Arts
The Arts section of Orient Lodge
Party With A Purpose
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/15/2011 - 20:38Monday evening, I went to a birthday party for Mark Masselli and Jennifer Alexander. Mark is the president and CEO of Community Health Center, Inc, where I work, and his wife Jennifer is a co-founder of Kid City in Middletown. They billed the event as their 105th birthday party, combining the age of the two of them.
The event took place at Eli Cannon’s in Middletown and was well attended by friends from work, various political figures that I knew and numerous other people whom I didn’t know or whom I was meeting for the first time.
In many ways, it was not really all that different from so many big birthday parties that I’ve attended. However, there was one thing in particular that set the event apart. Not only did they encourage attendees to donate to local non-profit organizations, but they pledge to match the gifts with a donation of their own to a local non-profit.
One of the nonprofits that benefited from this is Oddfellows Playhouse which lost 36 years worth of props and costumes when the building they were stored in collapsed earlier this year.
Another nonprofit benefitting from the support is The Buttonwood Tree. This is the music venue where I went to see Harpeth Rising during their Connecticut tour.
All in all, it was a great event, and hopefully others will be inspired to have similar parties with a purpose.
Music Monday - Jeanne Kuhns and Lost Mothra
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/14/2011 - 06:23A week ago, I didn’t write a Music Monday post. I had stayed up to watch some of the Super Bowl and didn’t have the energy to put together a reasonable Music Monday post afterward. If I had of really been on my game, I would have used it as an opportunity to highlight a musician from Wisconsin. Oh well, I’ll just have to do it today.
As part of the Orient Lodge Music review, I receive submissions from musicians across the country via Sonicbids and one that has jumped out at me is Jeanne Kuhns and Lost Mothra.
Besides being a singer/songwriter, she is also a painter. I don’t know if she is a football fan. However, she appears to be a key player in a growing musical arts community in Wisconsin, organizing the Woodwalk Concert Series. Her bio says she is influenced by “Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Eric Clapton, Arethra Franklin” as well as emerging indie artists. It is a great list of musicians to be influenced by, and you can hear some of the influence in her music.
There is something sad, yet empowering about her music; a beautiful melancholiness. It echoes the hard parts of life where hope still manages to sneak in.
As always, let me end it with a video of her performing. This video is from a performance at The Attic Books and Coffee, a “ a safe, welcoming, socially aware environment with exquisitely prepared espresso and tea beverages, high quality used books, and unique music.” It seems like a great venue for some great music.
Music Monday - Godel, Escher, Swift
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/31/2011 - 06:51Where do stars come from? It is the sort of question I would hear from my daughters when they were young and looking through a telescope with me. Years later, they would ask the same question as they watched American Idol or some awards show. In both cases, the answer might be something similar, you take a lot of hot air and wait for something cosmic to happen.
I would love to hear Jon Swift’s response to those questions. Jon Swift is an astrophysicist. He describes his research this way:
While I find all topics of astronomy fascinating, my professional research has focused on Galactic star formation. Following the discovery of a pre-stellar core located in an evolved and isolated molecular cloud (Swift et al. 2005, 2006), I spent the last part of my graduate career designing and completing a comprehensive observational program aimed at understanding the L1551 dark cloud in which that core exists (Swift 2006, Swift & Welch 2008).
Jon Swift is also an amazing musician. His bio page ways:
As Jon derives much of his inspiration from nature, it is not surprising that his music has been featured in snowboard and ski videos, yoga DVD's, fly fishing movies, and surf films such as Shelter, The Drifter, and Melali: The Drifter Sessions. Jon's song Run River has also fueled Corona Australia's highly successful From Where You'd Rather Be television ad campaign which was expanded to South America this year.
Jon Swift, however, can probably give much better explanations to how stars are formed. In the realm of astrophysics, he might talk about “a dynamic and inflowing envelope” around “the evolved molecular cloud L1551“. When it comes to music, he might shrug off the stardom that is generated by hot air. Instead, he notes that astrophysics and songwriting are complimentary. He mentions Kurt Godel’s work.
I grew up on Godel, Escher and Bach, and have always been fascinated by music that transcends incompleteness. There is a transcendent nature to Swift’s music, yet he goes further. He talks about the importance of discipline and detachment as essential components to any constructive activity, including songwriting.
The detachment comes through masterfully, most likely because of his discipline.
So, when you want some engrossing music, something more than the hot air that makes up so much of contemporary music, when you have some time to be still, to be detached and listen to music that goes beyond thought, spend some time listening to Jon Swift’s music.
A brief digression; I like to end my Music Monday posts with a video. As I searched for a good music video of Jon Swift, I found some really impressive covers of Swift’s music. That says something. Anyway, without further ado, let me end this blog post with this video:
How Do You Tell Your Children Not to Paint Each Other Green?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/29/2011 - 15:07Yesterday, my middle daughter who skipped high school to go to art school, and a couple months after she turns 18 will start her master’s degree program in art in Boston, posted a picture of me on Facebook. It was from when we went to pick a Christmas tree last month. To the photograph, she added the caption, “This is the lecture face.” Her older sister responded, “ Or the ‘...Mairead, did you really HAVE to paint your sister's head green?’ face”. Miranda responded, “ I think it's a similar idea :P”
When they were much younger, Mairead did in fact paint Miranda’s head green. It was hilarious and made the Blue Man Group look like amateurs. Fortunately, it was some water soluble poster paint that would come off easily in the bathtub. Unfortunately, there was paint everywhere, some of which may never have gotten completely removed from the floors, ceilings, walls, grout around the bathtub, etc.
It raised an important issue. How do you tell your children not to paint each other green? Somehow, bursting out laughing and acknowledging the great creativity seemed fraught with risks. While it was greatly imaginative, it wasn’t something I wanted to encourage. They were, after all, at that tender age where if you tell them something funny, they would keep repeating it long past it stopped being funny, and I suspect that it wouldn’t take too many times of cleaning up paint everywhere for such art projects to become pretty annoying.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to stifle the budding creativity. So, I took as close to a middle course as possible and put on my ‘lecture face’. I don’t know what I said, I hope I complimented them on the creativity, compared it to Blue Man Group as well as to rites in various aboriginal cultures, and then spoke with them about what a mess it made and told them they had to clean up, and not make any more messes that large.
I don’t recall how they reacted to the lecture, but they did take a bath, or perhaps two, and watched the green water go down the drain.
Did I strike the right note? It’s hard to say. Miranda is heading off to a graduate program in art. However, Mairead may have felt the rebuke more strongly. So, how do you tell your children not to paint each other green?
Music Monday - Michael McGarrah
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/24/2011 - 07:41Man, it’s cold. The thermometer tells me it’s 1 below. That’s 18 below for my international friends and others that prefer the metric system. Even our dog, who normally likes the cold didn’t want to stay outside very long this morning.
In the news, I see that the Superbowl will be between the Steelers and the Packers. Both teams are from cities where it can get mighty cold. I’m not much of a football fan, but I like to watch the Superbowl. I think of cold weather, football games and the like as part of that rough and ready American spirit; the spirit that turns up the collar bends forward into the cold wind and forges on. Steelers and Packers. They capture that spirit.
A lot of my friends wanted to see the Jets or the Patriots. They’re both great teams, but they don’t have that same feeling. At least it isn’t something like the Washington Lawyers taking on the New York Bankers, nope, it’s steelworkers and meat packers going at it.
What does this have to do with Music Monday? Well, I thumbed through the Sonicbids submissions and picked out Michael McGarrah.
McGarrah sings the songs of American’s that turn up their collars and bend forward into the cold wind. He starts off his biography saying,
It began when I was quite young, bumping along the blue highways of the Pacific Northwest in the bed of my Dad's 1955 Chevy pickup truck, watching the clouds scroll across the sky, humming to myself and fooling around with words and little melodies in my head
It kind of sounds like he’s still an old pickup truck driving around the states. Love Boat to Reno starts off
Let's catch that love boat to Reno
It leaves at midnight tonight
I'll bring the whiskey
You bring a suitcase
Filled with your favorite delights
Another song starts off,
It's a hot sticky summer night somewhere deep in the heart of middle America listen real close and you can hear the strains of a fender esquire drippin out like the bead of sweat on a hillbilly preachers brow shimmering guitar chords breaking like waves across the hoods of starlite coupe devilles and double mint perfumed girls with round asses like the fenders on 1958 chevy impalas pose and poke at poison dos as they gaze off into the blue haze impaled on their own personal dreams of post war picket fences
I wish I could write like McGarrah. I could spend hours just listening to his tunes, soaking up the rhythm and wordplay. He has a voice that can carry off his great writing and simple guitar picking that provides a great backdrop for his words without getting in the way.
So, the next time you are thinking more about steelers and meat packers and pickup trucks heading across the country, the next time you want to hear words of the American experience put together elegantly, find a Michael McGarrah CD, open a Lone Star, pour yourself a shot of Whiskey, and just listen.
I couldn’t find many videos of McGarrah, but I always like to end off with one, so let me sign off this week’s Music Monday with this.
