Month: May 2011

The Lydster, Part 86: Homework

I wrote a letter to the teacher pointing out the ambiguities, and hoping the students wouldn’t be marked as wrong when when grading the assignment.

As I’ve noted, I tend to be the one who works on the homework with the Daughter. She even had an assignment during the week off from school for Passover/Easter. Only 7 of the 24 students actually did the assignment, and Lydia was the ONLY one to color it, as requested, albeit on a Monday morning she was returning to class.

On the weekly homework, there are 10 spelling words to copy plus a bonus word. She’s quite good at this; I don’t think she’s gotten worse than a 95 on her weekly test. The homework also includes writing sentences and some math.

Occasionally, I find the exercises with the graphics to be a bit obtuse, but never more so than earlier this month.
The exercise:

“When y is at the end of a word, it can stand for the long sound of I as in dry, or the long sound of e, as in pony. Say each picture name. Circle long E or long I to show the sound of y in each picture name.”
You may not be able to see the graphic clearly, but I was having difficulty discerning what was being asked for:
2. city or sky?
5. cry or baby?
6. why (that’s a REALLY subtle concept for a first grader)
8. sunny or sky?
9. shy or boy (shy is REALLY subtle here)
10. heavy? (pry is the answer, again not a concept my daughter knew)
15. cloudy or sky?


And the next page
4. sleepy or yawn?
So I wrote a letter to the teacher pointing out the ambiguities and hoping the students wouldn’t be marked as wrong when grading the assignment.

That very evening, I got a note back from the teacher, in which she, working 1-to-1 with another student on the homework “realized the difficulty and confusion with this worksheet page.” She promised to remove the assignment for next year’s homework, and that the Daughter wouldn’t be penalized for any errors.

I think it’s very comforting that her teacher, who I’ve met with a couple of times, was so responsive.

I got nothing. Well, except…

Interview of me in Monday’s (Albany, NY) Times Union

I’m just getting back in town from our annual work conference. The Internet connection was not the fastest in te world, let’s just say.

But hey, you can read this interview of me in Monday’s (Albany, NY) Times-Union. Or you can read my intro to last week’s ABC Wednesday blog.

Somebody asked me about whether I had any insight re: last week’s “end of the world” pronouncement. The answer is no. But I am totally mystifed why this particular blowhard got such play; I just don’t get it. At least the December 2012 Mayan thing, I’d been hearing about for a while; the coverage of this one caught me by surprise, given his previous (lack of) success with such projections. I never mentioned the recent declaration in this, or any other blog, previously because I had nothing to add.

That said, I appreciated the insight of a buddy of mine, who e-mailed, “In a twisted sort of way, the Rapture flap reminds me of this episode of The Twilight Zone. “

(Photos courtesy of the TU)

Bob Dylan is 70

Feel as though I should come up with a list of my Top 10 Dylan songs done by Dylan himself. This is harder than it might seem because, often, someone else’s version tops his, in my mind.


A couple books (that I have not read) have come out about Bob Dylan recently, Sean Wilentz’s “Bob Dylan in America,” and “Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, Writings 1968-2010” by Greil Marcus. Dylan will turn 70 today, which also, I read in Jon Friedman’s Media Web column for MarketWatch.com, marks “the 50th anniversary of his arrival in New York City’s Greenwich Village folk scene. He was a star when John F. Kennedy was our president.”

I’ve been writing a bit about him already this year, from a reinterpretation of his lyrics to cover versions of his songs.

But I feel as though I should come up with a list of my Top 10 Dylan songs done by Dylan himself. This is harder than it might seem because, often, someone else’s version tops his, in my mind. I actually like his “Blowin’ in the Wind”, but it’ll always be a Peter, Paul and Mary song; ditto the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Willie Nelson doing “What Was It You Wanted”, even Joan Baez’s “Simple Twist of Fate”, and any number of others.

Links to the best videos I could find:
10. The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar – obviously from Bob’s overtly Christian period, I think I liked it as much because of its relative rarity – it was a non-album B-side of a single before it showed up in collections and the CD version of Shot of Love – as for that fascinating “church as bride” imagery. Not a great recording, I know.
9. Subterranean Homesick Blues – and I might like this more for the classic flashcard video than the song itself.
8. Hurricane – Bob was political from his early days, but this return to that issue, specifically addressing the trumped-up murder charges against Ruben ‘Hurricane’ Carter moved me.
7. Ballad Of A Thin Man – I’ll be honest: when I first heard Yer Blues on the Beatles’ white album, I had NO idea about the reference to “Dylan’s Mr. Jones”. Finally hearing it gave me a greater appreciation.
6. Summer Days – as I have noted, the Love and Theft album came out on September 11, 2001, but though I’d pre-ordered and purchased it, I didn’t listen to it until several days later. And when I did, it gave me such joy. No song more than this one.
5. Stuck Inside A Mobile With A Memphis Blues Again – I was initially attracted to the sheer length of the title, as well as the song’s merits. Couldn’t find a decent version online; this is the 2:22 intro from the movie about Dylan, “I Am Not There”
4. Highway 61 Revisited – if only for the dialogue between God and Abraham, it’d be worth it. This is a cartoon video someone put together.
3. Like A Rolling Stone – it’s anthemic. Love the Al Kooper organ.
2. I Want You – the very first Dylan song I ever owned, not from a Dylan album or single but from a Columbia compilation album The Best of ’66.
1. Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35 – from that Salvation Army intro to “everybody must get stoned”. Can’t resist.
***
The entire Highway 61 Revisited album.

S is for Songs from the classics

This swing version of the Lizst rhapsody was a major influence on several aspiring arrangers, including Billy Strayhorn and Billy May.


When I was 11 or 12, I took piano lessons for a little over a year. I wasn’t very good, though I did practice. I will say that it was useful for singing. My piano teacher was Mrs. Hamlin, the organist at my church at the time, who was like family; her parents were my godparents, and her sister’s son was my parents’ godson.

One day, I was laboriously trying to play the Bach Minuet in G, which, incidentally, I had danced to in second grade. Mrs. Hamlin said, “It’s like A Lover’s Concerto by the Toys.” At that very moment, I had no idea what she was talking about, though, of course, now I do.

Actually, I first owned A Lover’s Concerto as a cover version by the Supremes on their I Hear A Symphony album, which also contained their version of Stranger in Paradise from the 1953 musical Kismet, which poached Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor.

As it turns out, there are a LOT of pop songs that are based on classical music. Some are very obvious, such as Nut Rocker by B. Bumble and the Stingers, based on Tchaikovsky’s “March of the Wooden Soldiers” from The Nutcracker, or a couple songs from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, A Fifth of Beethoven by Walter Murphy, and Night on Disco Mountain by David Shire, the latter based on Mussorgsky.

Others may be more subtle. The J. S. Bach piece O Sacred Head, Now Wounded could be the musical inspiration for American Tune by Paul Simon.

Here’s a lengthy list of songs from the classics, which, of course, are in the public domain, and, as such, are not subject to copyright restrictions. This list is slightly shorter but is more in-depth. There are a half dozen songs here, but there are samples of each version.

The one example I found on no list was The Hungarian Rhapsody #2 by Liszt (heard here) which “was also the basis for a popular song, ‘Ebony Rhapsody’ by Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnston, introduced in the 1934 film Murder at the Vanities. In the film, it was played by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, who also recorded it. This swing version of the rhapsody was a major influence on several aspiring arrangers, including Billy Strayhorn (who later became Duke Ellington’s composing partner) and Billy May (who later recorded ‘Ebony Rhapsody’ with Nat King Cole).

ABC Wednesday – Round 8

Jeffrey Catherine Jones

Jeff was in transition to becoming Catherine, and one could see the discomfort on some folks’ faces.


There was a period of about 20 years in my life when the comic art form was extremely important in my life. One of the most impressive people working was Jeff Jones. I think I met him only once, at the FantaCon comic convention in Albany in 1980.

But FantaCo, where I worked in the 1980s, published at least two of his stories, in the anthologies Gates of Eden and Deju Vu. The covers were done by Michael Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson, respectively, two of his colleagues in something called The Studio. And both titles, on a purely commercial level, were abject failures, though brilliant on an aesthetic one.

So I lost track of Jeffrey Jones by 1994. I didn’t know, for instance, that he was undergoing hormone therapy for gender reidentification. A friend of mine, who knew Jones, tells of being at a big comic convention. Jeff was in transition to becoming Catherine, and one could see the discomfort on some folks’ faces. One of the dealers asked my friend if he could talk to Jeff and kind of break the ice among the dealers/Jeff/the public, which he happily did. After a while, more people came over. He introduced Jeff to some of the dealers he knew, and Jeff ended up with a crowd. My friend wrote, “I will miss his work and such a nice person.”

Apparently, from the reports I’ve read, things got easier as she became more evident. I’m happy about that; I can only imagine how difficult that must have been. I met a guy at a conference, actually around the same time as the Jones transition, then a couple of years later, at the same event, he had become a she, and she told me at length how her colleagues were not exactly supportive, to say the least.

Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter remembers Jones, who died this week at the age of 67. Interestingly, Spurgeon always uses “she”, which I suppose makes sense. (Beats writing he/she a lot.)

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