Arts

A Kaleidoscope & Mirror, Both Darkened | {story#3}

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

This is an original fiction piece written for StoryADay September. Read more & follow here.
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Yes, I am.

What?

I am.

Who?

Karen. From the office.

How long?

To what degree?

“To what degree?” What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I mean, “How long since what?” Since it became physical? Since we started talking? Since the idea popped in my head? Since I contemplated opening myself up to the possibility in the first place? To what degree are you referring when you ask me “how long”?

Why are you talking so calmly about this?

Because we’re adults.

No, “we” are not.
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Tomorrow | {story#2}

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

This is an original fiction piece written for StoryADay September. Read more & follow here.
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It’s not until you’re laying there that you realize how different reality is from the movies–especially in this case.

That moment exposes the assumptions you had about how this sort of thing would happen, and the various details and nuances of those assumptions are really affected by the cultural influences you take in.

The biggest difference? For me, at least, it was the sound. Or rather, to be more specific, the lack of it.

Music. Squeal. Cursing. Bending of metal. Breaking of glass. Breaking of branches. Landing of body.

And then, silence.
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Semi-Sweet, Bittersweet | {story#1}

/ Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

It was from loudly sucking the last of his milkshake that Ted finally understood the way she really was. Grabbing tissues, he made the call.

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This is an original fiction piece written for StoryADay September. Read more and follow here. (Because today is Labor Day, I am following today’s writing prompt by StoryADay.org to write “Twitter fiction”: a story in 140 characters of less. Come back tomorrow for my first “full length” piece.)

Creative Commons License
This work by Paul Burkhart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Weekend Photo Challenge: Free Spirit (a new weekly feature)

/ Paul Burkhart / 7 Comments

Today I’m introducing a new weekly post I’ll be doing. WordPress, the site that hosts this blog, has a weekly “Photo Challenge“, where bloggers are tasked with finding (or taking) a picture that captures a certain theme. See the bottom of this post for more information.

As my Facebook friends know, I do love taking pictures and trying to make them as beautiful as possible. And so, when I saw this today, I decided to begin this weekend featurette. The “challenges” are posted on Fridays, and so I will post mine over the weekend. Some weeks I might take a fresh picture, other weeks I’ll try and find an old one. I’ll post it, and tell a little bit about it.

Today’s picture is a really special one to me.
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A Note to All Philadelphians: you CAN beat the Parking Authority

/ Paul Burkhart / 2 Comments

There are few city institutions in this country more hated than the Philadelphia Parking Authority. Despite the name, they are the private organization on contract with the city to manage parking in the city. They make the laws, set the rates, set the penalties, enforce them, and have a financial incentive to making you fail at being a responsible parker in Philly. It’s understood that parking tickets will be a regular part of life in Philly. The PPA is the primary subject in A&E’s show Parking Wars, and their relentlessness and lack of empathy is so bad, that it’s had an effect on local tourism.

They call themselves the most efficient parking authority in the country, but had to be forced to follow-through on the requirement for them to give their profits to the public school system in Philly (they did this by claiming that they were suddenly “no longer profitable”, even as they kept more than a quarter of their profits in reserve bank accounts). Since then, they’ve been forced to reform a bit, but they continue to directly ignore recent court requirements that attempt increase their fairness, because, as is known, the appeals process is extremely problematic and confusing. So are the signs (just look at that one above)!
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Leonardo diCaprio & Kirk Cameron: BFFs (Laugh of the Day) [casual fri]

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

The other day, I wrote a pretty serious and in-depth post on the place of the darker things of this world in art, especially profanities. in the middle of the post, I put two rather intense videos as demonstrations of my point. They were both videos from films depicting serious husband/wife fighting. One was from Kirk Cameron’s “Christian” movie Fireproof, and the other was from the film Revolutionary Road, in which Leonardo diCaprio plays the husband. Adding to the irony, both of these movies came out in the same year.

It wasn’t until later that I was reminded by a friend that these two actually worked together early in their careers, on the TV Show Growing Pains. If you want some weird contrasts that can’t help but make you laugh pretty hard, feel free to re-watch the two clips below, as well as this clip of the two of these guys doing a scene from Growing Pains. In hindsight, it’s pretty hilarious.
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Christians & the Art of Profanities in Art

/ Paul Burkhart / 6 Comments

This post is not a defense of Christians cursing in their everyday lives (I wrote that post a few years ago, though I think at some point I may need to revisit some of what I said there).

This post, rather, is about the merits of Christians creating (or doing) art in which there are profanities (this also has implications on other “worldly” things in art like sex and violence, but they won’t be my main focus today). I’m writing this to prepare some people for the stories I plan on writing for this blog. I talked yesterday about how I’m participating in StoryADay September (Update: I’m done), and hope to post an original, completed fiction story every weekday in September. Concerning that, I wrote:

I will not be doing “Christian art” or “prophetic art” or “evangelistic art” as I write and post here. I will simply be trying to create Beauty in words and character and story in a way that is original, interesting, and stirring.  My stories tend to be rooted in reality as much as possible, and so they will probably include “real” things like sadness, violence, sexuality, cursing, or other things that challenge many Christians’ sensibilities. Know this ahead of time.

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Here I am leading a Port Wine tasting with Fluffer-Nutter Sandwiches [VIDEO]

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

Last night, some of my best friends threw a wine-tasting and food pairing party. Some of the people closest to me presented wine and food pairings that blew my mind. I had no idea that wine could do all of that. It was the perfect way to end a very busy summer.

Above, you will find a video of me presenting my wine and pairing. I led a tasting of a Tawny Port wine and paired it with Fluffer-Nutter sandwiches (my new obsession). I hope you enjoy it and learn some things.

You can see the videos of the other wine-presenters, as well as other highlights of our evening here.

Thanks go to Paul and Natanya Ma for hosting us, and specifically to Paul for taking and posting these videos.
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Visions of Arcadia: the most terrifying art exhibit I’ve ever seen

/ Paul Burkhart / 5 Comments

This weekend I had the privilege of seeing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new exhibit Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia. The exhibit showcases works exploring the idea of “Arcadia“: an idyll pastoral world envisaged in Virgil’s first major poetic work Eclogues where nymphs and fauns dwell alongside Bacchus and Pan; where human dwellers exist in peace, rest, and joy in the natural world.

(To put it simply: you can usually recognize Arcadian themes at work in a piece of art when it has naked people hanging out in nature–usually around rivers.)

This image of Arcadia, having been explored in art epochs in the past, overtook art once more right as modern art was being born, right around the turn of the 20th century. In fact, the exhibit subtly makes the argument that this image of a rural, paradisal ideal is an essential element in modern art’s development. The modernists’ dilemma–the tensions between longing and reality, finding and losing, permanence and transience, human and mythic–all find their embodiment in this Arcadian world.

The exhibit begins with excerpts from Virgil’s poetic treatment of this theme, set beside works that visualized his words. These run along one wall. On the opposing wall of this introductory hallway, there are excerpts from Stéphane Mallarmé’s modernist treatment of Arcadia, L’Apres-midi d’un Faune, accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings from Matisse that visualize his words.

The exhibit is great, but very theoretical. It works subtly and on nuance. It’s not just a bunch of pretty things thrown into a room. Instead it is a thesis–an argument–in visual form. It watches a theme develop from myth to poetry to visual art (and then from Renaissance to modern) and explores how they are all connected and converse with one another. It’s really like no other exhibit to which I’ve ever been. If you get the chance, see it.

But that’s not why I’m writing today.
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Unethical Plants vs. Unethical Animals: what to eat? [OPEN MIC]

/ Paul Burkhart / 4 Comments

So, I have this friend…

He loves documentaries and whenever he find one that is particularly informative, he tells us about it.

If I remember correctly, he may have been the first person from whom I heard about Food, Inc. which challenged our sensibilities about where our food comes from, and the whole notion of factory farming. I was now aware. I started hating Monsanto seed company with everyone else, buying organic food items, and buying my meat at a local farm, even though it was an hour drive and the meat was crazy expensive (I eventually gave this last part up, although I still try to be somewhat conscious at the store)

Then, I heard about King Corn and saw talks like this one and became all the more sure I should stay away from non-organic food purchases and try to cook more. My emphasis became “real” food and ethically grown crops.
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Girls: my new obsession

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

The TV show. The TV show. Rest assured, I mean HBO’s new dramedy, produced by Judd Apatow, about four twentysomething girls living in New York City. It just wrapped up its first season, and it was amazing.

Why was it amazing? Well, a few reasons. The writing is wonderful–it’s funny, thought-provoking, real, and profound. The characters are distinct and well-acted.

The show casts outright indictments against many of the marks of current twentysomething culture, revealing our narcissism, obsession with irony, and incessant naval-gazing; our infatuation with “becoming” and “being” more than “doing”; it betrays how our
Facebook culture has reduced our self-identity to the level and substance of a “Profile”, and the way we present ourselves and relate to others appears more like a well-manicured “Wall” (or rather, “Timeline”) rather than real, human interaction and messiness.

Further, the show shows genuinely messy and hard friendships and relationships. Granted, other media does this, but Girls is the best I’ve seen at showing how these difficulties are not “hiccups” or “things to overcome and get past”, but instead are the very things that challenge, shape, grow, and mature the characters and ultimately help them overcome those above-mentioned shortcomings of contemporary culture. It’s only by our messiness colliding and us holding on (as opposed to discarding) one another that we will become who we are trying to be.

Yes, the show takes us into the most intimate moments of characters’ lives–moments that are at times beyond our normal sensibilities of sexuality, relational “health”, and humor–and so many people (especially Christians, the primary readership of this site) will want to think long and consider deeply before embarking on this show.

Girls is indeed unflinching in its voyeurism and dysfunction, but it’s precisely that rawness and nakedness that ultimately turns the accusing finger towards us, exposing the ultimate delusion of our generation: that we’ve made emperors of us all, but emperors, in the end, with no clothes–more naked, awkward, fearful, and in need of covering than anyone that shows up on that screen.

But it’s also a comedy, so in the end, it reminds us not to take ourselves, the show, or even reviews of the show too seriously.

It’s so good.

My Most Awkward Dance Ever (RIP Donna Summer) [casual fri]

/ Paul Burkhart / 2 Comments

Believe it or not, there was a time that I did not have sweet dance moves like this and this.

This is the story about my first slow-dance.

Anyone that grew up in a middle-school setting where the seasons and holidays were marked by school dances knows that to “slow dance” was a rite-of-passage experienced by a precious few. Primarily reserved for nerdy kids that “dated” each other and the “cool kids” that hooked up and “dated” each other, the “slow dance” was a beast that eluded me for most all of my middle school career.

I had spent 6th- and 7th-grades going to most of the dances, but not actually dancing. While reveling in the glory of Third Eye Blind, NSync, Creed, Jewel, Boys II Men and Savage Garden, I’d hang out with my friends, “make fun of” (read: jealously wish I was part of) those that had someone to slow dance with, and join in the chorus of yelling middle-schoolers that would enthusiastically supply the edited-out curse word in “Pretty Fly for a White Guy“.

I was the quintessential “that guy” in those situations: an awkward wallflower, terrified of girls and wearing bad Christian t-shirts, who would (no joke) stand next to and carry on conversations with my slow-dancing friends–while they were slow dancing (once, a teacher had to tell me to give the dancing couple some space).

Yes, like I said, I was that guy.

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Art I Love: Arielle Passenti (a thesis review) [casual fri]

/ Paul Burkhart / 4 Comments

Question: What’s the longest word in the world?
Answer: the word is “smiles”, because between the two s’s, there’s a mile.

That’s a joke I was told by my father in the parking lot of a Home Depot when I was really young. I have no idea why I remember it, but it’s an appropriate place to begin when talking about the work of Arielle Passenti, a local Philadelphia artist whose thesis exhibition I got to see at the University of the Arts a couple of weeks ago.

I was able to purchase the work that you see at the top of this post. Today, I just wanted to share that piece, some of her other pieces, and my thoughts with all of you.

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Thoreau on the Eternal God, made Present [QUOTE]

/ austinricketts4 / 1 Comment

‎In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us…The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (via Austin Ricketts, who’s contributed to this blog before. My thoughts on this topic here.)