Brand from Home | May 21, 2020

Brand Library&Art Center
May 21, 2020
5 min read

Music Playlists

Today's recommending listening includes electronic/world fusion, Mozart's horn concertos, guitarist Gary Moore, and 2020 Grammy Award winners.

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 or Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.

Read Music

Recent issues of Gramophone are on RB Digital and you can check them out (June 2020 is now available).

Learn About Music

The Kennedy Center has a collection of art, dance, music and theater media for students of all ages

Streaming Music

Afropop Worldwide is a radio program that presents the music of Africa and the African diaspora. Check out their website with some cool past programs!

NPR's Jazz Night in America radio program has a very cool website with past programs and much more!

Learn About Art

Try Design Matters, a podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture through wide-ranging conversations with designers, writers, artists, curators, musicians, and other luminaries of contemporary thought.

Art Online

StreetArtNews has curated a great collection of short documentary videos related to graffiti and street art, interviews, exhibitions and reviews.

Studio Ghibli has its very own museum in Japan, filled with artifacts and homages to their films. The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo has a strict no-photo policy. Now you can peak inside!

Art Inspiration - Try It at Home

Try some modular origami - Make your own castle! The “bricks” of our castle are called “basic units.” Everything starts with them.

Step 1: Start with a square sheet of paper. Don't have any origami paper? That's okay, just make a square from any rectangle of paper:

Fold one corner up so that it meets the opposite edge. Crease gently. Fold down the excess on top. Crease FIRMLY. Cut along that firm crease line with the sharp tool of your choice, and you will have a perfect square!

Step 2: Fold the paper in half, side-to-side, and then turn the paper 90 degrees and repeat.

Step 3: Bring the left and right sides to that center crease, then turn the paper 90 degrees and repeat.

Step 4: Turn your creased paper so it’s diagonal, then fold up from the bottom and down from the top.

Step 5: Fold the top down to meet the bottom.

Step 6: Fold the outer points into the center on both sides and crease. Then, turn the paper over

Step 7: Using the creases you made on the other side, squash fold both ends of your piece, as shown.

Step 8: Crease along both sides of the piece and tuck the triangular flaps into the pockets.

Step 9: Do you see the big flappy opening

on one side? Open it gently.

Step 10: With your model open, crease along all the open edges so it stands up, as shown below.

Step 11: Gently pull up the triangular flap that’s sticking up a little from the “floor” of your work.Crease along the sides to hold it in place, as shown below. This is called “raising the form.”

Step 12: Once you’re all creased you can make the little triangle flaps stick out, or keep them both tucked inside the form.

Here’s how you make a tower, the base of your tower will always be two basic units, put together to make a solid block. So, take two basic units, both with their flaps IN, and gently dock them together as shown above.

Looking at the top of your new solid block, you can see that there are some nice little pockets where you can tuck in the triangle flaps of other basic units.

If you want to add more height to your tower block, just flap out the flaps of some more basic units and add them on top of each other, as shown above. Et voilà! A tower! You can make your tower as tall as you want. Try experimenting with different colors and types of paper.

Next time, in Part Two, we’ll make the other two types of units required to finish off this castle, and a surprise guest will appear.

Staff e-Recommendations

The Sandman.There is very little praise that hasn’t been heaped on Neil Gaiman ’s The Sandman, which should tell you all you need to know about the quality of this graphic novel series. Winner of numerous literary and sci-fi awards, this work, collected on Hoopla in 10 volumes, is a story about stories. For anyone out there who is an aspiring writer and looks at writing not only as a source of pleasure but a tool for learning their craft, you can’t get much more writerly than this masterful epic. The main character, Dream, is a convincing interpretation of a person – paper-white skin and jet-black hair, twinkling eyes, black clothes – with a proud, poetic, slightly sulky air about him. Dream is also simultaneously an idea: the act of dreaming. Because of this duality, Dream functions as everything from narrator to supporting character to a peripheral provider of ambiance in these stories. He is the linchpin of the entire series, which also introduces us to his peculiar family, the Endless, forgers and guardians of existence itself: clear-eyed, kind and lovable Death, keening Despair, conniving Desire, impartial Destiny, innocent Delirium (who was once called Delight) and friendly Destruction. Start at the beginning with Volume 1, Preludes and Nocturnes, read to the end of Volume 10, The Wake, and be changed forever. -LD

TajMo with Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ (2017). TajMo received a Grammy for best Contemporary Blues Album in 2018. I adore both Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ and it is so great to hear them working together. They have been long time friends but this is their only album to date. The collection includes interesting covers such as The Who’s Squeeze Box, John Estes’ Diving Duck Blues and John Mayer’s Waiting on the World to Change. While this work is not groundbreaking, these two veteran artists collaborate in a polished, bright and enjoyable album. My favorite is Diving Duck Blues where they sing and play guitars without the band. They each have such warm and down to earth singing and playing styles, it’s hard not to get drawn in. If you are unfamiliar with these artists, be sure to also check out their individual albums. -BW