Share this:

Self tittled piece by code name agracenote.

Share this:

I wrote this song as an anthem for every kid who comes from a broken home. All four band members’ parents are divorced, so we wrote this as sort of a light in the middle of the darkness for kids like us. Kis are often insecure about having divorced parents and sometimes blame themselves, the long for the security of one big happy family.

The line “Do me a favor, keep your feet on the ground” is saying do me a favor by staying grounded, staying together, keeping your footing in your marriage…
The line “Open your ears—hear the sound” is more of a personal line saying, listen to me, pay attention to me, hear my voice.
The lines “help me out and I’ll help you in, gonna fix this don’t know where to begin” are saying if you help me be being involved, I’ll let you into my life. The second half is saying I want to fix not only the relationship between my parents but also between my parents and myself.
And the chorus, “It’s you, It’s you, It’s all your fault—you can’t make it right—it’s not, it’s not…is saying yeah, it’s your fault for separating, but I’m not going to let it bring me down anymore.
The bridge “It’s gonna take a while for your to break my smile” is saying I’m just gonna be happy, regardless of my parents.
The refrain “I’m okay, I’m alright, still wish you would’ve tucked me in at night” speaks for itself.

The name of this song was almost a joke. I wanted a name that didn’t make any sense in the context of what the song is about. I just thought of the first animal that came to mind, and interestingly, it was “bumble bee.” I liked a two word name, but preferred “manta ray.”

I like this song because it means a lot to me personally as well as to the rest of the band. And it’s offered to anyone dealing with divorce, which is plenty of people. I think it has a stronger message than the average song you might hear on the radio.
–Gray

Share this:

Title: institution of intuition
I like this song because it makes me feel so relax to listen to it as well as playing it.
It brings out this emotion when I play piano and especially in this song that is almost to hard to describe with words.  I like to capture the essence of what I’m feeling and put it in melody and rhythm and a few hours later a song like this comes out.

http://ia600603.us.archive.org/10/items/InstitutionOfIntuition/1InstitutionOfIntuition.m4a

Share this:

track01
Vocals/Speeches: Martin Luther King Jr. – “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top”, Malcolm X – “Bullet or Ballot”, James Baldwin – “On Malcolm X”, John Fitzgerald Kennedy – “Inaugural Speech”, Jesse Jackson – Clip from the National Archives, Double Trouble – “At the Ampitheatre”

I cannot but emphasize how our society could be a hedge for many people, whom I referred to as “the uninvited”: underprivileged and ethnically exceptional. The heavy orchestra strings, sharp snares, and vocals from well known civil rights leaders were to criticize the current state of our time and to hope for change.

track02
I wrote the lyrics for this song, but I felt like it would come even deeper if people do not directly relate to the lyrics, but instead create a portrait from their own experience, solely through the instrumental; it could be anything — love, rejection, or anything you want to blame your sorrows on. It’s hard to put this song in the hip-hop category, for some might consider it mainstream music; considering the fact that heartbreak is a universal feeling, I did in fact put great effort to make this an easily acceptable song for various people.

Share this:

theBirdCover

Share this:

Perfect Fit

Her words never quite fit right. Sometimes they hang loose and gray over her, hiding thevibrant curves of her personality under a gray blanket of apathy.

Other times, they stretch tight across the bulges and mountains, her tone jutting sharplypast the boundaries of her phrases.

Some days she tries on a persona too big for her to fill. Her pointiest shapes only justvisible beneath the oversized costumes.

Many days she tries to pretend she has no personality, but the minuscule garments onlyexpose her curves and angles, pushing them out further.

Once in awhile, she might don something that almost fits her, hugging her in a few ofthe right places, but never a perfect fit.

The only garment she won’t try on is her own.

Share this:

See more GRCHS works in previous post and on our Flicker page at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/34028800@N05/5215667100/in/photostream/

Note: This piece was made during the summer of 2010 at a Kendall College of Art and Design class, and also appeared on the cover of the Winter/Spring 2011, Youth and Adults, Non-credit classes  brochure for Kendall College of Art and Design of Farris State University.  To visit their site go to: http://www.kcad.edu/

Additionally they have posted a digital version of their Winter/spring course book that can be seen at the moment at: http://www.kcad.edu/ya-winter-2011-guide/

Share this:

Washing Buckets: The Truth of the Trite

Washing buckets is a very mundane task. Degrading, you might say. Especially when everyone else you work with is out picking corn, driving a forklift and organizing the apple crates, or tilling through the strawberry fields on an authoritative John Deere tractor. You’re not going to save any lives, cure any diseases, or change the fate of the world by washing a bucket. Chances are, you probably won’t save any significant amount of product by having clean buckets as opposed to dirty ones, either.
But you will be making a difference.
Here I was, on a hot July afternoon, stooped over a rusty wash-basin with a grungy-looking U-picker’s bucket in one hand and an old, stained rag of a t-shirt in the other, thinking to myself that if the farm had any sort of caste system, surely I was the lowest duck on the totem pole. To my right lay a neat array of upside-down buckets, freshly scrubbed and glistening in the sunlight. To my left: a disorderly mountain of them, their grimy bottoms still caked with swill and strawberry residue.
It was right about then that I began to feel like my tiny role in the grand scheme of farm business was pretty negligible, and I began to think to myself, “Why me? Why am I the one stuck here by myself washing buckets when I could just as capably be working with the guys out in the field, or managing the Fruit Stand?” But I had to remind myself, I couldn’t complain. Just last week, my grandpa had asked me for the first time to disc-drag the cornfield with the JD 2550, our biggest tractor. Now there’s a prestigious undertaking. As if sitting high up on a powerful, sleek piece of heavy machinery that dwarfed even the field around it wasn’t exalting enough, you got to drag behind you a fifteen-foot wide mechanical monster equipped with dozens of razor-sharp, toothlike discs that dredged and razed anything in its path into oblivion. Just one sweep and the cornfield would be completely leveled.
That was a good day.

“This afternoon, not so much,” I grumbled to myself, dunking another bucket into the soapy froth and then scrubbing vigorously with my t-shirt rag. A murky splash of water flew out of the bucket and spattered the leg of my jeans. I watched, slightly bemused, as the darkened spot gradually faded to white, indicating that my bleach concentration was probably way too heavy. I shrugged and continued scrubbing.

The rich scent of chloride and rotten strawberries wafted up from the basin, creating quite the noxious fusion. I blinked, knowing my hands would probably be extremely dry and cracked when I was through, but hey, it was still “a great way to clean out your pores,” as my grandpa frankly reasoned with me earlier. And besides, someone had to do it; I guess it might as well be me. After all, good ol’ Alan Jackson did once say, “There’s nothin’ wrong with a hard-hat and a hammer.” No matter how trivial you think your job is, you’re making a difference. And by taking one for the team, it shaved a few hours of work off from everyone else’s schedule, allowing them to get done with a myriad of other important tasks. When the warm air of June came around next year, bringing strawberry season and plenty of U-pickers with it, we’d be readily equipped with clean buckets available for use. All thanks to the afternoon of one individual’s hard work.

And with that thought, I realized something. It didn’t really matter which person did what job. As long as everything still got done on time, as long as everyone did their assigned task dutifully, the whole thing would turn out okay in the end. It wasn’t just the elevated, awe-inspiring parts that had significance; It was everything. Every piece in the puzzle of farmwork had its own rightful place in the system of the business, big or small.  Everything, from the loftiest tractor job to the lowliest bucket-scrubbing task, was both necessary and beneficial.

I grabbed my drying rag and wiped the bucket thoroughly around the inside, setting it down in its place among the other finished buckets, thus completing another row. I smiled to myself. I was starting to feel pretty good about my current circumstance, and I don’t think that was the bleach fumes talking. My orderly display of finished buckets was beginning to look more progressive, and the stack of buckets left to go no longer looked as daunting. I was making visual progress.

Within the hour, I finished the last of the buckets, set them out to dry, emptied the tub out in the woods, and hung up the rag on the clothesline pole. Just about then, my grandpa pulled in the driveway with the tractor, ready for his daily three o’clock coffee break. A few minutes later, my uncle and cousins pulled up in the Dodge Ram, laughing to each other about some joke they must’ve shared on the ride back to the house. But I wasn’t feeling jealous at all, surprisingly. Because it wasn’t what you did that mattered.

It was how you did it.

Share this:

To see more Visual works by GRCHS students vistit other posts or our Flicker page.

What is America?

America too BIG to fail

We enjoy recreation

supporting peace
Democracy
Racial equality

We

work
engineer
Develop

We are

Happy
Healthy
Strong

We are

Secure

Dominant

Infallible

We have stuff

Lots of stuff

More stuff

“Where does it all go?”

Another America

We

Take advantage of other’s labor

Create bio-hazards and less healthy environments

Repress the weak

We

Take drugs

Wage wars

Keep others out

We

Produce Industrial waste

Program war drones

Hold back our resources

Mostly we

Cover up
Plaster over
Hide

What we really are

NOT TOO BIG TO FAIL