Magical Thinking

Zebra Finches Rock the Art World

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70 Zebra Finches Rock Out On Electric Guitars at the Peabody Essex

Here’s a kind of crazy question that sounds like the beginning of a joke — or maybe Japanese Koan:

How do 70 live zebra finches play about a dozen electric guitars?

Well the answer can be found through the new art and sound exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., titled, “From Here To Ear.”

“I mean you probably came here with this mental image of what are these birds going to sound like,” museum curator Trevor Smith said to me when I arrived. “Of course birds are very much something we associate with music. But when you go in there and hear that first power chord when the bird lands… it’s a beautiful feeling.”

And a surprising one. I’ll admit I didn’t expect the music to be so, well, rockin’.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, “From Here to Ear” installation for Nantes Creation Estuary, 2009. (Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum via Franck Perry/AFP/Newscom)

Lily Myers • “Shrinking Women”

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Lily Myers intended her poem “Shrinking Women” to be a personal one. But a video of her recital at the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational was posted to the poetry website Button Poetry and to The Huffington Post, where it went viral. With more than 3 million views, it continues to circulate across social media websites. The poem tells the story of women in her family who for generations have been taught to unconsciously shrink while making space for the men in their lives.

“I wrote this poem very much for personal reasons and didn’t ever think it was going to gain this much visibility,” Myers told Here & Now’s Robin Young. “But to be honest, it has opened a lot of dialogues at home that I don’t think would have been open before. And to me that’s the best thing that slam poetry can do.”

The poem gives details of her mother’s relationship with food, the way she has inherited her mother’s eating habits and society’s messages about women and size.

Source for text above: (http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/01/13/shrinking-women-poem)