Darul Aman Palace was gutted by fire in 1969. It was restored to house the Defence Ministry during the 1970s and 1980s. In the Communist coup of 1978, the building was set on fire. It was damaged again as rival Mujahideen factions fought for control of Kabul in the early 1990s. Heavy shelling by the Mujahideen after the end of the Soviet invasion left the building a gutted ruin.

I know first-hand how art and culture can transform individuals and communities. I grew up in Minnesota, at a time when I thought I had to be either black or white. As an Asian American, I was neither.

It was the work of Mu Performing Arts staging plays about the Asian-American experience in St. Paul, written, performed and viewed by other Asian Americans, that made it OK for me to be who I was in Minnesota.

Through their work, I saw my story on stage. It gave me a sense of pride and identity, a sense that I could make a difference.

I've spent 20-plus years helping to build stronger communities. I've done this through my work at LISC, the largest community development nonprofit in the country; with the City of Minneapolis; and the Hawai'i Arts Alliance.

I helped launch the Creative Community Leadership Initiative at Intermedia Arts here in Minneapolis and received a fellowship to study the intersection of art and community development at the Harvard Kennedy School.

While I've had different roles and responsibilities -- ranging from financing real estate deals to running a main street program, from serving as a senior aide to the mayor to running an art center -- my passion has always been the nexus of art, culture and community development.

And so I've been excited to take part in a growing movement to foster creative placemaking, artists and other cultural-bearers working with residents to strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood or town through arts and cultural activities.

Creative Placemaking: A Powerful Force

Amazing opportunities open up when communities move beyond the idea of "art for art's sake" and embrace the full power of arts and culture to transform the places we live.

Creative placemaking not only lifts up a neighborhood physically with murals and sculpture and investments in artist housing, galleries and theaters, it helps strengthen the local economy, as eye-catching storefronts, new cultural activities and intriguing installations bring in customers and attract new businesses. It increases a sense of community identity and local pride. It can make a neighborhood a more interesting, livable place.

But most importantly arts and culture are a powerful force that help shape a neighborhood's narrative -- telling the story of what kind of place it is, changing its reputation and its trajectory.

Over the last four months, I have traveled across the country to see firsthand how creative placemaking is making a difference in low- and moderate-income communities in Philadelphia; Indianapolis; Covington, KY; Woonsocket and Providence, RI; and here in the Twin Cities.

These projects have a greater sophistication, scale and impact than I think any of us imagined (click here to see a photo essay about some of the people, places and projects we encountered). Like the bubble machine that helped attract $43 million in real estate investment, or the former steel foundry where teens learn welding and couples hold weddings.

Sharing Our Knowledge

Over the years I've seen a fair number of people in our field who understand intuitively that the arts can be an effective to support their work. Where I think we fall short is there is no body of knowledge for how it works, why it works and how to do it.

The result is a collection of piecemeal efforts, a willy-nilly approach where an arts project happening on one side of town may not be known to people working on the other side of the same town -- much less the other side of the country. That means a lot of time wasted reinventing the wheel and a lot of opportunity lost.

Now the opportunity is there for us as a field is to start to codify these effective interventions into a standard of practice. If we can shape what we know into an accessible body of knowledge, we expand our collective toolkit so more communities across America have the chance to benefit.

But even as the concept of creative placemaking takes hold, there is a growing awareness that, as Spiderman once said, "With great power comes great responsibility."

Steps must be taken to ensure that arts-based approaches to community development are inclusive and equitable, that they resonate for all residents, regardless of their economic station or color.

Community development is challenging and long-term work. Creative placemaking presents a high-impact mode of intervention that can be implemented cheaply and quickly.

That bubble machine cost $20, but it brought joy to a busy intersection in North Minneapolis where people had no place to sit while waiting for the bus. The bubbles float by, and that otherwise frustrating experience lightens a little.

In St. Paul, where we gave artists $1,000 to do small projects. one created a work of stained glass in a chain link fence. When commuters stuck in traffic see that little work of art, it says this community isn't just a place to drive through. This isn't a place of misery. This is a place of joy and delight.

We've seen for a long time how the private sector uses the arts to help revitalize and gentrify places. In low-income communities and communities of color that doesn't always happen.

Now we have the chance to unleash the potential of distressed neighborhoods through these creative media. Because whether for the artist or the audience, arts and culture invite the individual to connect to others; they help us to form a sense of "How do I fit into this place?" And that is what community is all about.

Everybody deserves to have beauty in their lives. When we provide that to people in a way that resonates for them on their own terms -- relevant and culturally specific -- we inspire in them a sense of belonging and a belief that they can make a difference.

I work with a group called Intermedia Arts (www.intermediaarts.org) in Minneapolis. Their tag line is "Art. Changes. Everything." I know this to be true. Art invited a young man longing for connection and belonging to embrace his Asian-American heritage in Minnesota.

Art really can -- and does -- change everything.

...especially more etymology, like the Ancient Greek idea of revelation, not necessarily malignant or benign, not destructive, just a transformation. The idea of labeling history in a way that changes your perception of the present -- like New York on September 10, 2001 versus New York on September 12, 2001. The truth is most of New York was unaffected but our perception is completely changed. And not to downplay terrorist attacks but a deli on 12 Street looked pretty much the same September 12, 2001 as it did September 10 but so much extra meaning is attached.

Cults are very interesting to me because of what they say of the human condition. Most cults are based on two simple ideas; trying to create more significance for people's lives; and hanging out with other people. There's something in us that's cognitively hardwired to want to feel that our lives have extra meaning.

It's almost this idea that the apocalypse or the rapture happened a long time ago and God took his chosen people and we're what's left. These people on True Detective are dirt farmers trying to cultivate some meaning, and the meaning is through murder or drugs or degeneracy or narcissism or intellectualism or family; these seemingly arbitrary desperate responses to this existential void.

I just love the act of making it and releasing it and seeing how people respond to it. The success of the record is not whether it sells, the success is do I like it, did I enjoy making it, am I proud of it, and do other people seem to have a relationship with it? Music to me is just emotional, so I hope someone has an emotional response when they listen or come see the show, with the pictures, I want people to feel a little bit unsettled; to encounter things that look familiar but raise a lot of questions.

I'm a big baseball fan, and I was very excited to see it. Before I left I had a sort of formal visit from two of the women players and they said, "We've come to ask you if you could help us. We love baseball and it's our lives, but we have nothing, no equipment." I was so moved by their intensity, I said, "I promise you I'll try."

It can be the most simple game, but it really touches people. If you work together in strength and rituals, you'll learn how to focus on something other than crime or drugs. These coaches in Manipur were looking to help their kids have a better life through a sport they love ... This is a beauty within a remote area, and those coaches should be rewarded for it. They're the MVPs in my mind, the 'perfect' individuals who give of themselves in many ways. It's something I'll never forget.

Manipur has an incredible tradition with athleticism, a very high level of accomplishment in the physical arts. And while cricket is the principal game in India, in Manipur where people are so sensitive to the degree of which their culture has been affected by corruption, they almost hold baseball up as a counter force. The minute there's something that is fair and life affirming, people are very eager to have their children benefit from it.

That was pretty obvious to me. You'd see these women not say a word and practice hard, go sliding onto this hard surface and just be tearing up the skin on their legs, you know they are, and then at night when we had an event they'd come in with their formal ethnic dress and you'd go, "That's the girl that's been abusing her body on this hard field?" But the women are so strong, as coaches and as people.

In the experience of writing this book I've come to realize how similar the process of writing is to shooting photographs. When we want to write something, we start with a blank sheet of paper. This is our canvas. We have to start somewhere. Do we start with a lot of smart ideas about what we want to say? Or do we start from the canvas of our open state of mind with an intention to express our experience, and perhaps our wisdom? This is the dividing line where we choose to make art from our direct experience, or art from our conceptual ideas.

The impulse, the desire to communicate, is present. The potential is percolating in our minds. Then the words emerge from within us. We speak with our own voice and what we say feels like truth, like a deep rumble beneath the earth, like piercing sunlight. It is our experience.

If we begin with an open, receptive, curious, attentive mind, free of judgment and the desire to interpret, the impulse to express will flow through us, vibrating with possibility. From this openness, unconditional expression is born.

It is also the same process as writing songs. When I am ready to write a song, I have a feeling it's time to give birth. I know it. I can feel it. The vibration is happening, and I can't do anything else until I get the song out, until I make it whole, until it is here with me.

So I have to make myself available for the inspiration to come through. I have to sit down and be, maybe start playing a few chords to link up with the process. Somehow, when I know what the first step is, when I know where it begins, then I begin. What comes out first, the beginning of the expression process, may not be the beginning. It may be the middle. I have to find my way through it, but always while staying out of the way so it can unfold. It is a calibration. You are calibrating yourself so that whatever it is that you want to express is lined up with being in the present moment.

You are aligned with your heart and mind, your being, your intention, with the present moment, and with what is waiting to come forth. It's true whether we are writing a song, writing a book, telling a story, or taking a photograph. It's a three-way conference call between what is being expressed, the present moment, and our heart and mind.

In the case of direct visual perception, the state of openness in our minds is like the blank sheet of paper. Blankness is vibrating with presence, with possibility, with the willingness to connect. It is the birthplace of direct perception, where all unconditional perception and expression occurs. To prepare ourselves to see, we dissolve our thoughts into our sense of being fully present in the only moment that we have, the one that is right now. All other moments have ceased, or have not yet happened. This is all we have. So we feel this moment, in our bodies, in our breath, in our awareness of the ground, the pavement, and in our arms, legs, and the texture of our clothing. We feel all this and we feel fully alive.

Just like that, when we are ready, when the time is right, the space is prepared, and we have our instruments of expression, the energy of creation begins to flow, sometimes with a few bumps in the way, but it starts to come out. All we have to do is get out of the way. We don't want to think too much about what's happening. We just want to be aware of it and be fully there. So whatever the factors are that are coming together -- timing, placement, space, light -- we don't do anything to interfere, to stop it, to move outside of it, to second-guess it, or to look at it from the outside. When we observe what is happening and make comments about it, the thoughts and comments actually become obstacles to the flow of creation.

It's much more effective in the creation of an unconditional expression if we start out with no thought whatsoever. In the case of photography, for us to have an unconditional visual expression, we first need to have an unconditional perception. So how do we do this?

The first thing that we do is to find our ground. We bring our mind into the present moment. This moment is the ground for the whole experience. Our mind is present and available. What does that mean? It means we are not thinking about anything else but being here right now and the possibility of connecting, of communicating with whatever it is that stops our mind. That openness is the ground.

From this we prepare to go forth, to experience whatever meets us. And then it happens. Out of nowhere a meeting of light, color, texture, line. We don't know what it is that we have seen. We have no idea. But that is OK. We don't need to know. In the present moment we are with our new friend. We can take our time and get acquainted. We don't have any expectation that we will know anything beyond the experience happening right now. It is magical because it came out of nowhere. It is fresh because we didn't make it up.

Oh marital misery, what would we do without you? Here lies one of the great subjects of fiction, a chance to peer in close at desire, betrayal, hatred, lust, love, grief, boredom, disappointment, jealousy, and fury. Where else are we given front row seats to the kind of battle that rages only between two people sworn to love each other -- intimates, or inmates, supposedly conjoined for life? Here are nine dysfunctional marriages in literature, though the varieties of unhappiness are innumerable. Every marriage is different, even to the two people who occupy it. One person's tale of betrayal is another person's bid for freedom. One person's good enough union is someone else's small suffocating cell.





1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: Emma Bovary is who we talk about when we talk about marital unhappiness. Her simple country doctor husband cannot fathom the wild longings that live, then languish, inside her. In this portrayal of a doomed marriage, what speaks most piercingly is the contempt Emma comes to feel for Charles. The reader can only imagine Charles's side of the story: not the catalog of complaints he might lodge against Emma's vanity, infidelity and impracticality, but mostly, I imagine, just bafflement.











2. The Ice Storm: by Rick Moody: In this tale of angst in an upscale Connecticut suburb, marriage is a lonely state to live in. It is the mid 1970s and for Benjamin and Elena Hood, conversation is a rarity, intimacy is a figment, and sex is a relic of the past. They join their equally discontented neighbors for a key party, but even the partner-swapping sex is banal. One the night in which the events of the book tragically culminate, the ice rains down, the streets freeze, power lines fall. But inside these homes, the landscape is the most chilling of all.











3. Frenzy by David Grossman In this novella, Shaul is convinced that his wife Elisheva is having an affair, and in intoxicating, erotic detail, Shaul conjures every detail. The result is a feverish potent vision where love and jealousy are intertwined. Is Elisheva's affair fantasy or reality? Does the Elisheva of his imagination match the Elisheva who is, in reality, his wife? For Shaul, and for the reader, this no longer matters. What is undeniably true is that sometimes we live so close to someone, yet know so little of who they are.













4. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: In this novel where obligation and passion clash, Leland Archer is married to the demure May, about whom "he had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which tradition and training had moulded her." Amid the watching eyes of New York society, Leland falls in love with his wife's unconventional cousin, Ellen Olenska. Making use of her social standing and a well-timed pregnancy, May upholds her rightful position as the wife. But though order is restored, there are no clear victories here, not even for May. To be a prisoner in a marriage is bad. To be the imprisoner, even worse.









5. Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen: "For forty seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say - but only now when tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots swelled up visible, split the earth between them..." And so begins a novella where marital dysfunction seems an inevitable byproduct of living. After a life of struggle, a husband and wife cannot agree whether to move to a retirement community. An embittered battle ensues, until the wife is found to be dying of cancer. Apparently, only death has the power to resolve some arguments.









6. Anna Karenina: by Leo Tolstoy: In this novel whose opening lines famously declare that all happy families are alike, all unhappy families not alike, there is, of course, Anna's passionate and doomed affair. But there is also the marriage between Anna's brother, Stepan, and Dolly, which doesn't erupt as tragically. Dolly forgives her husband's infidelity, as good wives do, but later in the novel, Dolly confesses to Anna that her own fidelity comes not from commitment but because no one has invited her to do anything to the contrary. In Dolly's words, there is resignation and entrapped desperation.









7. The Awakening by Kate Chopin: Leon Pontellier was a "rather courteous husband so long as he met a certain tacit submissiveness in his wife." His wife, Edna, feels that marriage is "closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams." I'm no couples therapist, but this hardly seems like a good prescription for contentment. One night, Edna learns to swim, and "a feeling of exultation overt[akes] her, as if some power of significant import ha[s] been given her to control the working of her body and her soul." That Edna ultimately drowns herself in the sea where she first felt such stirrings of freedom feels especially devastating.











8. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates: In a house, in the suburbs, in a marriage, live April and Frank Wheeler, new suburbanites who worry that they are becoming dull, inauthentic incarnations of all that they despise. It's easy to blame their unease on the suburbs, but in this bleak portrait, there is little doubt that misery can find us wherever we are. April and Frank might argue over who has trapped who, but Yates makes it clear that they, and perhaps all of us, entrap each other. April devises a plan for their family to escape to Paris, but it's far too late for any such salve. In this book, it's bad before it even gets going.









9. "Temporary Matters" by Jhumpa Lahiri: No doors are slammed, no sharpened knives are wielded in the opening story of Lahiri's collection The Interpreter of Maladies. A young married couple, Shoba and Shukumar, are quietly reeling from the stillbirth of their first child, retreating to their own private seas of loss. One week, when the electricity is out, they pass the time by each revealing something they've never told the other, a game that ought to come with warning attached: Do not try this at home. They trade confessions, until she unveils the news that she is leaving him. Her blow is painful, but his retaliation is even more deadly. This story warns us that sometimes the most dangerous of marital downfalls arrive stealthily.

Tova Mirvis is the author of the new book Visible City.