Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, May 3, 2010
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.
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.
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