. I’ve made note of a few places in town where one can look a ways into the sky and see approaching storms. I migrate to these locations with a camera whenever the forecast for thunderstorms is promising.

The fourth of Betty Spackman’s Kitsch bitch choruses makes full use of her experience, the decades she’s now been an artist of faith wrangling with the Church’s indifference or hostility to the arts. The title of the last chorus is “Let’s get art back into the church!” What Spackman puts on paper following the title, however, says the opposite of this to a large degree.

She begins by suggesting why we might want to bring art back into the church: Bare, ugly walls and healing the wounds of artists who have suffered through years of rejection by leadership and their peers. She then continues by suggesting why churches should not necessarily become art galleries, saying “Even thought I am an artist and would welcome visual expression in any form, in any denomination, I’m just not convinced that we should be spending our energy fighting to get art into the church. I’m more interested in getting the church out into the streets — and even asking if our church buildings are not preventing us from fulfilling our ‘great commission,’ as people of God and as artists.” [Emphasis mine]

As much as I mourn on this blog the Church’s indifference to the arts and architecture, I can agree with Spackman’s statement. Yes, if you bring up church architecture I will still happily tell you what I think the American church is doing wrong and how it could change for the better. Would I like to see more art in church buildings? Absolutely. Could this be dangerous to artists and the art community as Spackman suggests? Possibly. Her concern is, in part, that the Church will take over the arts, begin telling people what is good and what is bad art: “The church as well as government has for centuries been responsible for persecuting innocent people, stopping the voices of prophets and poets and burning their books. One has only to look at history to see the dangers of declaring what is acceptable art and what is not — Hitler’s condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art, for example, or the silencing of poets by the Bolsheviks.”

If I recall correctly, I have at times clarified my interest in seeing Christians — who make up the Church — become more interested in the arts as different than getting art into the church. At other times, my writings probably seem to contrast Spackman’s desire to keep art out of the church. In reality I don’t believe our deepest shared desires as artists of faith are opposing. She possesses twice (roughly) the life experience and historical context to draw from than I do and, therefore, can write more clearly about the subject. To clarify again, my interest isn’t so much in turning churches into art galleries; it’s more to see my brothers and sisters engaging in culture, changing culture, being “in” the world instead of segregating themselves from it.

A friend of mine recently relayed part of her family’s search for a new church:

“Just last night we were talking about two local churches that are currently meeting in rented spaces. One is itching to build a $1M building, and in the process of buying land to build. We asked the pastors about it, and they admitted that their building will be used only 5 hours a week (church offices are elsewhere), maybe less. But they feel that it’s important to have a building because “people don’t consider you a real church until you have one”. Another pastor we met with said that the church has $8M; he wouldn’t build or buy a building, but would instead start a daycare for the kids of single women, or put it into ministry some other way, and continue renting a theater (which is pretty cheap to rent on a Sunday morning) to meet for church. This seems to me to be a better use of money, even though it’s unconventional. If the church needs a nearby presence, then rent or buy a storefront to house offices and a couple meeting rooms for mid-week Bible studies or coffee, etc. Why spend so much for a giant, empty building?”

Some will suggest that hoarding $8M of parishioner’s giving is equally as irresponsible as spending it on an unused building. Even larger churches don’t come across this kind of money in short periods of time, let alone smaller ones renting meeting spaces. But my friend’s point is well taken — unless this church has a more specific goal than was suggested to her, in which case “hoarding” is actually “saving up.” The pastor mentions a daycare, but apparently didn’t give the impression this was a hard and fast reason for his congregation’s large bank account.

Growing up, indeed even into my college years, the emphasis on evangelism was inviting people to church. While this may have, at one point in the now distant past, been a culturally reasonable approach to introducing people to God, it’s not so much today (”Seeker-friendly” approach included; as I recall, the pastor at Willow Creek in Chicago recently suggested this approach — spearheaded by his church — wasn’t in the end such a great idea.). As important as architecture is to me, as much as I lament the current state of the built environment in America, the second church in my friend’s example is the wiser of the two in my opinion, both fiscally and evangelistically.

My brother attends a storefront church in downtown Grand Island, Nebraska. This church is very outreach oriented. It regularly schedules events to get people into the building — not necessarily for a Sunday morning service — by using art, music and coffee strategically according to its location. I’m not sure how well it’s working, but their idea seems to lie in between the two above, and perhaps betwixt Spackman’s thoughts as well. Knowing what I know now of real estate in that community, their storefront was probably a relatively inexpensive purchase, fiscally responsible(My dad is in the process of purchasing a 6,000 square foot building in the same downtown for less than $80k.).

Still, the most effective method of introducing people in our post-modern* culture is probably going out to meet people where they are, not attempting to lure them into a specific meeting space. Artists should therefore attempt to live incarnationally. By this I more or less mean “Be a part of the community around you.” Don’t live reclusively. Live “in” the culture and represent the God you have the privilege of knowing and loving to the best of your ability. Use your gifts in drawing or sculpture or music to this end.

* Post-modernism, while maligned a few years back by Christians in America, is not in and of itself a moral or immoral thing. It represents a shift in the broader cultural manner of thinking and responding, in my opinion, to changes in times and environs. There are, as perceived by people of faith, good and bad parts of this new way of thinking, just as in the past people would have observed — according to their values — good and bad parts of other new -isms as they came along.

I tend to do everything in sixth gear, including my shopping; it’s part of who I am to do things quickly. When I go for groceries like I did tonight (at Wal-Mart in our small town, where the best selection can be found), I do it efficiently and walk fast. It’s a pet peeve of mine when I come across people who appear completely oblivious to their surroundings, including other people. This usually occurs at Wal-Mart when people see friends and decide to make conversation in the middle of an aisle. They slow down my progress.

Tonight my progress was slowed down at the register by — not by an oblivious type — a short lady who couldn’t find her Wal-Mart card in her purse. This was OK though tonight; I had a headache and no where in particular to be. While I waited in line I relished the moment in an unusually quiet store, watching the people purchasing their groceries, clothing, electronics, impulse buys.

I wonder if I shouldn’t make people watching a hobby, with a sketchbook in hand of course.

I’m reading through a new blog entry by Makoto Fujimura and am finding a lot of it’s content relevant to my thoughts on intentional observation. He cites early on in his lengthy post a November 2007 NEA study on reading in America. Following are some of Fujimura’s observations; the post is a reflection on his recent visit to a Van Gogh exhibit.

“Not only does the report give us hard data on the steep decline of reading at all levels and age groups (except the pre-teen years — call it the “Harry Potter effect,”) but it substantiates an alarming trend of communal disengagement. We are not only reading less, we are reading less well: we are not only reading less well, we are losing our capacity to focus and pay attention to the world around us with empathy . . . The key word is “communicate,” and the report points out the severe consequences if we continue to lose our capacity to communicate. We may, if we go down this road, no longer have the capacity to be moved by Van Gogh or any other artist: we would not have the patience and longing in our hearts to do so.”

Some, I am sure, will point out that the mode of communication has shifted from the antiquated print culture to our current internet society; now we have a “visual culture,” and are taking in information differently. But taking in mere information does not mean we are deeply engaged with the content. We may be able to scan for multifarious sensory input, and gather unreliable, but perhaps important, bits and pieces in our junkyard of amassed headlines. But the type of mental wrestling that reading a good book brings is irreplaceable.

Good stuff, which I think is self-explanatory and backs up my interest in intentional observation. Equally as interesting in Fujimura’s article are details about Van Gogh’s faith I never knew about previously; granted I never studied his life or work with any kind of depth.

The following is one of my favorite Van Goghs, Cafe Terrace at Night:

One of the themes on The Aesthetic Elevator is what I refer to as “intentional observation.” In other words, take time to stop and smell the roses. In the early days of this blog I talked about how walking across campus in college afforded such an opportunity — a built-in time for paying attention to things most of us ignore.

I was reminded of this today as I began to rake leaves in the backyard. I remembered how influential spending time outside, particularly during Spring and Autumn, was to my artwork. And as I thought about it some more I realized how detrimental things like television and automobiles are to this process.

Computers don’t necessarily help either.

Interesting thoughts on how impatient we are from Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed blog:

“There are stories making the rounds about people becoming nauseated while watching the popular new movie The Bourne Ultimatum. Not because they [sic] movie is so bad, but because the shot lengths are so short, averaging (apparently) something like two seconds. In some people that sort of thing — alongside fast camera moves — seemingly induces vomiting. Fascinating.

That, however, got me thinking. Many people, myself included, think movie shot lengths are getting shorter and edits closer together. It is, to one way of thinking, a reflection of our collective attention deficit disorder, our inability to stay focused on any one thing for a more than a couple of seconds. (Still with me? I’m kidding.)

Continue reading via this link.

I’ve thought this about movies for the last year or so. The jittery result of such short scenes really bugged me in certain films, although I can’t remember which films off the top of my head.

A few weeks ago I realized something. I’m passionate about living spaces. This isn’t really a revelation. What it is is a succinct way to describe how I’m wired. I’ve been interested in residential architecture since I was twelve years old. This new phrase, however, causes me to think differently about choices I’ve made in the past and will make in the future.

I had coffee with Joel Armstrong this morning. Afterwards we put my bike in his van and drove to his house to pick through the treasures in his garage. From there we drove back towards my place. This is where the story gets interesting — and where it relates to my passion for home interiors.

If I were driving we would have turned down Jefferson to get home. Joel stuck to Main Street, which is not really much slower. Main goes through downtown. It goes right by the Siloam Springs building I spoke of a few weeks ago.

When I looked at the building with a realtor two years ago I saw a piece of furniture, an antique buffet. The buffet stood out in the dusty unfinished second floor space. I almost called the owners and asked if I could have it. I regret not doing that. I told my friend who has a contract on the building I wanted it and he said sure, although neither of us knew if it would still be there when he signed the papers.

So Joel and I drove by said building on Saturday. A sign on the window said “free stuff.” We like free stuff (and I knew the buffet might be in there) so we stopped. We wandered into the building and another “customer” pointed out who was in charge. Just as I was about to get the opportunity to talk to the owners, the ones giving the stuff away, the lady right in front of me found one of the doors from the buffet in a pile of stuff. She asked the owner what the door went with and when the owner pointed to the glorious buffet the lady was almost giddy. And claimed it immediately.

The buffet was in better shape than I remembered (other than one of the four curved doors being off of it). It’s about 40 inches tall. I failed to note the flavor of the exterior veneers, but the inside of the doors were birds-eye maple. It boasted clean shelving and built-in drawers for, I assume, silver. Some of the inlay on the outside of the doors needed attention, but I happen to know that the claimer’s husband is a cabinet maker with an enviable wood shop. This same claimer also goes to my church and lives immediately next door to good friends of mine.

Even after she claimed the majestic piece I asked the building owners where it came from. They said it was left by a tenant who couldn’t pay rent. That tenant was apparently a nephew of the late Wal-Mart heiress Helen Walton. History like this adds incredible value to such an antique, although had I been able to take the thing home I would have kept it. I gave this piece of information to the claimer on our way out of the building, infusing her with another round of giddiness. She hurried back into the building to ask more about the history after calling her husband and telling him to “Come now! Bring truck!”.

If I would have stepped into the building 60 seconds earlier the buffet would have been mine. The claimer said she was willing to wrestle for it. I should have taken her up on this offer.

Of course, it seemed we were a couple minutes too late for any of the good stuff. There were two other interesting pieces of furniture — one a disassembled wardrobe as beautiful as the buffet — that the other couple milling around in the junk already claimed. As it was the building owners (reputed in town for their apparent unwillingness to keep up or sell at reasonable prices the many downtown buildings they own) hadn’t even decided amongst themselves what they were giving away or keeping. The one other thing I really wanted, a little balance scale, they decided they were keeping. I would have used the scale for weighing out materials in glaze-making. I went home with a couple antique-y things for my dad, hardly qualifying as any kind of consolation prize.

Is it insane to obsess so much over a dusty old piece of furniture? I spent the next few hours thinking about this whole scenario. First of all I wondered why God, in whom I believe strongly and trust to take care of me (even if this is in ways I don’t understand), would allow me to even see the “free stuff” sign. Why did He pick this Saturday for Joel to insist I go back to his house? Why didn’t I suggest Joel take Jefferson instead of letting him keep driving down Main Street? If we wouldn’t have seen the sign I would never have known what I missed out on, that I was less than a minute from getting this wonderful piece of furniture for free, a piece of furniture I had longed for for two years or more. I would have assumed, after my friend signs the contract on the building in September, that the owners took it with them. It was never guaranteed that I would get it.

And it would have been less torment if we arrived at the building later, after the claimer drove off with the buffet. The claimer who I will now see every week at church, reminding me of my loss. It says in the Bible, in the book of James, that we are to rejoice in tribulation. For me this is tribulation.

I hope I came across as civilized to the claimer. I didn’t take her up on her wrestling challenge. I tried to say encouraging things, although I can’t remember exactly how any of them came out. I remember saying something like, “Well, I’m glad there are other people in Siloam with such good taste.” I’m not sure if this came out in a positive or negative way to the hearers. I did call my friend, the claimer’s neighbor, and suggest he go next door and lust after the beautiful object (said mostly in jest, of course). My friend didn’t do this, which I suppose I should be thankful for.

Part of my interest probably stems from being a dumpster-diver, from my keen interest in salvage and restoration. This was a find, an incredible find. And the claimer knew it. And I’m sincerely happy for her. I’m just quite sad for myself. And my wife, who was with me when we saw the buffet two years ago, is almost as sad.

What will I learn from this experience? Am I supposed to learn something, or am I just supposed to give grace which in turn will make God look good — which I’m perfectly OK with and which God deserves from us. Or maybe I was supposed to wrestle this woman, probably only five years older than me (roughly). Maybe my wrestling her for this beautiful piece of furniture would be kind of like Jesus’ anger at the vendors in the Temple. After all, I do believe that my passionate interest in beautiful, tactile things is a gift from God.

I know, I know, that last one is more than a little bit of a stretch. Truth is I have know idea why God allowed this to happen in my life. I may never know.

Part of the humor in the whole adventure was that Joel didn’t come away with much free stuff either, and he’s as much of a salvage monkey as I am. He kept asking for the junkiest and most obscure little items — an old sign, spools of wire — which the owners of the building decided on the spot they were keeping. Old, half-used spools of steel wire they keep, and significant, wondermous antique furniture formerly owned by the Walton family they give away! How incredibly strange this seems to me!

I know that I will look back on the morning and laugh.

Once I get over my insane sadness. Once I stop kicking myself for not being more aggressive, for not walking into the building and yelling “Where’s the buffet that used to be upstairs? I want it!” which, my wife will tell you, isn’t all that much out of character for me.

Last night I watched Music and Lyrics with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore as I stuffed and sealed envelopes. I figured it was a good background film, one that I didn’t need to pay all that much attention to. It surprised me with some witty dialogue and a plot revolving around an artist’s struggle to conform to commercial interests or fight for the better song — the “right” song in the words of Barrymore’s character.

Hugh Grant’s character leans towards making a living as ’80s pop band has-been. Drew Barrymore’s character gave up on her writing after being maligned in a novel by a former professor, but she retains an ideal of artistic integrity. When it comes to their art, most artists I’ve known personally — those who are painters and sculptors — hold dear this ideal. They shouldn’t make artwork that other people like; the viewers should like what they make.

When it comes to my own ceramic creations and mixed media sculpture I create whatever it is I like to create. This is what’s natural when I’m in the studio. I don’t think about the fact that I’m affirming the aforementioned ideal.

When it comes to my fervent interest in architecture I freely acknowledge the importance of the client. Architecture is no less of a tactile art, but serves a different and obviously functional purpose that modern visual art does not. Even so, one of my favorite quotes is attributed to the French architect Le Corbusier: “Treat your clients like children.”

While this saying, taken by itself, comes across as more than a little obnoxious, it holds some truth. The architect, and likewise the painter or potter, is (hopefully) good at what he or she does. Every person has knowledge in their respective field worthy of respect. Looking upon one’s clients as children does not necessarily mean you summarily ignore there interests and input. In a healthy family, parents will love their children and respect their opinions — even if the opinions are discarded in the end. The loving parent wants the best for their child.

I’ve no idea where these two examples, my interest in sculpture and my interest in architecture, come together in the realm of an artistic ideal. Perhaps they don’t. A painting is a much more static object than a building, though no less important in an artistic sense. Part of why I’m so drawn to architecture is the need to engage so many different disciplines — I’ve said this before on this blog — in order to do it well. People must interact with a building, even if it’s in a completely utilitarian and unobservant manner. A sculpture or painting is, frankly, much easier to ignore.

I need to think on this a little more.

A wonderful experiment in D.C. attempting to expose our impatience and lack of appreciation for things beautiful was blogged about at Think Christian:

“A recent article in the Washington Post describes a fascinating experiment: what would happen if the world’s greatest violin player set up camp at a Metro station in rush-hour Washington D.C.? Master musician Joshua Bell played anonymously for an hour on a $3.5 million violin in a D.C. subway station as part of an experiment to see how commuters would respond. Would busy commuters notice him? Dismiss him, toss him some spare change, gather to listen? Would anybody even notice that they were being treated to masterful renditions of some of the finest music in human history?”

Blogger Jeff Berryman suggests in his commentary on the article that “beauty is common; the experience of it is rare.” Read the original Washington Post article, Pearls Before Breakfast, via this link.