Escalating Registers

04/24/2014

At Vassar, Battle of the Bands is Mostly a Battle Between Men

Of the eight bands and forty-plus musicians that participated in a Battle of the Bands competition at Vassar College there was only one woman outside of the Revolting Hags and she played the bongos.

03/02/2014

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

02/14/2014

Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

− Anatole France

stare at the picture looking back at me from the screen of my phone and smile. I have just received an image of Baru, my dog, having fun while exploring my father’s farm in Ecuador. I feel an urge to be there next to him, laughing as he curiously approaches cows and dairy appliances. Baru embodies e...

02/13/2014

Many students engage in clubs or volunteer for charities in high school. For Rob Egan, such involvement led to spearheading his own non profit, an endeavor that's grown to become his passion.
http://beta.escalatingregisters.com/article/acsaa/

hen I was in eighth grade, a former English teacher suggested that I enter a contest sponsored by our state treasurer about how to change the world. The winner of the essay competition would receive $1,000, to be stored until the winner was entering college. I entered the contest in early 2008, but…

02/07/2014

Destruction, Graffiti, and Hope: The Street Art of Christchurch, New Zealand

In 2010, Christchurch, New Zealand was rocked by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. Imagine everything: people, trees, skyscrapers, being raised a meter and slammed down at 1.2x the force of gravity. Reconstruction began immediately, but was soon halted by another 6.3 magnitude earthquake only six months l...

02/03/2014

"When I was little, in the days before I was even tall enough to reach a computer, when music streaming was done not on iPods, but Walkmans bigger than my head, I used to read. A lot."

http://beta.escalatingregisters.com/?p=1003

When I was little, in the days before I was even tall enough to reach a computer, I used to read. A lot. It didn’t matter what it was, I would read just about anything and everything I could get my hands on. I was drawn in by that alluring, magical world of reading, which forced me to stimulate the ...

01/27/2014

"With a spatula in hand and long wispy white hair held out of his eyes with several rubber bands and a baseball cap, the man spread a layer of grout on a light pole as carefully as his shaking hands would allow."

An encounter with The Mosaic Man, Jim Power, on the streets of New York.

http://beta.escalatingregisters.com/article/mosaicman/

On a sunny afternoon in New York City, I was walking on St. Mark’s towards Astor Place when I saw a small gathering on an adjacent street corner that caught my eye. As a non-native New Yorker, I was unaware of the city’s unspoken rule that dictated that I was neither supposed to pay attention to a c...

01/21/2014

Landon Kramer hears a new kind of singing in Twitter and Spotify. While listening, he looks at what they might nourish and what they might kill.

http://beta.escalatingregisters.com/article/full-of-teeth/

2013’s year-end lists have come and gone in the music world. Music writing publications like to divide their fodder annually, and I think it’s a useful system for the grand scope of musical output. But I’m wary of the years not just organizing but infiltrating their music when we become absorbed in…

01/13/2014

So, a picture is worth a thousand words. But what are your Facebook and Instagram selfies saying? And what happens when the goal is to look beautiful, sexy, but also employable?

http://beta.escalatingregisters.com/article/yourpicturesonline/

Before the days of digital cameras, we1 took photographs sparingly and kept them for only our eyes and those of our close friends and family. However, now we take pictures of everything and anything. It does not even matter what we happen to be doing in the pictures; all that matters is how we look....

01/12/2014

"Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose"
Sartre, Being and Nothingness

01/09/2014

"How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager- I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?"
Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition

01/07/2014

"But how could you live and have no story to tell?"
Frydor Dostoyevsky, White Nights