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Brand from Home | October 22, 2020



Music Playlists


Today's recommending listening is Isaac Hayes' soundtrack for Shaft, Palestrina, Billie Eilish, and Jerry Reed.


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.


Learn About Music

Oxford Music Online includes Grove Music Online, The Oxford Dictionary of Music and The Oxford Companion to Music. Check out this new article on Lin-Manuel Miranda who was the composer of Hamilton and In The Heights.

The Musical Museum in London has a fabulous collection of instruments including reproducing pianos, orchestrions, self-playing violins, pipe organs, gramophones & synthesizers. Their YouTube channel has a fun video of organist Richard Hills performing on the Mighty Wurlitzer.


Streaming Music

Do you need sound effects for Halloween or the other upcoming holidays? FindSounds is a very cool website that has sounds organized by category.

 

Art Online

Commonalities: Prints and Drawings of Art Division and Brand 48. Join the Brand Associates for an examination of what goes into creating drawings and prints from the viewpoint of artists, art educators and students. Using examples from Brand 48 and Art Division, the panel will discuss how to look at artworks in these often under-appreciated media with a focus on the skills and techniques that are specific to each and the way these are taught to and practiced by students and professionals alike. Thursday, October 29, 6 - 7pm.

Brand 48, the 48th Annual National Juried Exhibition of Works on Paper is on view September 12-October 30, 2020 in our virtual gallery.


Meet Robert Brown Award winner Marco Hernandez. His prints explore issues associated with the societies and politics of contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American cultures.


Brand 48 is organized by the Brand Associates in partnership with Brand Library & Art Center.

Explore the unexpected work of Julia Weist, making art out of public records. During her residency with the Department of Records and Information Services in NY, she researched the municipal government’s relationship to art and artists. Explore a little more of the history of unusual artists in residence programs and how she got started. Try exploring Glendale's past and learn how to access historical newspaper articles online to get started on your own journey of discovery.

Take an interactive trip with 12 Sunsets: Exploring Ed Ruscha's Archive. In 1966, Ed Ruscha drove along the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. Using a motorized camera mounted on the back of a pickup truck, he methodically photographed all of the buildings on each side of the street. Ruscha and his collaborators returned again and again documenting the cityscape for more than fifty-five years. They continue to record Los Angeles’s thoroughfares today.


Art Inspiration - Try It at Home

Heart of Los Angeles offers a series of Home Studio videos covering Huichol Storytelling, Plastic Painting, Soap Carving, Painting on a Found Object and more.

Report any monarchs you see on their western migration to Journey North. Migration is still in progress! Remember to take your camera when you are traveling or on a hike or even in your own backyard. Your observations contribute to our collective understanding of monarch migration in the West! 


With-Draw Together!


Every October, Glendale Library, Arts & Culture encourages and celebrates the act of drawing. This October we've created a list of drawing prompts for each day of the month to encourage you to draw. Keep an eye on our Facebook page where we will be posting help and samples every morning to help you get started on each prompt.

Tips for Day 22: How Small Can I Draw? Challenge yourself to draw something very small. Reduce the size of your paper and try again. Watercolor illustrator and YouTuber Kasey Golden finds out how small she can draw and paint in this Teeny Weeny Challenge. Get inspired with 50 stories of small works by people like you with 50 small works by Mo Willems.


When you’ve created a piece of art, you can take a picture, post it on social media and share it #withdrawtogether

 

Staff e-Recommendations

I’ll start with my favorite anecdote from Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier. In 1941, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon created Captain America, the heroic patriot comic book hero, known to Americans across the country as the man slugging Hitler on the cover of his first comic. One day, the offices Kirby and Joe Simon get a phone call from the lobby. According to the call, three nazis were downstairs to deliver their review of the comic hero (they hated it and were threatening the creators, so glad times have changed….). Kirby, not one to back down from a opportunity to brawl with Nazis, rolled up his sleeves and headed to the threat, sight-unseen. In this moment, his personality is captured perfectly. A tough and foolhardy New York street guy AND an artist (I feel like we are always taught those two things are opposites) was willing to defend the silly comics he was making because he knew they represented something bigger. That same NY kid also was the brains (although his credit has always fallen short) of creating what it known as “cosmic marvel,” the deeply nerdy science-fiction subgenere of Marvel comics, full of Gods, aliens, futuristic American landscapes, abstract concepts manifested, galaxies and so much more. Evanier’s book tracks the life and evolution of the art of the father of modern superhero comics. It’s full of clippings, sketches, and full-scale images of his artwork, and really gives you an idea of how wonderfully weird and experimental he was. As celebrated as he was in life, the book does a good job of reminding the readers and fans that the Jack Kirby model of business should not be followed. The prolific artist often was on the bad side of a good business deal, and many still need to be told that Stan Lee alone did not create the Marvel universe. The book does a great job of contextualizing popular comics history to the times and to Kirby's work. This is a great art book and a pretty good biography, and anyone who is a fan of Kirby will enjoy it. -GG

Terry Riley - In C (1964). Terry Riley (b.1935) is one of the most influential contemporary composers and one of the first minimalist composers. He started as a pianist but also studied composition at San Francisco State, the San Francisco Conservatory and UC Berkeley. He studied and taught Indian classical music. He played piano music in bars and was involved with the avant garde movement. One of the most important pieces he composed was In C (1964). It wasn’t the first minimalist piece but it was the most influential. So much contemporary classical music of the period was bewildering to audiences and often the musicians. Riley created one of the first pieces of minimalism that was accessible to audiences and scalable to the size of the ensemble. He made the score freely available, consisting of two pages of instructions and one page of music. Even if you are not a musician, read his instructions as they are very understandable and explain the varying length of the performances and the very flexible instrumentation. Still, in every performance, it’s recognizable as the same piece.

Here are several versions and of these I really like Bang on a Can All-Stars with the smaller chamber ensemble including added percussion, pipa and mandolin. It’s all fun whatever version you prefer and there are others on Naxos Music Library. -BW

 

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.



 

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