Brand from Home | August 27, 2020

Music Playlists

Today's recommending listening is Bruce Hornsby, George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, Yuko Mabuchi playing Miles Davis, and contemporary composer Lori Laitman.

Get a free Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Library eCard instantaneously. It can be used to access our online resources including eBooks, eAudiobooks, eNewspapers, eMagazines, online classes, online tutoring, and learning games, as well as streaming movies and music, and more.Try listening to a streaming Playlist from Freegal Music, Naxos Music Library, Naxos Jazz Music Library, Hoopla or Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.

Call for Artists and Musicians

Last call for Art Happens Anywhere applications! The deadline is August 31. For more information click on this link.

Read Music

You can login to RB Digital using your Glendale Library card. Read current issues of magazines such as Aperture, PleinAir, Southwest Art, international Artist, Architectural Digest, Detail, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Gramophone, Guitar Player and many more.

Learn About Music

You can login to Oxford Music Online using your Glendale Library card. This online resource includes Grove Music Online, the Oxford Dictionary of Music and the Oxford Companion to Music. Check out this timeline of Women Composers.

Streaming Music

Leimert Park Jazz Festival is virtual this year and the celebration is on Saturday August 29 beginning at noon (PST). The Festival is a celebration of jazz, community and the cultural heritage of Leimert Park.

The California Symphony is hosting 4 free upcoming virtual classical concerts; the first is on September 12 at 7pm. Join 30 minutes ahead of the concert at 6:30pm to hear Maestro Cabrera in conversation with guest artist Adam Golka, a renowned Beethoven specialist.

Learn About Art

Access 500 online courses with Universal Class. Try out a range of everything from calligraphy, beginning Adobe Photoshop, sewing or knitting tutorials, photography to flower arranging.

Learn About Women's Suffrage

National Archives Museum offers a virtual exhibit in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote highlights the struggle of diverse activists throughout U.S. history to secure voting rights for all American women.

Try Art and Women's Suffrage from the Museum of London. Explore the banners, postcards, posters and cartoons of the suffrage movement's artists provided by the Artists' Suffrage League formed in 1907. Included are 10 stories of the people behind the Women's Suffrage Movement in images and objects.

The Brandywine River Museum of Art presents Votes for Women: A Visual History. This exhibition examines the visual culture of the suffrage movement, revealing the “look” of women’s rights.

Discover the stories of Golden State women from the 1700s to present who inspire change and reflection in Women Inspire: California Women Changing Our World from the California Museum. Also offered Women's Vote 100, Fight for the Right:100 Years of Women Voting.

Watch The Vote on American Experience, a two part PBS series with accompanying articles, interactive experiences and digital shorts. Explore how and why millions of Americans mobilized for and against women's suffrage, bringing to life the unsung leaders of the movement and the deep controversies over gender roles and race that divided Americans then and now.

Art Inspiration - Try It at Home

Christian Robinson, author and children's book illustrator, offers Making Space. Anyone, big or small, can join in making something together with this video series. Explore your creative spark by creating a cut paper map to help find your way. Doubt, uncertainty, and feeling lost can be constant companions on the road to creativity. It’s okay to feel lost sometimes, keep going and ask for help when you need it. This series is an excellent tool to help people process powerful emotions through art.

Contribute and collaborate with Zooniverse, giving people of all ages and backgrounds the chance to participate in real research with online citizen science projects. Help with everything from transcribing historic anti-slavery manuscripts or the groundbreaking work of early women astronomers, to counting penguins, elephant seals, sea lions, or cormorants.

If you still haven’t found the right citizen science opportunity for you, try using SciStarter to search for a new one. Users can filter projects based on a number of fields, including those that can be done online or from home.

Staff e-Recommendations

Octavia Butler completed her prescient, extremely bleak dystopian science fiction novel Parable of the Sower in 1993. In January of this year, the graphic novel was adapted and illustrated by Damien Duffy and John Jennings. It begins in the "distant" future of Los Angeles in 2024, a barren landscape of exploitative corporations, violence, looting, drug use, and disease. Lauren Olamina lives with her family on the outskirts of our city in a gated self-sustaining community that is somewhat insulated from the issues outside--as long as the gate is locked and the walls aren't climbed. This is important because Lauren has hyperempathy syndrome (she's a "sharer") and can feel the pain (and pleasure) of others -- but these days, it's mostly pain. Needless to say, it's only a matter of time before their community is infiltrated, and tragedy piles atop tragedy. To read the graphic novel is to thumb through the protagonist's notebook pages of poetry and spiritual insights. At the beginning, I found it confusing, but after a while I was living with Lauren through the suspense of her experiences. Parable of the Sower's illustrations are best when Lauren and her chosen followers are walking along the freeways of Southern California, trekking through fire on either side, and confronting marauders on all sides. Highly recommended for anyone who wants an introduction to Octavia Butler that crackles. -SB

Ray Kane Punahele (1994) - One of the masters of Hawaiian slack key guitar is Ray Kane (1925-2008). The guitar was introduced to Hawaii from Mexico in the 19th Century. The guitarists tuned down some strings —making “slack keys”—creating open string chords with different possibilities from standard guitar tunings. It also enhances a rich, full mellow sound imitating the sounds of nature with the use open strings and harmonics. This album is mostly Ray playing solo guitar and singing on a few songs. Only on Hawai’i Aloha is Ray joined by his wife Elodia on vocals, and the San Francisco Nahenahe singers. He only composed a couple of songs on the album and his piece Punahele has become a slack key classic. It’s a good example of his distinctive way of performing hammer-ons and pull-offs and his use of harmonics. The album is a great summer listen (or any time) if you are unfamiliar with the music. Alexander Street does not include the liner notes but you can find them on Dancing Cat Records web site and they are worth reading. -BW