Looking to the future…

Sitting next to Daniel, you can feel his energy – his zest for life.  He is a man who is proud of what he has achieved. You can see it in his smile.

Daniel and his four brothers lost both of their parents as a result of the conflict in northern Uganda when they were very young.  They grew up knowing their grandfather as their only guardian, and had little access to money for school fees.  Life was not easy.  The prospect of attending university was nearly laughable.

Daniel first came into contact with Invisible Children as a secondary school student when he was accepted into the Legacy Scholarship Program.  After successfully completing secondary school, he applied to continue his studies, and is now a second year university student majoring in Business and Supplies Management.  He’s looking forward to entering the work force, but he’s even more excited about investing in the lives of youth in northern Uganda – just as he was invested in.

“After school I hope to get a good job and be a responsible person, supporting an organization like Invisible Children that is helping people,” he said, smiling. “Without this scholarship, I wouldn’t be able to attend school.  Now I can see myself as someone who has a future.”

Those of us who have ever been encouraged, built up, or invested in – know,  just like Daniel does, that there is an immeasurable richness in giving back.  A big thanks to you who are helping students like Daniel reach goals they never even dared to dream were possible.  Find out more about the Legacy Scholarship Program here.

-Malorie

Rolling Stone Lists Most Eco-Friendly Artists

Read this Rolling Stone article on the top 15 most eco-friendly rockers in the industry. I discovered a really progressive organization called Reverb, run by the guitarist of Guster who works with artists to create more environmentally sustainable tours, with initiatives like green riders, biodiesel fuel, waste reduction and recycling, as well as educating fans in “eco-villages” to coordinate volunteers, organize festival carpools etc. 

Other artists that made the list include: Jack Johnson, Radiohead, Drake, Phish and The Roots.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/photos/the-15-most-eco-friendly-rockers-20101216/0595793

Dead as Digital: We Get By >> Vol 2

So I’m easily excitable when it comes to my music-blogging friends getting together to create something really cool, needless to say when I came across Dead as Digital’s year end lists’ compiled by some of the best and brightest bloggers out there, I was amped! If you’re not too familiar with music blogs, these contributors are a good place to start. Check out the rest of the post for full lists and mp3s and download the mix at the link below. 

Via Dead As Digital:

“So when I was approaching this mix, those that I invited to be a part of this year end mix are the colleagues on both the blog side, and artist side that have become more than just another voice, but one I am happy to claim a little more than a passing kinship with. If I could throw an online christmas party, they would be the first to receive invites… But since I can’t, this is it.

As with We Get By Vol 1, I asked each person involved to submit their favorite (downloadable) song of the year, and, if they felt so inclined, a top ten as well…”

The list features  No Modest Bear, Stadiums And Shrines, Head Underwater, Ears Of The Beholder,Dead As Digital, Think Or Smile, Smoke Dont Smoke, No Fear Of Pop, Holy Spirits, Rollo And Grady, Weed, Ghost Animal

Grab the mix HERE

We’re listening to: Idiot Glee

Idiot Glee – “Ain’t No Sunshine (Bill Withers)” from Ian Perlman on Vimeo.

Idiot Glee is the solo project of James Friley, he marries psychedellic sounds with doo-wop like no one I’ve ever heard. I love his Bill Withers cover of “Aint’ No Sunshine” above, it’s got an electronic vibe, but it still maintains it’s classic soul and rhythm. His lush, layered vocals remind me of Perfume Genius- just enough of that thoughtful crooning, mixed with toy keyboards and loops. If you’re still in the mood for some Christmas tunes, he’s offered up a little Christmas album for a measley $2! 

Beach House: I Do Not Care For the Winter Sun

Hey all, hope you’re all having a wonderful holiday! Wanted to share a new track from Beach House who just released their holiday track “I Do Not Care For the Winter Sun” and as I sit here, looking out at the San Diego sun slipping through our office blinds glowing golden stripes down the entire room, I really don’t mind this winter sun. There is no trace of winter here, although from where most of you are sitting you can feel the weight of it, the biting frost and buried cars. So I extend this song to you (mostly out of guilt because I’ve cheated Winter this year). Hope this gives you the warm fuzzies!

Beach House- I Do Not Care For The Winter Sun

Beach House- I Do Not Care For The Winter Sun

USA or bust!

As part of Invisible Children’s Reciprocal Teacher Exchange Program (TReX), five teachers from northern Uganda will spend a few weeks team teaching in schools around the US.  Their journey starts today, and they’re excited!

Calistus, Head Teacher of Keyo Secondary School, has been looking forward to this moment for some time.  “When I come to the US, I think it will be like a dream I have been looking forward to achieve,” he said recently.   “I am a geography teacher.  I have been teaching about America, mainly from books, but I think that this is actually going to be an opportunity to see some of those things I was seeing in pictures; it will be an opportunity for me to even step on the soil of America.  When I come back I think that will actually be a historic moment.”

While in the US, Calistus and the other teachers will give presentations about East Africa and participate in team teaching, information sharing, and skill-building conferences.  They will leave the teachers and students in the US with a new understanding of northern Uganda and return with a new set of skills and knowledge of American culture.

“I have a lot of stories to tell the students and the teachers about northern Uganda,” Calistus said, “which I am so excited to share with them.”  We have a feeling that they’re just as excited to hear them, Calistus!

Good luck to all of our teachers participating in the TReX and a big thanks to their host families and schools!

-Malorie

Read this over Christmas: Solitude and Leadership

Millennials are neck deep in a river of communication. I don’t need to list the technological revolutions of the past decade that have provided us a wide river deluge of connectedness, we all know them. And I often argue that it is this very connectivity that will save us from ourselves, expanding our empathy for humanity at large to the point of global consciousness and responsibility.

But this article causes me to pause and remember what I must bring with me en route to the revolt: my self. A worthy self committed to “morality, mortality, and honor.” If we are connecting to other human beings and all the while losing the value of human connection, we will be no better than when we started. Please, read this article. It’s worth every second you spend on it, and when it’s over, you’ll find the time to read it again. – Jedidiah

Solitude and Leadership

Posted By William Deresiewicz

The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October of last year.

My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. When we think about leadership in American history we are likely to think of Washington, at the head of an army, or Lincoln, at the head of a nation, or King, at the head of a movement—people with multitudes behind them, looking to them for direction. And when we think of solitude, we are apt to think of Thoreau, a man alone in the woods, keeping a journal and communing with nature in silence.

Leadership is what you are here to learn—the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to command a platoon, and beyond that, perhaps, a company, a battalion, or, if you leave the military, a corporation, a foundation, a department of government. Solitude is what you have the least of here, especially as plebes. You don’t even have privacy, the opportunity simply to be physically alone, never mind solitude, the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership. This lecture will be an attempt to explain why.

We need to begin by talking about what leadership really means. I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution that, like West Point, liked to talk a lot about leadership, Yale University. A school that some of you might have gone to had you not come here, that some of your friends might be going to. And if not Yale, then Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and so forth. These institutions, like West Point, also see their role as the training of leaders, constantly encourage their students, like West Point, to regard themselves as leaders among their peers and future leaders of society. Indeed, when we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions—senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth—we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.

So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of. My students, like you, were energetic, accomplished, smart, and often ferociously ambitious, but was that enough to make them leaders? Most of them, as much as I liked and even admired them, certainly didn’t seem to me like  leaders. Does being a leader, I wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful? Does getting straight As make you a leader? I didn’t think so. Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even ex cellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning. And it seemed to me that that had to be especially true of the kind of excellence I saw in the students around me.

See, things have changed since I went to college in the ’80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to start a lot earlier. We didn’t begin thinking about college until we were juniors, and maybe we each did a couple of extracurriculars. But I know what it’s like for you guys now. It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to jump through, starting from way back, maybe as early as junior high school. Classes, standardized tests, extracurriculars in school, extracurriculars outside of school. Test prep courses, admissions coaches, private tutors. I sat on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the committee was read what they call the “brag” in admissions lingo, the list of the student’s extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12. (more…)

And the Schools for Schools winners are:

THE CLUSTER WINNERS ARE:

Last night’s benefit show at the Troubadour

From The IC Music Blog:

(all photos by Scott Toepfer )

As I consider where to begin in my recap of last night’s holiday benefit show at the Troubadour, I’m in search of words to adequately describe it. I’ll try. But mostly, I’m just shaking my head, wondering whether it was all a dream. We were so honored and humbled by everyone who came out (packed the place out) and showed their support to us. Last night meant something to everyone who was in that room, we witnessed those rare moments when music becomes everything and we feel connected in a way that can only be expressed through collective attention to the front, huddling close and singing along.

This all came together in a few weeks, with the first announcement of our lineup, to the reveal of our headliners (Middle Brother) to the overwhelming support from music blogs and magazines- with everyone from the LA Times, Filter, Levis, YVYNYL, Paste and more, along with help from our partners Yours Truly, Rollo & Grady and KCRW- the anticipation ran high. The days leading up were spent at airports and hotels, packing and unpacking vans, testing lights and getting food. My favorite parts of the shows are usually before doors, getting a chance to watch some of our favorite artists sound checking. I kept nudging Alex saying, “Is this real life?”. Kenny, Alex and I watched it all come together so organically, everyone was super co operative, so they all made it really easy.

The night began with John McCauley performing a Deer Tick acoustic set, as hundreds of people began pouring into the venue, a little wet from the neverending rain that has plagued southern California for the passed week. Next up was Blake Mills, an extraordinary musician who mostly works behind the scenes, producing and teaching guitar to some of the biggest bands in the industry, at just 23 years old. Yeah, unfair- we know.. He put out a record this year called “Break Mirrors” and it was hands-down, one of my favorites. He performed alongside his girlfriend Danielle Haim and the Goldsmith brothers of Dawes, which was probably one of the highlights of my evening. Danielle Haim is a dream.

After Blake, Guards went on and played a lively set of revivalist rock with favorites like “Resolution of One” and “Long Time”. Seriously, if you don’t have their EP yet, you need to grab it over at their bandcamp. Oh, and bonus- it’s free. After that were the lovely and haunting sounds of Mountain Man, a three-girl acapella with harmonies that will destroy you. I had the pleasure of hanging with them beforehand and they’re the absolute sweetest. They managed to arrest the crowd with complete silence for their set as they whaled and hummed, sometimes without even microphones, just with the power of their own vocal chords and their meditative songs. Their voices are instruments, and their presence is commanding.

After them, Cass McCombs graced the stage with a rare performance. He played alongside members of Darker My Love, the kinds of music that led us into a sombre place, one that was quiet and soft, then brought us back up with classic Americana and jangly rock. I remember hearing whispers of “Cass is playing? He never plays!” so as co-headliners, they absolutely delivered.

The finale was the long-awaited, much beloved Middle Brother with all three front men of Deer Tick, Dawes and Delta Spirit, along with Griffin Goldsmith of Dawes at drums and Blake Mills on guitar. They announced that it had been 8 months since their first ever performance at SXSW, but with three masterful musicians taking the stage, they took complete control, and engaged the crowd with entirely new songs off their debut record to be released in March. The tracks sounded borrowed from all three acts, but reappropriated, refreshed to sound new. More of a country-blues inspired sound, they shifted from swaying ballads to fast-paced gritty rock jams. We couldn’t have dreamed of a better way to end the evening, with an encore Replacements cover song and eager cheers from the crowd.

So many incredible people made this happen, and for that we extend our gratitude and love to all of you. All of the bands, thank you Guards, Blake Mills, Mountain Man, Cass McCombs, and Middle Brother. To Nathaniel Whitcomb of Think or Smile, who wasn’t even there, yet managed to steal the show with his gorgeous visual art and animation playing on the backdrop throughout the show. (Seriously, everyone kept asking about it) To Scott Toepfer who took beautiful photos for us, to everyone in the Yours Truly crew, Chadwick Gantes and Brandon Tauszik for filming, Carter from Rollo & Grady, Tim from Smoke Don’t Smoke, Andrea from Filter magazine, Sharky’s Woodfired Mexican Grill, Zack from Sezio, Meghan Ellie from Levis who flew out from San Fran! (I now call her my dreamboat) to Florencio Zavala who designed the beautiful show poster, to our Invisible Children volunteers- Kimmy, Taylor, Bert and Marshall. To KCRW, everyone at Partisan Records, The Grafton Hotel, The Standard, and everyone at the Troubadour. We sincerely couldn’t have done this without you. We consider you all family, brothers and sisters. Thanks for sharing this meaningful experience with us.

Love,

Nada, Kenny and Alex.