Middle schoolers won’t be fooled by advertisements

By Ashley Matthews
Free Press Staff Writer

March 29, 2007
Advertisements for alcohol, tobacco, beauty products and fast food won’t fool the Shelburne Community School students who recently completed a study of the media and how it targets young people.

On Tuesday night, the students presented four videos they created to expose secrets of the advertising industry and media. In one video, the students used glossy magazine advertisements to show “constructed beauty” — carefully crafted images that are airbrushed and altered to create unrealistic simulations of perfection. In another, students showed cigarette ads they said were meant to attract young people — cool images of fashionable young smokers.

“I learned what you see isn’t always picture perfect,” said 13-year-old Jacqueline Spitler, an eighth-grader who participated in the media study program. “A lot of my questions were answered about how ads are made.”

Spitler was in a group that created a video about fast food. In that video, students approach a counter to place typical meal orders for McDonald’s food products, including cheeseburgers, fries and shakes. Each one is handed a tray inscribed with the caloric value of their orders, all totaling in the thousands.

“Those aren’t made-up numbers,” Spitler said. “I went online and researched it myself.”

About 40 middle school students at the Shelburne Community School participated in the program, which was led by Champlain College professor of history and media studies Rob Williams. He said it’s important to teach students how the media work so they can make healthy choices.

“I think because we live in the most powerful media culture in world history, we have an obligation to teach our young people about it in a way that doesn’t demonize it, but looks at the good and the bad,” Williams said. “I hope they will appreciate the media’s power to persuade. I hope they will appreciate how much creativity, thought and money goes into targeting them as consumers.”

Williams said he also wanted the students to realize that they also can create media themselves. While creating their films, the students learned about video production.

“Our corporate commercial media culture wants us on the couch — to be consumers, not producers. But we can create media that challenges the system,” Williams said.

The program is part of a yearlong media studies program led by Shelburne Community School counselors Rachel Petraska and Kate Senecal. In the coming weeks, the students’ videos will be shown throughout the school.

Contact Ashley Matthews at 651-4811 or amatthews@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com.

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Anne and Pete Sibley: Will You Walk With Me

It’s not often that Mad River Valley residents have a chance to treat themselves to the high, wide and lonesome sounds of an acoustic old timey duo all the way from the Rocky Mountain West.

But, on Saturday, April 7, central Vermonters have the opportunity to spend an evening at Waitsfield’s Big Picture Theater with Jackson, Wyoming’s Anne and Pete Sibley, a husband/wife duo who’ve been singing together ever since they met in their high school choir. Inspired to learn traditional tunes at their Wyoming “hootenanny” circles, the Sibleys have spent the last few years on the road, performing at dozens of folk festivals, small town venues, and intimate concert settings from Colorado to Connecticut.

So how did they find their way to Vermont? Last winter, Helen Whybrow and Peter Forbes of Knoll Farms’ Center for Whole Communities in Fayston decided to bring the Sibleys to the Valley to perform as a way of sharing their music with local residents, as well as helping to raise funds to support CWC’s conservation-minded work at their Fayston farm.

Good choice. For all of us.

“Will You Walk With Me” is Anne and Pete Sibley’s third CD, and showcases their many musical talents, from their simple but deft instrumental work, capable wordsmithing (eight of the 13 songs on this CD are originals), and their lush two-part harmonies. To say that hearing Anne and Pete sing together reminds one of the crispness and clarity of a Vermont mountain stream might sound like a bad beer commercial jingle (at worst) or a little cliché (at best). But there is no two ways about it: their vocal blend is achingly beautiful.

As is the CD as a whole. Begin with their thirteen song selection, a well-chosen blend of original and traditional tunes like A.P. Carter’s “Gold Watch and Chain” (complete with a bold vocal harmony intro); Utah Phillips’ “Rock, Salt and Nails,” ably interpreted by Pete; and their own rendition of the classic “Angel Band.” Their best cover, to my ear, is their tasty capturing of Del McCoury’s “I Feel The Blues Movin’ In,” with its jazzy inflections and some remarkable harmonica riffing – spare but tight - by John Kuzloski. The Sibleys’ liner notes indicate that they first heard McCoury perform the song years before at the Targhee Bluegrass Festival – the Sibleys’ version provides yet another fine example of the accessibility of old timey music, and of the genre’s ability to be reinterpreted in new and fresh ways over the years.

Interestingly, though, the Sibleys’ original numbers capture the ear as capably as their cover selections, if not more so. Consider the gorgeous harmonies and stripped down acoustic instrumentation of track #1’s “The Road Song.”

Miles, open miles on my mind/
I must travel on/Every town has its song/
Even when the memory is gone
Will I find where I belong…

The words, backed by Pete’s banjo work and Anne’s strumming, capture the road weariness and yearning for security that is central to the genre. (And it’s a rule – whenever one reviews an old timey CD, one has to use the word “yearning” at least once.)

Or the title track, with the “pale moon out on the water” and “lightning flashing in the sky,” the words weaving a tapestry, and extending a story of invitation to any traveler with itchy feet.

Or the remarkably moving “Silver Ring,” which tells the story of a mother’s life as seen through her daughter’s eyes, backed by understated but hooky instrumental work.

I’d never heard of the Sibleys before this spring. But listening to their latest CD makes me want to hear more.

So, will you walk with me?

The answer is a decided yes.

The Sibleys perform on Saturday, April 7 at 7:30 pm at the Big Picture Café – reserve tickets by calling 496.5690 or emailing libby@wholecommunities.org, or buy tickets at the door.

Find out more at www.anneandpetesibley.com.

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Life Short Call Now: Bruce Cockburn Plays Chandler!

The last time Canadian acoustic troubadour Bruce Cockburn played the Chandler, he arrived in the midst of a blinding snowstorm.

And so did local Vermonters, who came close to packing the beautiful old music hall in Randolph to catch an earful of Cockburn’s tunes.

This year, with spring in the air, Vermonters again have another chance to hear the veteran performer at one of the Green Mountain state’s premiere small theaters. With its sprightly acoustics and intimate live feel, Chandler is a venue made for the likes of Cockburn, one of the world’s most passionate, gifted, and politically outspoken songwriters.

I first heard Bruce Cockburn’s now-classic “Dancing In The Dragon’s Jaws” CD when I was in college, and, like many others, was immediately struck by his unique combination of guitar virtuosity (among other techniques, Cockburn helped to popularize both open tunings, which allow a solo acoustic performer to create a “drone-like” bass sound, and the use of the left hand thumb as a bottom strings bass walker) and refreshingly honest songwriting. Tunes like “Wondering Where The Lions Are” and “All The Diamonds” combine the poetic and the political with an intense, intimate and personal mojo that is all Cockburn, and with in-your-face tunes like “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” and “If A Tree Falls,” he wears his political heart on his well-traveled sleeve.

On his newest CD, entitled “Life Short Call Now” (featuring a provocative image of an old rotary dial telephone, going up in flames), Cockburn continues to mine the same veins of story-telling he has for several decades now, fusing post-modern landscapes and ancient themes with his rich and lilting voice.

Consider the title track, which is vintage Cockburn:

Billboards promise paradise/
And tattoos done while you wait/
Possible futures all laid out/
On the sweeping curve of the interstate

Or track #3, the appropriately titled “Mystery.”

Can’t tell me there is no mystery/
It’s everywhere I turn/
Moon over junkyard where the snow lies bright/
In my heart to burn

And the gripping “This Is Baghdad,” with its Middle Eastern-tinged modal dimensions, and Cockburn driving his lyrical sense and tempered outrage straight into the heart of the most broken city on the planet, the war-ravaged capital of modern Mesopotamia.

Everything’s broken in the birthplace of love/
As generation two tries on his tragic flaw/
America’s might under desert sun/
I saw her frightened eyes under the muzzle of her gun

I’ll stop there, because no review can give Cockburn’s music the kind of poetic justice it deserves. Instead, make plans to go spend an evening with him yourself.

Hear Bruce Cockburn live at Chandler! music hall on Saturday night, March 24. The performance begins at 7:30, and tickets can be ordered by calling the Chandler box office 802-728-6464, or via email: tickets@chandler-arts.org. Or visit Chandler’s website at www.chandler-arts.org

first published in “The Valley Reporter.”

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Anais Mitchell’s “The Brightness” – From the Political to the Personal

Anais Mitchell is back.

And this is good news for listeners who like a well-crafted and passionate song.

After this up-and-coming 25 year old Vermont native floored me (gently, mind you – hers is a waif-like but powerful voice) with her 2004 collection called “Hymns for the Exiled,” she is back two years later with a new ten song CD called “The Brightness,” co-produced with “Viper House” Vermont legend Michael Chorney.

And new backing. Righteous Babe. That’s right.

Ani DiFranco’s label.

Yep. THE Ani DiFranco.

Can it get any better?

And, simply stated, “The Brightness” is, in many ways, an astonishing CD.

I’ve suggested elsewhere that Mitchell is among the first and best of what might be called a “post-9/11” songwriter crowd, in that she is able to make musical and lyrical sense of the coming of our “war on terror”-driven surveillance society in a way that helps humanize what is essentially so dehumanizing – all this trading of liberty for security.

But the overtly political references found in “1984,” “Cosmic American,” and her last CD’s title track are mostly absent here on her new CD, save, perhaps, “Song of the Magi” (track 6) – about the fabled visit of the three wise men to the baby “born on the killing floor,” as Mitchell observes.

Instead, Mitchell mostly trades on personal stories of love, loss, hope, and redemption, with only hints of the political, so subtly woven in that you almost may miss them unless you are listening closely.

If I cannot take you for a liar or a lover/
I’ll take you for a brother in arms

She sings in “Your Fonder Heart,” the CD’s opening track, backed by very little other than an acoustic six string.

And “where did the old poet go?” Mitchell asks, accompanied by only a spare piano track on song #2 – “Of a Friday Night.” “I asked around,” she answers. “Nobody knows.”

Call me a good time gambler/Call me a restless wife
I’ll be a midnight writer/
Out in the corner, in the brightness, of a Friday night.

And the intimacy never lets up, right through to the tenth track about a New Orleans hobo-like character called Uncle Louie who, through the madness of Hurricane Katrina (which hovers over the song like Banquo’s tempestuous ghost) couldn’t get his heart “Out of Pawn,” the name of this wonderfully crafted song.

And Chorney’s musical production genius, like the inspired leadership from the Zen poets, is conspicuous in its absence.

There is so much ambience to this CD (it feels like a live concert recording without the audience), so much going on tucked way back at the margins and underneath, and yet, each song sounds so spare. And vulnerable, And beautiful.

Chorney understands, as a producer, that what Mitchell needs here is the ambient space to breathe, to weave, to spin her stories out for her listeners with as little interference and distraction as possible.

Remarkable.

“Brightness” indeed.

Find out more at www.anaismitchell.com.

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