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The GoodLetter Thursday, January 9, 2003
GoodThings, Inc. :: Stories, actions, ideas, and greeting cards that connect us.
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Greeting Card of the Week
Valentine's Day Card Offer: Be good and be mine
Thanks to all of you who ordered and sent GoodThings Holiday Cards to your friends and family this year. We hope you'll continue to communicate with the people you love by using our greeting cards and feel good knowing you're helping us increase awareness of ideas, actions, and organizations that make a difference in the world.
Now through February 7, order a pack of any GoodThings Greeting Cards and we'll include -- as a bonus -- a free GoodThings Valentine's Day card from our newest line of greeting cards. Simply order any pack of cards from our online store, and you'll receive an e-mail message from one of us at GoodThings. We'll ask you to select your favorite GoodThings Valentine's Day card from the six cards pictured below. Then, we'll send it to you with your order -- it's as simple as that! (We print all our cards on recycled paper using soy ink.)
Please visit our online store today by clicking here or on any card
If you think customized GoodThings Greeting Cards would be perfect for your non-profit organization to use for various correspondence, send an e-mail to cards@goodthings.com and ask us about our card customization program and volume
discounts.
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| This Week's Feature
Looking In, Looking Out
by Jen Chapin, World Hunger Year
In this personal testimonial, a woman considers her life's dual challenge. How can one invoke the internal emotion required to write good songs while maintaining the external vision to make a difference in the world? In other words, can you feed your soul and feed the world?
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The following is a profile of one of our recently announced Favorite GoodThings for 2002. For more information about the campaign or about this and other honorees, please visit our Web site at www.goodthings.com/2002favorites.
Dear GoodLetter readers,
During my first semester at music school in Boston, I would lock myself in a practice room and spread my New York Times out over the piano keys. There I would sit, slumped over with guilt as I dug into the news. It would take a while before I would get around to my Ear Training, and my reading would be taunted by fluid scales of other fingers that filtered in from adjacent practice rooms. A friend walking down those long aisles of discipline might spot me through the little window there and laugh before going off to fine-tune what seemed to me to be impossible levels of skill at his or her instrument. I felt like a fraud. I loved music so much, but it all seemed so specific, and my unfocused mind would not permit me to swim in it to the exclusion of other things.
At night, I would go home to my Cambridge apartment and proofread the papers of my Harvard graduate school roommate. She was a socially minded woman with aspirations of public service in government, and I could see myself in her place. I had just arrived with a degree in international relations from a liberal arts college where I had spent my time writing papers on subjects like government in Zimbabwe and US-Mexican relations. I was as passionate about studying these topics as I was about deepening my understanding of education, public policy, literature, and different cultures. My interests were not just academic; they were somehow personal.
Then there was music. My spirit and my body depended on it. I had been a listener and a singer for all of my life. I was able to take this for granted until my college band came apart during senior year. School was to end and real life to begin, and it occurred to me that I might not be able to live without being involved in making music, in some way. So I turned down graduate school to become an undergraduate again at Berklee College of Music.
It's a little weird to go from weighty class discussions about NAFTA, led by a former-ambassador professor, to the connect-the-dots work of notating a basic bossa drum pattern in Arranging 1. But what was stranger for me was to go from forming abstract questions on social, political, and economic issues -- thinking about the world -- to the immediate little problems of what chord should go next. If I was going to sing, if I needed to sing, then I needed songs, and I wanted to write them myself. This was what I wanted to learn when I came to Berklee. So my focus had to turn inward. Like a shy toddler who can walk confidently but is just learning to put words together, I began to make ragged little gestures that aspired to be songs.
How crucial is self-absorption to the process of making music or any form of art? And when your body is your instrument, and your own psyche is your subject, how do you survive the tedium and narcissism of looking into this ever-present physical-emotional mirror? I'm still the same toddler, but I live in New York City now, writing and performing and trying to "make it" and I struggle with this question every day. I want to find the inward balance of personal discipline and introspection to make good art, but both my life and my art demand that I turn away from the mirror to feel a vital connection to the striving, suffering, dancing outside.
My father Harry Chapin had wrestled with these issues, years before, in a different context at a different time. At the age when I was singing in the James Brown Ensemble and studying jazz harmony, he was a self-taught folkie, writing and performing songs inspired by the message-driven music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. He went on to find a great degree of commercial success with his own brand of "story songs" about the lives of everyday people. But by the time he hit number one on the pop charts, he had begun to question what, if any, meaning lay in achieving status as a "rock star."
Conversations with my mother and his good friend Bill Ayres deepened his concern over the self-absorption of the 1970s, coming so soon after the idealism and social activism of the previous decade. Famines in Bangladesh and Ethiopia were in the headlines, and my dad became especially disturbed over the existence of hunger in a resource-rich world. He would say that hunger was "an obscenity" and that hunger in America was "the ultimate obscenity." In 1975, my father and Bill Ayres founded World Hunger Year (WHY). The name came from the urgency they felt, which told them that we needed to ask WHY hunger exists in a world of plenty, and that every year was world hunger year until hunger was eliminated. A new life began for my dad. The ensuing whirlwind of lobbying, meetings, and appearances combined with an impossibly busy schedule of concerts and recordings only accelerated until he died in 1981.
It's hard to avoid clichés in describing the impact this legacy has had on me, especially the obvious one that my father's short life is "a lot to live up to." And it has been -- and remains -- a lot. The fact is that I was raised on the idea of fighting social inequities even more than I was raised to make music. But both are in me deeper than any pressure derived from a legacy. And there are contrasts as well as parallels between my dad and myself. So far I have been spared the pressures of commercial success, but not the desire to make some small dent in the injustice of this world and to make things better however I can.
Of course, I am always hoping to make that dent with the music itself, like Pete Seeger with his hammer. Then my sometimes-dueling passions are united in work. Precious are the days when I find a turn of phrase or melody that seems like it might be able to really reach people where they are. And when, in a lyric, I can touch on some of those "outside" things that are so thick in my heart, when I just barely manage to tap on the hurts of the world without being preachy, then, I am happy. But it's an elusive thing. It seems much easier to just get out there and try to help in ways I can see and touch.
Last year, I became chair of the Board of Directors of WHY. As time goes on, I find myself getting increasingly excited and more and more involved with WHY's work. I love that WHY looks beyond band-aid remedies for hunger to dig into root causes and empowering solutions. And I am energized to learn how these problems affect us all, and that we all can get involved. Recently, we've been working on launching a program called Artists Against Hunger and Poverty, which aims to establish connections between musicians (and other artists) and WHY's national network of innovative community groups fighting hunger and poverty locally through self-reliance. So far, Bruce Springsteen, Natalie Merchant, and Phish have gotten involved by donating time and concert tickets to groups along their tour routes. They've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and tons of morale for groups that fight hunger with job training, counseling, after-school programs, community gardens, and so on. Other not-yet-superstars have contributed greatly as well. One of the things I'm trying to do is help get the word out about the program so that we can enlist a diverse array of artists to become members and do what they can.
So I'm still in the practice room with my New York Times, stealing time away from my creativity to try to feel that link to the world. This is part of my essential nourishment, even if it continues to come with a pinch of guilt. How ironic to feel bad that I'm worrying about poverty at the expense of rock & roll! It is all wrapped up together in me -- the looking in to write songs, the looking out to learn and to work with WHY. Making music and performing can be a combination of both. Now I work to find the balance, and to make these different aspects of my work coherent to myself and to others.
It all makes sense, in a way. Art is the ultimate expression of humanity. When we write a song, or launch into a saxophone solo, or paint a picture, we are sharing with each other our yearnings, our heartbreaks, our spirit. Hunger and the deep poverty that lies at its roots is the denial of humanity. It can rob us of spirit, and take away all aspirations but simple survival. So it is natural to work to vanquish one while exalting in the other -- certainly both efforts require much creativity! When I remember this, my work finds symmetry, and my days sing in harmony.
Jen Chapin
New York
This article originally appeared in "Berklee Today," the alumni magazine of Berklee College of Music and appears here by permission.
Jen is a songwriter, singer, social activist, and educator. Her latest CD "Open Wide," a duo album with acoustic bassist Stephan Crump, was released last year. Her previous contribution to "The GoodLetter" was "Can A Song Make A Difference?" (June 27, 2002). [Read it now]
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Good Grabs :
Headlines that teach and inspire
For the past couple of years, we've found our favorite positive or constructive pieces of world news and featured them in our "Good Grabs" section on the GoodThings.com home page. We've heard from many readers who've told us they'd love to see Good Grabs in The GoodLetter. These are the GoodThings-esque news stories and ideas we've found during recent Web wanderings.
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The automobile industry's shifting paradigm
Hybrid cars going mainstream?
(CNN.com)
Alternatives to oil
Drive to Survive 2003
(Institute of Ecolonomics)
[more]
[still more] (New York Times)
Asking important questions
Reclaiming our courage
(WorkingForChange.com -- Working Assets)
Mandela's wisdom
Peace is made with enemies
(Cape Cod Times)
Personal passions
Woman's bid to break AIDS cycle
(BBC World News)
The power of words
The human factor: What makes our species unique?
(Boston Globe)
New human-interest stories on public radio
The Next Big Thing
(WNYC.org)
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We love to hear from you about anything: ideas or situations that are inspiring you or challenging you to think, as well as
organizations, programs, and people that contribute to your community and the world everyday. Please drop us a line.
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Good Gravy
Each week, we feature a new list of Good Gravy recommendations from GoodLetter readers or from us here at GoodThings. So send us your own personal top-ten list (or top five) of all things entertainment related -- the books or articles you're reading, the movies you've rented or seen in the theaters, the music that you can stop listening to.
Take our word for it -- these are two new music releases to look out for.
(music) Global Soul, by Various Artists (Putumayo, 2003)
What music got you through the holiday season? Here's a new release that recently made someone in our office very happy:
"A 3200-mile road trip. The driver -- a folk-bluegrass fanatic. The
passenger -- a disco-diva. The dog -- howls at everything. With hundreds
of CDs in the flexi-case, only one satisfied us all: Putumayo's Global
Soul, a collection of contemporary soul and R&B from about the world.
In Global Soul the local rhythms of Brazil, Senegal, Italy and
Cameroon meld with the smooth styling of early Motown and the harder
edge of today's hip-hop and rap. It's a mix you've got to hear to believe --
and we did, over and over and over again. Global Soul -- it has a
beat, we danced to it, and we give it a ten!" [learn more from Putumayo]
(music) The Women Gather, by Sweet Honey in the Rock (Earthbeat, 2003)
"For three decades, this phenomenal group of women have been singing powerful songs about the quest for social justice. But their songs aren't just educational and enlightening -- they're beautiful. The divine harmonies they create make the inspiring messages of their songs even more spine-tingling. This is a wonderful collection of Sweet Honey in the Rock songs commemorating their 30 years in the unique oasis they occupy on the musical map."
[learn more from Earthbeat Records]
Talk to us: What's your Good
Gravy? What do you think of our new Good Gravy format? Let's start sharing good entertainment finds with each other!
Send us your list of what you're reading, watching, or listening to and let us know why you think it's good.
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