Contactless pickup services and limited in-person services are now available at Glendale Central Library, Brand Library, and Montrose Library.
Music Playlists
Today's recommending listening is Suzi Quatro, System of a Down, Juilliard String Quartet, and Jacques Brel.
Listen to a streaming playlist from Freegal Music, Naxos Music Library, Naxos Jazz Music Library, Hoopla or Music Online from Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.
There are some fun poetry albums you can listen to streaming on Freegal. What could be more fun that hearing Dylan Thomas read Yeats or Alec Guinness read Longfellow? The National Poetry Month playlist includes poems by Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes and Bob Dylan. Sun Ra was an important jazz musician who was also a poet.
Music Online
The Music Of Armenia is a seven volume series on Celestial Harmonies record label and is a wonderful introduction to Armenian music. You can listen to it streaming on Alexander Street with your library card number and the booklets are included.
Read About Music
Nolo Press is a publisher of do-it-yourself legal books written for the layman. A few of the titles are in the Brand Library collection that help with common art and music legal questions on topics such as the public domain, licensing and music law.
New volumes in the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series include volumes on the Rolling Stones, Jerry Garcia, Status Quo and Popular Song in the First World War.
Online Concerts
The World Music Center (WMC) at UCLA has launched a new virtual event series, Musics from Around the World: Southern California Composers in Concert, spotlighting contemporary global music makers throughout the region. The first concert was on April 7 featuring Christopher Adler playing the khaen, an instrument from Laos and Thailand and the video is archived. The next concert on May 5 at noon will feature composer Reena Esmail who straddles the worlds of Indian and Western classical music. The third concert on June 2 will feature ukulele virtuoso and slack key guitarist Daniel Ho.
Celebrate Citizen Science Month & Earth Day
Learn all about The Great Sunflower Project and all the ways you can count bees, flies and other flower friends this spring. Watch this video from PBS Nature. Over the past few years, scientific studies have suggested that both honey bee and native bee populations are in trouble. In 2008, this project was started as a way to gather information about our urban, suburban and rural bee populations and to give you the tools to learn about what is happening with the pollinators in your yard.
Since April 22, 1970, people around the world have been rallying together for a healthy, clean environment. Celebrate Earth Day with these stories from Science Friday.
Films Online
Chasing Ghosts by Grizzly Creek Films is a fascinating film that follows a team of determined explorers who spent months wading waist-deep through the swampy wetlands of South Florida to learn where the elusive ghost orchid lives and how it is pollinated. They not only found what they were looking for, but walked away with a newfound love for the wetlands.
Artist Allison Schulnik captivates with her new animated short MOTH, a film created over the course of 14 months with frames hand painted, gouache-on-paper. The film seeded and bloomed from a moth hitting her studio window and continues as a wandering through emotions.
Combining live-action puppetry and stop-motion techniques, Fear of Flying is a collaborative project, Conor Finnegan details the process in an interview with Short of the Week, involving Fallover Bros and Renate Henschke crafting a flock of birds and a larger team of creatives aiding in production.
Art Online
The Cantor Art Center’s presentation of When Home Won’t Let You Stay has particular resonance with the histories of displacement, migration, and immigration shaping California and the Bay Area. The UN estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is an international or internal migrant who moves by choice or by force. In this era of mass migration, and amid ongoing debates about it, Migration through Contemporary Art considers how contemporary artists respond to the migration and displacement of people worldwide. The exhibition borrows its title from a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet who gives voice to the experiences of refugees.
In this Genshitsu Sen lecture, Dr. Bruce A. Coats, surveys the 11th-century novel The Tale of Genji, written by Japanese court lady Murasaki Shikibu, emphasizing how the novel has been imaged and reimagined for a millennium. Tonight April 22, 2021 from 4 - 5 pm.
Checkout some art books from the library using our Contactless Pickup Services.
Brand Library Staff Reviews
An absolute feel good folk album from the brilliant Margo Guryan, 1968’s Take A Picture is a snapshot (pun fully intended) of 1968 American rock—folksy pop melodies with a psychedelic edge; playful, smart and aware. Sunday Morning is a great opening song which she had written a year earlier for Spanky And Our Gang, and the next year would be a duet for Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell. Love Song, Someone I Know, Think of Rain and the title track Take a Picture, soak in the feel-good songs (even the melancholic tunes feel good) of a patient singer-songwriter that echoes Burt Bacharach. Guryan, an Armenian-American born in New York strayed from her jazz-piano upbringing once she was exposed to The Beach Boy’s God Only Knows, which launched her into the pop sounds of the 60s. This album fits perfectly in the Post-Pet Sounds Indie Rock category. But if you want her definitive song you must seek it somewhere else: The Hum from her unreleased playlist, 27 DEMOS, is perfection. -GG
Dressed for War is Julie Summers’s biography of Audrey Withers, who took over the challenging editor position at British Vogue in the direst of circumstances—the Second World War. Withers began working in a London bookshop before becoming a subeditor writing copy and captions at Vogue. The magazine, and Withers’s career, took an unexpected turn in 1939 with the outbreak of war. British Vogue went from bi-weekly to a monthly magazine contending with paper rationing and shipping restrictions as well as clothing restrictions. Even through the Blitz, however, with fifty-six nights of German bombings, the magazine was almost never published late! British Vogue became a propaganda tool for the government—a way to reach women and encourage them to “carry on," volunteer, and accept the more utilitarian fashions and hairstyles necessitated by war, even down to including the amount of coupons required for styles, how to mend clothing, find good values, and use patterns. The biography would be excellent if it only documented this time of tremendous change in the fashion industry, but through letters, memos, and reports we also get to see how British Vogue was different and set itself apart from American Vogue and the day-to-day frustrations of running a fashion magazine with a wide array of talented and temperamental artistic contributors. Withers’s friendship and encouragement of photographer and Vogue contributor Lee Miller, who became one of few female war correspondents whose first-hand accounts were featured in the magazine, is a definite highlight. Audrey spent thirty years at Vogue championing women and bringing the politics of the day (and her own progressive politics) into Vogue’s pages. Almost all of Dressed for War is completely engrossing. -SB
10 Freddie King: 20 Blues Hits. There were once three kings of the blues — B.B. King, Albert King and Freddie King— and they were all unrelated. They each had individual styles of singing and guitar playing and it’s important to hear each of them. Freddie King (1934-1976) has a very different style than the other two Kings; Freddie was from Texas and incorporated more of the Texas style with Chicago blues. He also had a big influence on the development of rock music and his instrumentals were covered by surf bands. Many of his other songs became blues standards. This compilation consists of some of the songs he recorded for Federal Records from 1960-1966. He had a big success with the instrumental Hide Away in 1961 which lead him to record 30 more instrumentals such as Out Front, Nickel Plated, and Just Picking. As fun as the instrumentals are he has a fantastic soulful singing voice and my favorites are You’ve Got To love Her With Feeling, I’m Tore Down and You Mean, Mean Woman. Freddie was inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 by ZZ Top, there is even a fun video of the speech by Billy and Dusty talking about Freddie on their web site. Certainly an album everyone should listen to! -BW
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Covid-19 Resources
Reliable information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) is available from the World Health Organization, the California Department of Public Health, the Los Angeles County Public Health Department, the City of Glendale, and the Library, Arts & Culture department.
Resources for Music Businesses And Industry Workers, Playing for Change, Sounding Point LA
Resources for Freelance Artists, California Arts Council, Americans for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts
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