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GUEST EDITOR

Best Of 2013, Guest Editors: Van Dyke Parks On “Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt” (“House Of The World’s Cultures”)

As 2013 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.

VanDykeParksLogoWith Van Dyke Parks’ new Songs Cycled (Bella Union), the renowned composer, arranger and vocalist (in that order), not only releases his first album of originals since 1995’s Orange Crate Art (with Brian Wilson singing), but lends his usually complex creations a renewed sense of simplicity. The thoughts may be determinedly complicated and touched by the soul of social protest, but Parks’ music is deliciously direct, while remaining as elegant as anything he’s done for himself (à la 1968’s chamber-pop initiator Song Cycle) or others (the Beach Boys and Rufus Wainwright amongst them). Parks will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature with him.

HausDerKulturen

Parks: Every year, for the last five years, I’ve gone to Berlin, to sit on their advisory board. I, the only American. That, for Germany’s largest Arts organization (more than 40 permanent employees).

Google the image of “The Pregnant Oyster” in Berlin, and you’ll see the setting of that dream escape. Multi-cultural in every intent, der Haus is aware of our new geologic age (“Anthropocene”) and all it implies for civilization and this fragile earth. As we have, in fact, multiplied and subdued the earth—now what?

The Arts will have to deal with that. Those crazy Krauts seem determined to face that question with an urgency that hasn’t yet hit the entertainment racket, and the vapid rock-stars that baskin its comfortable corporate tenure.

Berlin now has Europe’s largest train station and airport, via Europe’s most stable economy. We’re talking “hub” here.

I’m heartened to have the chance to escape the mere frivolities of fame and fortune to find myself among those who make a hungry, enraged, and dispossessed humanity job one. Such an arts organization has enriched my life, and directed me in my musical purpose, beyond where the word ends.

Video after the jump.