My sister brought back a picture of some graffiti in Saskatoon a few summers ago that I ran with, writing one of my first songs that has continued to grow with me in the years since, and which continues to accompany me in new musical places. I’ve played this song in my kitchen by myself, […]
Read more "Graffiti: An old song with new friends at the GSGW Fall Jam"Jack Kerouac would be ninety-two today (March 12th), a birthday the New Republic has celebrated with a Reconsideration originally published in December of 1972. Noting a recent change in fashion that “left Kerouac’s work inert and his legend inactive,” William Crawford Woods set out to devour the scope of the author’s “one vast book” of […]
Read more "On Jack’s 92nd Birthday"I’m forever indebted to Alan Levine’s description of #IntroGuitar sometime last spring, where he included Gleneagle‘s Introduction to Guitar 11 in a list of experiments in Open Courses You Won’t Find in the New York Times, A Cheesy Edudemic Infographic, or Among Davos Champagne Sippers: In a basic hosted WordPress web site, he has […]
Read more "“…not a class that teaches guitar, but one where you can learn guitar.”"Something that I haven’t given as much blog attention here as I would have liked so far this semester is the vibrant community that has sprung up around our school’s Introduction to Guitar class. Having had students post their work regularly to a wiki site in past years, I wanted to incorporate some of the […]
Read more "“…totally uncharted territory.”"I wrote a few weeks ago about team-teaching a wilderness journaling activity with my TALONS colleagues along with my oft-mentioned Internet brother Jabiz Raisdana, using his poem-turned-song “Poetry is Nothing” as an introduction to a solo-walk around Hicks Lake, in Sasquatch Provincial Park. Having turned the corner here in metro-Vancouver toward fall and winter, I […]
Read more "Poetry is Nothing… in the woods."A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to meet a handful of local talented musicians in an afternoon session I delivered at the inaugural Port Moody Youth Arts Festival, where through the course of an afternoon we would set out to write a song. In addition to the afternoon workshop, my name was slated for […]
Read more "Port Moody Youth Arts Festival Songwriting Workshop"A little twist on the Family Legend assignment from the Daily Create let me bring this neighbourhood legend to the Camp Magic Macguffin campfire. They had come from Burnaby, had the MacDonalds that came to reside on Garcia Court, and beyond the neighbouring suburb were from points across the breadth of Canada and back into […]
Read more "Family Legend"Among the more ambitious spontaneous projects I’ve attempted as a teacher, the 30 Person Rock Band project came out of a conversation with my guitar class about what our next endeavour should be: songwriting, another recording of individual or group progress, a performance, or… something a little bigger. Something we’ll discover as we go, together. […]
Read more "The Thirty Person Rock Band"Though it’s not a newspaper (as the original #Ds106 assignment prescribes), I had the idea this afternoon while my teaching parnter was teaching the Arthur C. Clarke short story, “I forget thee, Earth” to give the front page of our handout the blackout poetry treatment. The text of the new work, Art Clark’s “I forget […]
Read more "Arthur C. Clarke Blackout Poetry"A few weeks ago I saw a post by my “Internet-twin” Jabiz Raisdana that included a few photos and a poem beginning, Poetry is Nothing… Poetry is nothing… – Based on a poem by Jabiz Raisdana by Bryanjack As I’ve had inspiration to do a few times before, I took Jabiz’ lines and picked up […]
Read more "Poetry is Nothing"