February 7, 2012

Sharon Van Etten says that when she writes music, "it's to heal."

Sharon Van Etten was once an aspiring songwriter in Tennessee, but she had no idea how the music industry worked. So she moved to New York City and took an unpaid internship working for a record label.

“I started doing mail orders and then learned my way around the music blogs,” Van Etten says in an interview with Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “I didn’t know what a music blog was at the time.”

Cripplingly shy, Van Etten toiled in anonymity during the day, then performed in clubs at night. Her boss, Ben Goldberg, had no idea she aspired to record for his label, Ba Da Bing Records.

“I actually got called out, because I never invited [Goldberg] to my shows, and I didn’t tell him I did music. And he yelled at me that I didn’t invite him to a show,” Van Etten says, laughing.

Goldberg loved what he heard. He agreed to release Van Etten’s breakthrough album, Epic, on which confessional lyrics are dispensed with either eggshell fragility or bold surges.

A Wounded Place

Van Etten’s new album comes out Tuesday, and the accolades are already rolling in. It’s calledTramp, and the internal navigation through life’s minefield dominates her songs.

“I would say they are personal and they come from experience, whether they be my own experiences or my friends’ experiences, but they’re mostly love songs,” Van Etten says. “It’s supposed to be a conversation with the listener in a general enough way where they can relate to it and not feel so alone.”

“Ask” is a great example of what people love about Van Etten’s music. The person in the song comes from a pretty wounded place. In a recent interview, she said that “sadness isn’t an emotion that most cool bands want to talk about.”

“When I write, it’s to heal,” Van Etten says. “It’s my own self-therapy so that I don’t actually feel sad all of the time. The only thing that’s helped me get through some really hard times was just being able to write and express — it’s very cathartic for me. I’m hoping that, by writing and performing for other people, it affects them the same way.”

Learning To Rock

Van Etten made her name with quiet, acoustic songs, but Tramp also features some rockers, including “Serpents.” Van Etten says she wrote that song in secret because she wasn’t telling anyone that she was playing the electric guitar.

“I didn’t know how to rock at all,” Van Etten says with a laugh. “When no one was home, I would just turn on my amp and play guitar as loud as I could. Whenever I got upset, I would sing, but at the time, I was trying to write more — my songs are more sad, and I don’t feel comfortable being angry. But I’m learning that it’s OK to have all of those things if you don’t direct it at someone.”

Perhaps rocking out was a way to challenge what people thought of Van Etten, but for her, it was more about her own self-image.

“I feel like I was a lot more insecure. I had a lot of social anxiety,” Van Etten says. “I didn’t really know myself very well, and I’d never lived in the city. A lot of things were just happening really fast, and I didn’t even know how I felt about things as they were happening. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was figuring out a lot. I’m a lot more secure than I used to be. The more I do music, the more confident I become, and I think these new songs show that.”

(via NPR)

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February 6, 2012
A Glimpse Behind Bars: Juveniles In The Justice System

by Dana Farrington (via NPR)

This 10-year-old, R., was brought in from school by a policeman. He had stabbed a schoolmate, but it was unclear what tool he had used. He was waiting to be picked up by his mom, who couldn't get him until she got off work, for fear of losing her job.

Photo: Richard Ross/Juvenile In Justice

This 10-year-old, R., was brought in from school by a policeman. He had stabbed a schoolmate, but it was unclear what tool he had used. He was waiting to be picked up by his mom, who couldn’t get him until she got off work, for fear of losing her job.

In the confines of jail cells, photographer Richard Ross documents children’s experiences. He snaps pictures without revealing his subjects’ faces, aiming to “give them a voice.”

The Juvenile In Justice project includes photographs of more than 100 facilities in 30 states. The project’s website has numerous images and quotes from incarcerated children.

Shooting compelling images in a bare, 8-by-10-foot cell is not an easy task, the veteran photographer tells The Picture Show in an email. Neither is “coming up with a new solution that respects the juveniles’ privacy, identity and still gives a feel of what the space is, without being boring or predictable.”

His images highlight scarred arms, bright jumpsuits and angular, empty cells. They show a variety of facility conditions and inmates of different genders and ages.

One photograph shows a small 12-year-old looking over papers in his cell. He says he was sent to the facility for fighting with another boy.

Ross argues in a caption that “institutionalizing juveniles and branding this as criminal behavior rather than dealing with it as normal behavior wrongly places juveniles in places they should not be.”

The online galleries feature testimonies with the children’s ages and other background information, which add more context to the faceless bodies. But Ross says the act of hiding identities sends a message of its own.

“By not showing the faces, I can imply shame or a sense of universality,” he says.

The goal, Ross says, is to hand over the photographs to “organizations that have better data and more skills at advocating for policy change than I do. I hope this will better arm them to show a human side to their statistics.”

Juvenile In Justice has required a high level of perseverance and negotiation, Ross says.

“I had to try and convince many, many people I was working with them in a spirit of bon ami,” he says. “Yet, I still had to allow the images to be critical or comment on the situation, while not violating the trust of the people I was dealing with.”

The photographer has a forthcoming book featuring his photos of the juvenile justice system.

“After the years and years of work I have done in many fields on many assignments,” Ross says, “this is the one that has been the most rewarding.”

PBS NewsHour also interviewed Ross and produced a video on the topic.

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February 5, 2012

miauniverse:

M.I.A - BAD GIRLS

(Source: miauniverse, via hipstertracks)

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February 4, 2012
Wislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012: The Szymborska Poem Above My Desk

by Dana Stevens (via Slate)

For over seven years, since tearing it out of a December 2004 issue of the New Yorker,I’ve had the same Wislawa Szymborska poem taped up above my desk. Here it is*:

ABC
I’ll never find out now
What A. thought of me.
If B. ever forgave me in the end.
Why C. pretended everything was fine.
What part D. played in E.’s silence.
What F. had been expecting, if anything.
Why G. forgot when she knew perfectly well.
What H. had to hide.
What I. wanted to add.
If my being around
meant anything
to J. and K. and the rest of the alphabet.

I never get tired of this perfect little poem’s simultaneous simplicity and complexity, the way its playful personification of the alphabet coexists with a wistful meditation on the infinite unresolved stories contained within each finite human life. Like many of Szymborska’s poems (and I can’t claim to know her work well; I’ve only read one anthology, View with a Grain of Sand, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, as well as poems, like this one, that showed up in magazines I read), “ABC” is a strangely apposite poem to re-read on the occasion of Szymborska’s death at her home in Krakow this week at age 88.

Whatever else Szymborska’s poems are about (a dinosaur skeleton, some antiquities glimpsed in a museum, a cat unable to understand why its owner has disappeared), they are almost always also about death, impermanence, and the passing of time. And yet her voice couldn’t be less funereal, melodramatic, or self-serious. Even her insights about the ephemerality of human existence can sometimes sound almost merry. In “No End of Fun,”a poem written from the point of view of the gods looking down with amused affection at human life, she writes, “Carry on, then, if only for the moment / that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!”

Szymborska’s work is lucidly, sparklingly funny, with a keen eye for the transcendently mundane details of everyday life; perhaps it’s because she sensed time’s passage so sharply that she noticed so much, and recorded it with such precision and seeming delight. In the poem “Miracle Fair,” (also the title of a collection translated by Joanna Trzeciak) Szymborska ticks off a list of underrated “run-of-the-mill miracles”: “a miracle minus top hat and tails: / scattering white doves.” Her poetry has that same paradoxical combination of overabundance and plainness: It’s a miracle minus top hat and tails.

I first heard of Szymborska when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, and read her only intermittently thereafter, in spite of the place of honor “ABC” occupies in my workspace (for a more complete appreciation of her work, I’d recommend Adam Gopnik’s lovely tribute on the New Yorker website). But one afternoon last summer, I found myself in the poetry section of Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley, suddenly transfixed by her unique poetic voice; every poem I randomly browsed seemed more powerful and meticulously constructed than the last. Thanks to the Boston Globe’s excellent obituary, I now know that Szymborska also wrote a popular Polish newspaper column for decades—its characteristically modest title, “Non-Required Reading,” is also the name of a translated collection of her journalistic prose which I can’t wait to read. I can’t speak for J. or K. or the rest of the alphabet, but Wislawa Szymborska’s brief residence on the planet definitely meant something to D.


*“ABC” from Monologue of a Dog by Wisława Szymborska. Copyright © 2002 by Wisława Szymborska. Translation copyright © 2006 by Harcourt, Inc. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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February 3, 2012

Why do we believe?

(by DMCMAGIC)

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