I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MAL BLUM-“See Me” NPR’S SOUTH X LULLABY (March 13, 2018).

I feel like I was pretty lucky to see Mal Blum just days before they went to SXSW and made a Lullaby.

Without the band, Mal sings more quietly which certainly lets you hear the words more clearly–and Mal is a gifted lyricist.  But Mal also writes catchy tunes.

I love that the verses are quiet and muted, but there’s loud strumming in between.

And as the song nears the end, the intensity ratchets up for a line of “why can;t they see me?”  …before the quiet conclusion: “I was right there.”

Mal performs in front of the Future of Secrets art installation.

The Future of Secrets was conceived by Sarah W. Newman in collaboration with Jessica Yurkofsky, Rachel Kalmar and metaLAB at Harvard. The installation, which is part of the SXSW Art Program, asks those attending to anonymously type a secret into a laptop and in exchange someone else’s secret is given to you. Those secrets are then projected on a wall, which is the backdrop for this video.

“‘See Me’ is an unreleased song that will be on our next record (sometime next year),” Blum tells NPR. “It’s about the disparity between how one sees oneself, or the struggle of being seen as we are, versus how others view us, which can result in an unintentional hidden self or a perpetual feeling of invisibility. Being transgender informed the song, but it’s not exclusively about that.”

[READ: September 10, 2017] “An Education”

This is a short piece about two girls in school  I assume it is set in Hungary as it is translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.

The narrator said she was always a hard-working child filled with self-discipline.  But her parents never understood that she did it all for herself–not for them or to make anyone else happy.  Her father was the school principal and was absolutely proud of her–she was hardworking and punctilious like he was.

Her mother, on the other hand, was clearly more loving to her sister Blanka–when she lost her temper with Blanka “there was something frenzied and indiscriminate about the way she pummeled her.”  Her father tried to push her very hard to make her learn more.  Her father was far more proud of the narrator than Blanka, but “no one was ever as proud of me as Blanka [was].”

She relates a story on an evening when her father came into the room looking for a button.  Everyone was asleep but her.  She was able to silently show where the button was and even managed to sew it on for him.  Moments later he returned with a gold card for her.

She explains how her father had instituted a system of gold and black cards to reward and punish behavior.  The person with the most gold cards at the end of the year won a prize, so her father’s token card that night was practically an insult since she knew she wouldn’t win.

Students could get them at school but also at home if they were especially good or bad.  Her father never gave her one at home no matter how hard she worked.  This was especially bad to her this year because she had been sick for a month.  She wasn’t in school and couldn’t earn cards there, but they wouldn’t give her one at home.

Blanka felt bad though and tried to help her out. But her help, while well-intentioned, was not well received and ultimately had the opposite effect entirely.

The ending is quite a moment.  It was a pretty dark story overall, but the intention was good.