LPV

Lesson plan videos help substitute teachers get to three o’clock in style. I watched the following four elementary school art YouTube videos and describe them for future reference.

“Andy Warhol Hands Elementary Art Lesson” by Lindsay Smith starts with her explaining Warhol and PopArt to her students. The second scene shows her working through an example for the kids: she glues four squares of construction paper, each a different color, to white drawing paper. Individual practice and assessment follows, where kids outline their hand onto the color squares, then they staple the squares and cut along the line they drew. Ms. Smith has them paint their hands black and stamp the cutout hands in the squares of their pictures. When completed, the students leave them to dry overnight.

“How I run my elementary art classroom with flipped videos, gamification, and TAB teaching for artist” by Miss Russ begins with her explaining the title, and she explains how to begin the class out in the hallway: they come into the classroom thinking about their ‘WOW’ objectives and initial work stations. She utilizes popsicle sticks as coded tickets to entry, with the grade, day, and hour printed near each tip. They drop their popsicle stick in the bucket of the station they want to work at. The kids march over to pick up their materials: a white board and colored markers for example, and they are expected to do “art magic” over a three minute sub-period. They pass in their white boards, then she shows them a video for about ten minutes, the subject of which is based upon feedback she receive the last time the class met. Once the students are at their work centers they have about twenty-five minutes of work time. The last five minutes of art class is spent on the carpet mat, so the students can talk and share with each other, which provides feedback for the art teacher.

“Elementary Art Lesson: The Hand Line Design” starts with tracing the hand using marker on a long white sheet of drawing paper. They are to go all the way around the forearm and hand. The teacher hands out a sheet of a dozen different designs. They section parts of their hand outlines by drawing curvy lines, within which the student will draw different designs. After filling in the sections with designs, they color in some of the shapes black to make the designs pop.

“Kids Art Week – Lesson 1: Picasso Dogs” jumps right into crafting: 5″ by 7″ watercolor paper, 8.5″ by 11″ black construction paper, a pencil, a black marker, a round pointy paintbrush, a glue stick, and tempora paints…blue, yellow, and red.

Step 1. Draw an eye anywhere on the white rectangle.

Step 2. Turn paper 90 degrees clockwise; draw a second eye three times bigger than the eye drawn in Step 1.

Step 3. Turn the paper 90 degrees clockwise; draw the dog’s snout.

Step 4. Turn the paper 90 degrees clockwise again; draw the dog’s ear.

Step 5. Turn the paper 90 degrees clockwise once more; draw the dog’s tongue.

Step 6. Turn the paper one more time and draw a paw.

Finish drawing the dog, connecting the individual features. Once you have the dog drawn, you begin painting in secondary colors. The kids mix the primary tempera colors to get hues of purple, orange, pink, etc.

The kids set it aside to dry until next class. Then they take a black marker and re-draw their original outline over the dry paint. Then they glue the painted dog paper onto the larger paper to frame it.

So much depends on whether a lesson will be provided by the absent teacher or department head. Some lesson plans call for work which some students complete in ten minutes, and then they proceed to cause trouble. It is important for substitute teachers to emphasize submissions of high quality work, where the entire piece is complete, not just a quick sloppy sketch the kid completed to clear time to make mischief.

Above The Sea Of Mist by Roger S. King on #SoundCloud

https://soundcloud.com/rogersking/above-the-sea-of-mist

Ten Down

https://flic.kr/p/LvKbAm

kitty kidney stones

Fred is an orange cat who began meowing loudly this morning.  His side buckled.  He would go into his litter box, but he couldn’t pee.  He seemed dizzy.  Then, he vomited twice.  He had kidney colic and was communicating his suffering.

By four in the afternoon, the vet said he had x-rayed Fred’s kidneys, and they had stones in them.  Fred must remain on a special diet for the remainder of his life.  He’s hooked up to an I-V.  I’m sure all he wants to do is climb a maple tree, but he has to pass a stone or two first.

Kidney colic in cats is a symptom of critical illness, because they can die within 24 hours if they cannot go pee.  If your cat has these types of symptoms, please make sure a veterinarian examines it.

Granola Basics

Preheat oven to 325F

Dry Ingredients:

• 3 cups  Old Fashioned Oats
• 1 cup    Unsalted nuts
• ¼ cup  Coconut chips or crumbled Graham crackers
• 1/3 cup  Dark brown sugar
• ½ Teaspoon of Cinnamon
• ½ Teaspoon of Salt
• 1  cup of dried fruit, such as raisins or cranberries
• ¼ cup Chocolate morsels

Wet ingredients:

• 1/3 cup of Extra virgin olive oil
• ¼ cup of honey
• ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract

Mix all the dry ingredients except for the dried fruit and chocolate, which you add after the granola cools.  Mix and stir the wet ingredients, making sure the vanilla extract bubbles are tiny and spread throughout the oil/honey blend.  While stirring, slowly pour the wet into the dry ingredients in a big mixing bowl. Once all the oats are covered with slick sweetness, gently pour onto parchment paper covering your baking sheet.  Spread out and pat down your granola toward all corners, so that the granola isn’t stacked in the center.  Bake for 17 minutes.  Allow the baked granola to cool for 10 minutes on the stove top. Once the pan is cool, add the dried fruit and chocolate nibs to the top of the granola.  Break up the clumps while filling a storage container with your granola.  Keep the storage container in the refrigerator, since you aren’t adding preservatives.

homemade granola from scratch

Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Levels

The most important skill in digital art is layering.  In GIMP, you layer by following these basic steps:

Close all windows except the GIMP tool box and active image window.

Open the Layers Dialog box from the active image window: Windows>>Dockable Dialogs>>Layers.

When you select a layer in the Layers Dialog box that layer comes to the top of the image window.

Clicking the Up Arrow in the Layers Dialog box changes the layer number of the selected layer.

Personal Glass Menagerie of Original Songs

Combining introverted personality with an obsessive focus on one aspect of life defines the same type of person as the character Laura in The Glass Menagerie.  Some people have to escape reality; and, if there’s no space to run to, they turn inward, inventing an imaginary world.

A local radio disc jockey stated this week that the pro football teams were losing fans in droves for no other reason than grown men playing Fantasy Football.  The enchantment of a world of make believe pulls them away from emotional involvement with their real football teams.

There’s no official Fantasy Rock Star; but Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and ReverbNation, offer musicians a place to post recordings of original and cover songs.  It’s nearly impossible to become an actual rock star on those sites, since most members are fellow musicians.  Posting videos to YouTube probably offers one greater potential exposure to a genuine market.  Also, marketing sharks selling followers (bots for the most part) seriously take away from the user experience on each of those sites.

The beauty of escaping to my own glass menagerie isn’t realized in the websites catering to those obsessively creating songs.  A meta-magical world the composer or player creates exists in and around each song.  A player comes up with a song, writes it down, performs it, records it, and uploads their finished product to a cloud where others can hear it.  The fun is in the creation process, not in waiting for anyone to notice or listen to the song.  In my case, I would be waiting a very long time for anyone at all to listen to let alone appreciate my artsy experimental noise songs; but, having that fantasy experience, pretending each song has some sort of special value, though deeply personal, leads to the continuation of the obsession.  The creative process and one’s own appreciation of its results perpetuate the need to continue participating in the fantasy.

Obsessive meta-magical participation can lead to dissociation, where one begins to refer to ones self as “us” in various ways.  Take, for instance, The Rogering:  a somewhat lewd rock band name used by a man obsessed with playing the game of online fantasy rock star.  Perhaps this happened in my youth:  I compartmentalized my emotional difficulties with my mom, spending hours each day playing my guitar with my notebooks open in front of me, escaping to a place inside where I felt connected to chords, notes, rests, lyrics, sections, and the louder aspects of dynamics.

Within each song, I could add another verse and chorus to my imaginary world. The characters lately involve beautiful women who pull upon my heart strings while dressed in their black dresses and toting their steam punk weaponry.  They take different forms as friends, lovers, sisters, and mentors.  Conflicts between them, among them, about them, are never resolved but carried on, like the revolving plots by the great storytellers of our times.  It’s a world of long hem lengths, huge hats, incredible shoes, and Goth makeup.  My songs act as a glass menagerie of a personal stash of Vivian Girls.

Experiments with theme, variations, sound mixes, audio compression, and my compositional process, combine to act as the backdrop to the endless obsessive menagerie.

If my obsession involved appearing on stage in a never ending attempt to have attention paid to me, then I would be writing from the road right now.  My creative process wasn’t emotionally tied to a need for attention.  It evolved from escaping to a peaceful corner when there was tremendous emotional turmoil happening at home as a child.  Music and lyric writing presented a door which opened each night, and I deliberately kept the number of real people who discovered the existence of that passageway to a minimum.

Experimental Adjustments In Composition

 

Composing music in the modern sense presents a challenge of decision around how much becomes excess.  Preserving an idea of how you want a finished product to sound, whatever the degree of aesthetics involved, helps to make purposeful each task in the compositional project.  Choices executed early in the process reduce probabilities of chaos gaining control.  

    Writing one part each for vocals, keyboard, guitar, and bass wouldn’t seem too difficult to those who’ve written symphonies.  I remember sitting in church and listening to an original choral arrangement by the choir director; it sounded as if it was composed on a computer.  Technology enables ease of composing, but getting carried away with all the possibilities can push a finished piece beyond the human skill set of the singers; at that point, reliance upon technology becomes noticeable.  When humans attempt to perform what robots play with ease, an expression of human frailty can result.

    Even analog compositions can become a mess; if that’s intentional, then one must adjust the perception process.  I know from the start I like distorted guitars, thunderous bass lines, and a combination of keyboard voices.  People not used to the noisy side of alternative music will not like my songs, even though they might otherwise enjoy unplugged – fully acoustic, versions of the same numbers. 

    My next musical experiment regards discovering ways to further electrify folk songs.  For this, I suspend my previous experiment involving lead bass lines.  The old cliche about answering the musical question still rattles in my bones.  

    I now ask, “What if Fairport Convention had played grunge?”  What if the fiddle parts had been played by a lead guitar wired to a dozen special effects including massive amounts of distortion?  (Sometimes I compose the vocals too high for me but with Sandy Denny in mind.)  So, this is my current musical question or compositional experiment:  writing songs from the vocals down which, if played on acoustic instruments, could pass for folk songs of the English variety, but which mostly bare resemblance in their completed nature to schizophrenic art.  

    One of my college psychology text books displayed a schizophrenic’s painting of a cat.  This was not just an ordinary cat, mind you, but one you wouldn’t forget if you saw it.  Every aspect of the feline in question stood-out:  the exaggerated colors, the fur elongated like a million sun beams, the eyes widened to the point of a paranoiac’s receptive awareness.  A compositional approach to reach a similar end – songs which exaggerate defining characteristics, makes for excellent experimental material.  

    The previous compositional experiment:  what would my songs sound like if composed from the bass line up, is now completed.  The songs are posted and the latest linked to this blog entry.  What I learned from that experiment was multifaceted:  complexity issues led to listeners saying the songs sound confusing;  some imitative sections produced positive results…a bass line can sound like a steamboat engine without taking away from a song’s thematic melody;  raising the bass line volume to the second level just because it represents a central theme isn’t always a best practice, because the human ear wants to follow the story told by the human voice; symbolic or imitative melodies have dynamic limits before reducing the transmission of a musical theme.    

    One upon a time, I attended a bass master class taught by Victor Wooten.  The very first thing he told us was that the bass determines the chord.  I now fully understand what he was trying to teach, and a more complex bass line empowers the level of progression in a song – even if it’s just a noisy, grungy, punk rock song.  

      

    

What If Maxfield Parrish Had Played Bass?

    I read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go this past June.  In the story, a prep school’s staff encouraged clones to create art works, because the clones revealed their souls through their creations.  If paintings reveal the soul of their painter, how unjust would a dystopian society be for taking a second kidney donation from a Maxfield Parrish? 

    What happens when you create something you feel is beautiful at the time, but you return six months later and wonder what happened?  You take a second look at your creation and want to hide it from public view, throw a sheet over it, feeling embarrassed.  Perhaps, at the time of creation, your perception of your original idea enhanced the image you had of the finished product.  In retrospect, the idea was the true thing of beauty, and somehow it vanished.

    I mention Maxfield Parrish because so many of his paintings depict a utopia of sorts.  Viewing a painting such as Romance can give one an epiphany – from a Greek word meaning “vision of God”.  Obviously, society expected no contribution of vital organs from Parrish; but, I wonder what his inner music would have sounded like.  Perhaps beautiful songs played in his mind while he painted, but they never were recorded for others to hear.

    Bass playing can become as picayune as oil painting.  So many attributes and variables factor into playing well.  You have to practice long and hard to reach virtuoso status, and you constantly empower an inner critic to tear apart every little error you make.  How good, then, would a bass player have to be to sound as lovely as a Maxfield Parrish painting looks?  What characteristics would a bass line possess to impress a listener by its elegiac vivacity?

    

 

   

    

 

       

What Popped Baroque Pop’s Bubble?

    I was a little boy when Baroque Pop ruled the airwaves.  Today, the Baroque Pop group on Soundcloud consists of only 27 members and sports a list of about fifty songs, many of which are Lana Del Rey cover songs.  To provide a comparison in scope: the Dubstep group has 57,789 members.  How many of Dubstep’s members could even sit through a single playing of the Odessey and Oracle album?  Not one second of it sounds like the soundtrack to some deathly video game, so I would guess it would make youthful eyes roll upward.

    One great thing about the legacy of Baroque Pop is you can listen to entire albums of it now on You Tube.  Some of the videos make you sit through advertisements, of course; it’s only fair.  Entire albums by The Kinks, The Zombies, and The Turtles, You Tube makes available for listening pleasure and inward fugue.

    Two of my songs produced this year fall into the Baroque Pop genre and have yet to find an audience.  The harpsichord, well overdue for a comeback, bangs out the heart of the beat, which often is in six-eight time – something somewhat mordacious to modern ears.  We’re not even teaching kids “Hickory Dickory Dock” anymore; how can we blame teens for not liking six-eight meter? Kids are just handed video game controllers which associate abrubt sound with violent actions. (I’ve had to add two words to my computer’s dictionary already in this paragraph; my apologies to any home school students trying to read through this post without switching to views more delightful.)

    When did Baroque Pop really die and what killed it?  It’s really easy to point at Disco and blame it for destroying the trip of Woodstock; the lure of girls shaking their fannies to a throbbing beat led to the collapse of the endless summer dream.  The Bee Gees, a Baroque Pop group transformed into a Disco band, included both genres on their album Main Course.  Anyone who, as I did, repeatedly listened to it, cannot be blamed for developing symptoms of schizophrenia.  Jive Talkin was on the same album as Country Lanes.     

    Besides The Bee Gees murdering their main musical genre, one could point to the advent of Prog as a listener’s evolution.  The Baroque Pop of Pink Floyd’s See Emily Play evolved into the progressive masterpiece of The Dark Side Of The Moon, which contained a hit song written in seven-four time (Money).  That progressive development in rock took less than five years.  So, listeners chose to listen to more complex music, either melodic (Prog) or rhythmic (Disco).  

    A small percentage changed radically toward a non-harmonic music called Punk Rock.  I remember walking into a nightclub in 1978 and having to cover my ears.  This band wearing leather was playing whatever note they wanted to… extremely loud.  The type of people gathered I knew were from wealthier families who were socially quiet to the point of being reserved; but, in this setting, they wore their hair dyed, had safety pin piercings, and donned black leather pants with large zippers on the sides.  They wouldn’t talk with me at all.  I was too square for these types of kids, because I dressed nice and appreciated harmonic music – such as Baroque Pop.  I saw the punks as youths who had no memory of the mid-sixties, and they only wanted an outlet which afforded them a way to be completely against what had come before.  They looked like rebels, but many of them would vote for Ronald Reagan just because hippies hated him.  Punks didn’t rebel against society as much as they hated any association with its past – they treasured their own energy.

    It was much easier to play punk than prog.  You couldn’t pass the audition for a prog rock band unless you could read music.  Every damned note in a progressive song was supposed to have some deep mystical significance to the stoners you played to.  I had a fellow band member whose roommate played guitar but didn’t want to be in a band.  One time I visited them in their dorm room, and his roommate was in some sort of trance over his spiral notebook.  I asked my fellow band member what his roommate was up to.  He said he was writing the lyrics to his own concept album which would be extremely progressive.  I’m not sure that album ever got produced, but I hope the guy never gave up the nearly impossible pursuit of precisely playing the music in one’s head onto some sort of reproductive media.  (I felt sorry for that fussy math major, who would not jam with us because we played what he referred to as “Elvis shit”.)

    I would venture to say REM was the last band to be able to successfully market Baroque Pop numbers to the world.  People could also point to The Cure or even Prince, who was much bigger at the time than he’s given credit for now;  Raspberry Beret being the first Prince song to come to mind as being Baroque Pop in musical style.

    It’s funny how many advertising agencies use Baroque Pop in commercial soundtracks now. They can’t use Rap jingles to the same extent or affect as the old style songs.  There’s the profanity barrier for one thing, and people tend to most accurately remember a message set against a subtler set of air pressure exchanges.  The sonic backdrop of an advertising message necessitates a jingle be melodic for purposes of memory retention.  Nothing beat Baroque Pop when it came to melodic hooks.  As to what killed it in the marketplace, perhaps it was overuse by the advertising industry.  No one wants to pay for what sounds like a television commercial soundtrack.  

    Hence, Baroque Pop, as a thing of beauty, is dead for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the advertising industry has prostituted the genre to the point of interest saturation.  If, like me, you love Baroque Pop music, and write your own songs out of that love, it’s best to press on yet incorporate elements of modern varietals into your works.  Any Baroque Pop style song utilizing a Dubstep rhythm track may be more marketable than one consisting of one flower child tapping a tambourine.  Overall though, lovers of Baroque Pop will likely remain Castaways From The Shattered Crowd.