Reflection on Blogging

At first I didn’t think that I was capable of writing that many blogs. After the first one I realized that 300 words wasn’t such a big deal. At the beginning I pretty much stuck to the premise of writing every day. It wasn’t till the end of the assignment when I started to slack off. There was only two blogs that I didn’t write down on paper before I typed them. It was the typing vs. writing and this one. It really helped to write down my thoughts before I started to type because I can write virtually anywhere. And the ability to stop and look outside or to be comfortable on the couch helps me with my mind flow. I did notice that my fluency started to improve as I went along. It seemed that I would get the blog entries out of the way faster and faster each time and with more ease. I read some of my classmate’s blogs and some of them were pretty good. I don’t think I’ll ever get to the level of some of them. I just can’t seem to creatively state my words that well. I can’t remember if the refection is supposed to be 300 words or not so ill reflect on the picture that I drew. The first one “Created with Blues Traveler” is a tree standing by its self at night naked in the winter that is kind of how I felt that day I was by myself with nothing to warm me. The next one that I posted “Flower with Tree Roots” was the lonely tree that had met and fused with a beautiful being, the flower. I think I like this sketch the best out of all the ones that I created recently. The next one “?????????” I felt a little crazy that day I was thinking in multiples of three that is why there are three trunks and 9 question marks. The last one “Pushing Away the Pusher Man” is me pushing the addictive thoughts out of my head and away the dealers in my life. Overall I believe that blogging helped out my fluency with writing even though I didn’t enjoy all of it. But I did write almost every day at the beginning but if you check the dates they won’t be right because I wrote most of them down then typed a couple at a time most of the time.

My Grandma

My grandma is going to the hospital today to have surgery on her knee. She has already had surgery on one of her knees. I shouldn’t be that worried about her because it isn’t a major surgery but every time that she goes under the knife I am afraid that she will never come out of it. Since she has C.O.P.D. and a pacemaker there can be complications every time the anesthesiologist puts her out. She is probably the craziest person in my family and this is one of the reasons I love her as much as I do. You’ll also never find a person with a bigger heart than her. She would rather be dirt poor than have anyone around her go hungry or unhappy.
Her parents moved here from Germany in the late 1930’s. This was about the time that my grandma was born. Her parents came to America with hardly any money in their pockets. Her dad was still able to build a farm in Willard, MO. Grandma has one out of two siblings that are still living. The living sibling, her sister Vonda, has owned hotels and many houses that she has flipped on the market to make a substantial amount of money for herself. My grandma’s bother who died a few years ago was a highway patrolman. My grandmother’s parents raised three good, hard working people. Although my grandma dropped out of high school she has had many jobs. I don’t think she can enjoy a day that she doesn’t work. The last time that she was set up with a bad knee she started to go a little bonkers.
My grandma has lived in almost every state in the continental United States. Finding work where ever she went. She has told me some crazy stories about how her and my grandpa would just pick up and move hundreds of miles to get to the next job that was waiting for them to do. They moved from Missouri to Wisconsin to rebuild a farm that had become out of service. She is the only female that I know of that has been hay bailin. If you have ever been hay bailin you would know how hard that this task is.
After my grandpa died of a heart attack when my mom was nine, my grandma was forced to raise to little girls on her own. She would sometimes work three jobs just to keep the bills paid and food on the table. I have no idea how tough that would be I have only ever had one job at a time and that was sometimes overwhelming. All in all she did a swell job of raising her girls; they both are fairly successful in their own way. My mom is a registered nurse and my aunt Rhonda runs an apartment complex and rents out houses to people.
My grandma is a very religious person who wants the best and tries to instill good values in everyone that she comes in contact with. She goes to church every Sunday that she gets a chance to. Even if she is so broke that she can’t put gas in her car she will give the church her tithes or more than is asked for. Her spirituality is a big portion of her charm.
She might drive me crazy sometimes because I lived with her for most of my life. You could say that she is like a second mom to me. She is one of the most important persons in my life and if I were to loose her it would break me in a way that I have never felt before. So grandma please come out of this surgery.

A Blog of Rambling

What does it mean to be an old soul? I was told that I was an old soul today, but I’m not quite sure what that means. The subject that brought this thought up was when my neighbor and I were talking about music and what kind of music that we thought was good or bad. She is quite a bit older than I am, well maybe not quite a bit older but at least ten or fifteen years older than me. She seemed to like most of the same type of music that I enjoyed, and she agreed that most rap is a bunch of crap. The one type of music that I disagreed with her on was her love of 80’s music. Now don’t get me wrong there are musicians from the 80’s that didn’t totally blow, but most of the ones that she likes are lipstick wearing hair bands, such as Poison and Bon Jovi. The music that she didn’t agree with that I liked was 90’s grunge bands like Nirvana and Blind Melon. The decades that we had the most musical taste in common with was the 60’s and 70’s cause we agreed that there has yet to be anyone to surpass the music that was created in that era. I guess that is what she meant when she said that I had an old soul, not liking anything that has been created in mainstream music in the past few years. If anyone that reads this could tell me their interpretation of what the term “old soul” means to them, well I’d just be jibbered. I think that the word jibbered is my new favorite word but I don’t exactly know what it means. So if someone could give me their interpretation of the words jibbered and old soul it would be greatly appreciated. Tonight I am listening to Leon Russell and if you get a chance to listen to him my suggestion is to do so. He is a bluesy soul musician from the 70’s he also gets some inspiration from southern gospel and Cajun music. I’m pretty excited that I get to go and see him in June. He is going to be performing with Doctor John in Lampe, MO the weekend of my birthday (June 15). My dad is taking me to the show. I love going to shows with my dad, mostly for the time we get to spend together and partly that he buys the beer and food while we are there. My dad is pretty much the shiz.

Jazz Fest Concert Report

The day was Saturday, February twenty-seventh, 2010, and I went to an all day jazz fest at the Missouri State University campus. When I looked it up I had the assumption that it was going to be concert of professional musicians, but when I got there I was surprised to find out that the musicians were high school students. This didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the program. I actually was stunned to hear how well these high school kids played. The Missouri State jazz band also played, but I seemed to enjoy the high school bands more because the MSU jazz band seemed too loud, not that the volume was loud, but there was too much going on and the high school bands seemed to play more smoothly.
Jazz is a direct descendent of the blues even though it has many different influences. Jazz started in America in the 20th century. It hailed mostly from New Orleans because of its wide ethnic diversity. Jazz blends everything from blues, swing, military bands, ragtime, gospel, and even sounds from Africa. Jazz has been through many changes since its start. It has branched out into many sub-categories such as acid jazz, Latin jazz, and fusion jazz, which blends jazz into everything from funk to rock. This variety of musical syncretism helps a large assortment of people to connect with the music and really enjoy it.
Traditionally jazz bands have a pretty wide array of instruments that make up the arrangement. Each band that I saw had a different set of instruments that they worked with. They were all similar though. All the bands had aerophones such as trombones, trumpets, clarinets, flutes, saxophones, and soprano saxophones. It is very traditional in jazz music to have horns; they give the music a more full sound. Most of them had electro-chordophones like electric guitar and electric bass. Traditional jazz bands would not have had electric instruments in them, but more and more the electric guitar and bass are being fused in with jazz music. They had regular chordophones as well, with the piano and stand up bass, which you will find in most jazz bands. The instrument that they all had in common was the drum set which is a combination of membranophones, the bass drum and toms, idiophones, the cymbals, and the snare drum which is both a membranophone and an idiophone. It is said that jazz was the first genre of music to incorporate a traditional drum set like we see in almost all popular bands today. There was one band that had a metal xylophone, which is an idiophone. This band also was the only band that used voices as part of their performance. They didn’t actually use any words; they just used their voices to complement the instruments.
The tone color of most of the jazz bands that I saw was smooth and inviting. This made the bands easier to listen to. They were polyphonic in structure, where all of the different instruments were playing different melodies. The rhythm that was used was in a quadruple meter. This was true for all of the bands. The only thing that I wished would have happened was that there would have been more improvisation instead of reading from sheet music. They were very structured in that way.
Many social institutions were represented in this concert. The campus of the university was the most prevalent one because that is where the concert was held. The high school and college bands themselves were social institutions: they had a conductor, who picked the music, and the musicians, who played the music. Then the social institution of the audience receiving the music of the bands was represented. The audience was mostly made up of parents, I’m assuming, and kids supporting their competition or their friends that they go to school with. This jazz fest was a competition which is also a social institution. These institutions helped to shape how the experience was received by everyone who attended, including me.
Each band had their identity. They all were dressed uniformly, each band having a different uniform, which made the bands separate in the visual aspect of the show. The identity of the composer came through in the music. In most cases the composer seemed fun loving and peaceful. One of the reasons that jazz is able to fuse with so many different kinds of music is because of the different ethnic groups that came together to create the genre. Yet the bands that I saw were pretty low in cultural diversity. Most of the people were Caucasian. If I were to guess what the performers’ economic status was I would say that the majority of them were upper middle-class because I’m pretty sure the performers have to buy their own instruments, and all of the instruments looked very nice. There was one thing that I noticed that struck me as somewhat odd, when the Missouri State jazz band performed. There were people whose ages varied greatly; some of them were as old as me and some of them, I would guess, were in their fifties playing on the same stage.
The section in the book that best coincides with the concert that I went to would have to be Indian Hindustani music. Both have a certain structure that they follow, but embrace improvisation as a key portion of a performance. Jazz and Hindustani music both blend together with many different kinds of music from all over the world to create new and exciting genres of music.
Overall I enjoyed the time I spent listening and watching the jazz concert. It was an interesting new experience. That I will always remember. I took my grandma with me to the show and she fell asleep in the stadium chair which was pretty funny. I said earlier that high school bands in my opinion were better than the Missouri State jazz band because the high school bands played a more traditional form of jazz. This made it sound a lot smoother.

no sleep

I’m sitting up it’s about 2 am. I already took a nap earlier today so the chances of me going back to sleep any time soon are slim to none. I think writing this blog entry might help me go to sleep. The days that I don’t sleep are usually the days that I need sleep the most. This will happen almost always the night right before a big test or a day that I have to work a whole lot and I know that I have something important to do that next day. I believe that my lack of sleep is partly because my mind doesn’t always do what I tell it to. When I try to force myself to sleep it never happens but when I just lay there and zone out to TV I’ll drift off with no control or before what I am watching is over. There are sometimes that I’ll go a couple of days without sleep this is when ill get a little squirrely and be full of energy which doesn’t make a whole lot of since because I would think that I would be about to hit the ground and be dead to the world for a couple of days but the more tired I get the harder it is to sleep. So I’ll just sit here and turn on the TV and try and get some sleep before I got to school at 8:30 in the morning.

Music

I’m sitting at home listening to the Old Crowe Medicine Show trying to figure out something to write this journal entry about. The Old Crowe Medicine Show is a pretty awesome bluegrass band. The song that got me to start listening to them was their rendition of Bob Dylan’s ‘Wagon Wheel’. I have been stuck on this particular album; it’s their self titled album, ever since I bought it a couple of weeks ago. This doesn’t mean that the Old Crowe c.d. is the only one I’ve been listening to but when I get stuck on a c.d. I tend to listen to it at least once or twice a day. This will go on for about a couple of months or until I find something else that I deem worthy for my ears and mind to be filled with. Sometimes I’ll get stuck on more than on c.d. at a time. When I am finally done with a c.d. I’ll either go and get a new on or ill go back to one of the ones in my collection that I haven’t listened to in a while. If I am board of all of my music or I am a way from the c.d. case I will listen to the radio but I try my hardest to steer clear from the FM radio stations around this area. I don’t know what this world would be like if music never existed. All I know is that is a world that I would not want to live in. Everything would be very dull, no inspiration at all. I can’t even think of anything to write about unless I have music going through my ears to spark my thoughts. So in my opinion music is the most important thing in the world.

A Consert Report I Did Recently

Split Lip Rayfield Concert

My buddy Thomas and I had planned on going to a party that night, but we heard that this other friend of ours was celebrating his birth day at Patton Alley Pub. There was going to be a show, so I decided that that seemed more interesting than a party without live music. I had never heard of Split Lip Rayfield before, other than they were bluegrass, so on the way to the bar Thomas played some for me. I thought that it was pleasant to the ears, which made me more excited to go.
When we got to the bar the opening act had already started. I didn’t catch their name, but they were a two man band that fused indie rock with bluegrass. The two musicians relied heavily on their string instruments. They both played acoustic guitars, chordophones, with call and response between each other. One of them used a tambourine, an idiophone, on his foot and stomped the stage, also an idiophone, as the precision in the performance. They took turns with the lead singer position. Their voices accented each other well.
The people who were at the bar were just arriving; they were finding their spots, like picking a home for the night. While the opening band was playing there weren’t a whole lot of people dancing out in front. Most of the people were sitting at the surrounding tables, booths, and at the bar. They didn’t seem to enthusiastic about the opening band. I believe that the reason was that most of the people that were there, were there to see a blue grass show. That was not what genre the opening band aspired to. I still enjoyed them though.
Toward the end of the opening band’s performance the red-haired guy took a break for a couple of songs and the dark-haired performer did some solo work. One of his solo songs was a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues.” The structure of this piece was polyphonic in rhythm. “Cocaine Blues” is a song that as far as I could tell was in triple meter and was somewhat of a segue into the next band because it was more country and upbeat in comparisons to what the opening band had been playing. This is about the time that people got up and started to come closer to the stage and dance around.
By the time Split Lip Rayfield came onto the stage it was getting late, and everyone was getting pretty loose and drunk. People were applauding as the stage hands finished doing the set up for the band. From what I could tell the musicians in Split Lip were in their mid to late forties. After the show I looked the band up, and they have been together for about fourteen years. You could tell from the rapport of the group that they get along well. It felt like they had been playing together for all of their lives.
Split Lip is a trio of musicians. The one on stage left seemed to be the oldest and played an incredible acoustic guitar and a mandolin, which are both chordophones. The man at center stage played an old muffler that had been modified into a stand up bass. The neck of the bass was the exhaust pipe. The resonator was the bulk of the muffler, and the connector pipe was the stand for the bass. This unique adaptation of a stand up bass was a chordophone. They guy at center stage also had a kazoo attached to his microphone with scotch tape. About half way through the show they took the kazoo off of the microphone. The kazoo was the only instrument in the performance that wasn’t a stringed instrument. Instead the kazoo is an aerophpone. The songs that featured kazoo had an odd yet pleasant twist. The kazoo added some timbral variety to the pieces. The man that performed on stage right played a banjo (a chordophone). In my opinion the banjo is the essential part a bluegrass ensemble. Most of their songs included themes of drinking, women, running away from the law, heart break, and having an outlaw life style. Their voices had a bit of a southern twang and went together very harmonically. The blue grass that Split Lip Rayfield performed was up tempo and seemed to have some rock overtones.
There were not too many social institutions represented at the concert, but the ones that were there were prevalent. The bar itself was a social institution in where people come to the establishment solely to have a good time and forget about the hardships of life and to socialize with people that they have similar interest with. The interest might be similar music taste, or it might just be the enjoyment of drinking. There is also the social institution of the concert with a stage and audience dancing out in front of the band. The bar made sure to honor this institution by setting back all of the tables to make sure to leave ample room for people to pack into. The way the secular concerts are set up is to honor the band that is performing by setting them on a pedestal or stage in this case, raising them above everyone in the room. Even the way that the speakers are set up is a part of this social institution by creating an embrace that the audience can fit into and be surrounded by the music.
The identity of the musicians seemed to be that of people who might be on the outskirts of the normal social order, where musicians have become so commercial that they all end up sounding the same. They have somewhat of an older sound, which is why I believe that I enjoyed them as much as I did. They seemed a little rough around the edges but all in all morally good individuals.
People at the show ranged in ages dramatically from people that were my age, twenty-one, to people who were in their mid to late sixties. The one thing that I enjoy about going to these types of shows is that you’ll never see any people that act and dress like gangsters and thugs. You can always tell what kind of people are at a show by the ability to get to the front of the stage. If you go to a rock show, it’s like hitting a brick wall when you get up anywhere close to the stage but at this show people would just move aside and let you get as close as you want. The type of music from the book that most resembles the type of music that Split Lip performed would have to the Irish Celtic chapter because of the relationship of dancing to the music. Overall I enjoyed the concert. My only problem with it was that it didn’t last quite as long as I would have wished.

Pushing Away the Pusher Man

?????????

Nature's Meaning to Me

Nature to me is everything that is sacred in this world. If it wasn’t for nature we wouldn’t have anything. Music, art, food, and religion would be out of existence if the world didn’t supply us with them. Most people don’t appreciate nature as well as they should. I believe that animals and weather spawned music into the minds of humans. If you ever go out into an open field and hear the crickets chirruping, the edge of an ocean and hear the seagulls and the waves crashing, or in the middle of the woods and hear all the animals scurrying and calling out to each other forming a joyful sound, you know what I mean when I say nature created music. Then through music man could communicate with each other witch eventually turned into words and words are what we base everything after, for example intelligence and expression of feelings. Most art is mimicking natural phenomenon such as animals, plants, mountains, oceans, and human beings who originated in nature no matter how domesticated we get. We still have primal animal instincts deep in our subconscious. We still kill out of necessity. So without nature we would starve because all of the food that we eat comes from killing some living thing in nature no matter how processed it is. I also believe that without the stars and the sun to give us a greater consciousness that just to live, eat, shit and die. To think there is something looking down upon us that is larger than we could even imagine. Originally the sun was the one god that looked after us all and protected us from the cold and predators of the night. The stars were the spirits that showed us the way in the dark but they could be misleading so it was better to follow the one, the sun, so you were always safe. When it is said that man was created in god’s image I can see the truth behind that statement because all people have good warmth inside as well as a dark side. Everyone has nightmares or at least has had one. So all in all I believe that without nature we would all be lost in existence and would probably be eaten by some predator that was bigger that us if we weren’t able to communicate how to get away from them. And we would be lost spiritually or that least more lost.