I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SHARON VAN ETTEN-Epic (2010).

Sharon Van Etten caught my attention with the song “Don’t Do It,” which I love.  The rest of this album doesn’t have the intensity of that song, but rather, it gets under your skin with some great songs and interesting and subtle textures.

There’s only seven songs (running time just over 30 minutes), so “epic” is kind of a joke.  But she packs a lot into these songs.  The opening two songs are about 3 minutes each, and they are great alt-folk songs, especially “Peace Signs.”  They are sparse but effective.

“Save Yourself” adds more instrumentation, including a slide guitar.  But it’s the harmonies that really make the song great.  “DsharpG” is a cooly brooding song that never wears out its 6 minute length.   And “One Day” also has major potential to be a hit.

Of course for me the highlight is still “Don’t Do It” which gives me goosebumps with each listen.

What’s really impressive about the disc is how on the surface it seems like a simple folk album and yet every song has subtly different sounds and textures to makes this a really complex recording.

[READ: February 16, 2011] “Homeless in Sacramento”

Vollmann wrote a lengthy piece about death in the November issue of Harper’s.  Now, four months later, he’s back with an 18 page (!) article about homelessness. Now, normally I wouldn’t read an article about homelessness, because, well, because its a major bummer, but also because there isn’t anything that I can do about it and it doesn’t seem like there’s much new to say about it.

But I decided recently that I was going to try to read Vollmann whenever I encountered him, since it was unlikely that I’d ever go back and read his vast output.  So, here I am.

Vollmann does, in fact, manage to say something new about the homeless.  He begins by explaining that the house he bought had a vacant lot next to it.  And he has been tacitly encouraging homeless people to sleep there when they need to.  He has learned to like many of them and he finds that the frequent users have become “friends”–as much as you can in that situation.

He’s given grief by his neighbors and then by the police who tell them that he can be put in jail for allowing people to sleep outside in his property (the Sacramento homeless laws appear to be very strict).  This leads Vollmann to investigate the homeless situation in the area and leads him to Safe Ground, an organization designed to give the homeless safe places to sleep.

Vollmann even joins them on several nights: getting to know some of them, eating with them and even sleeping on a tarp in the woods.   (Sacramento has very clement weather).  And so, Vollmann introduces us to a vast group of people.  Each person has a different reason for being homeless and varying degrees of desire to become un-homeless.  The one consistent feature is that everyone is polite and most of them are surprisingly unsmelly.

I’m not going to recount everything in this essay, but he does mull over many interesting aspects of the homeless situation which I had never considered before.  While not enjoyable per se, this was an eye-opening story.  I can’t decide if Vollmann was particularly brave for doing this or if that’s just another thing that he’s likely to do to satisfy his curiosity.