I have a theory about the above photo - I think that the word “hangover” does not refer to our current generation’s definition of feeling like crap after a night of drinking alcohol. My suspicion is that a hangover once referred to a female’s ass, when it is large and sitting on a chair or stool, and some of the ass hangs over the edge of the seat. Well, I suppose it could be a male ass, but they are never as fat and juicy, so they probably rarely create “hangover”, at least not as often as women do.
Anyway, here is another random track from the green cassette that I recently found. I have no idea when or where or why I did this beat. It is decent at best. So I digitized the cassette tape version of the song into an AIFF file, and then I went into GarageBand (Oh no! A musician’s worst enemy, I know, but I figured I would try something new) and I tried to cut the song up a bit and shorten it and add some effects, hence the cheesy and abrupt “effects” you hear in the beat. It is lame, I know, and I make no excuses.
Is this beat cool? I have no idea, I feel no connection to it. Perhaps it is nice background music to have on while you are preparing dinner one night.
But hey, I tried something new - that is to mean, I tried to see if I could incorporate GarageBand into my music without it making everything sound cheesy and generic and like a four year old made it. Seriously, at the school where I work, kindergarteners are taught GarageBand during “media lab” class. They all string together some loops, make some techno beat that sounds like it should be in a car commercial, and then they are very proud of themselves. They want to give you their headphones, and they say “listen, listen listen!” And putting all that crap aside, it is always beautiful to see a six year old feel very proud of oneself, regardless of the quality of what they are feeling proud about.
What is the origin of the word “kindergarten”, you ask? Well, it was created by the German born Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), famous Educationalist. Kindergarten in Froebel’s vision meant both ‘a garden for children’, where children meet with environment and also ‘a garden of children’, where they play together and express themselves in a smaller garden world by means of play with their age group. He believed that “children are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers.”
Friedrich Froebel had an unhappy childhood with a severe step-mother. He was abandoned and treated strictly as a child. Friedrich got to know what happiness is in the uncle’s family while studying at high school. He had a huge desire for education, strong Christian faith and love to the natural world. He studied mineralogy in Jena and architecture at the Berlin’s Humboldt University. Inborn skills of an educator helped Froebel to realize the failure of teaching system because of its incompleteness and absence of agreement with the outer surroundings and nature.
The first kindergarten was established by Froebel in Bad Blankenburg in 1837. He renamed his Play and Activity Institute to a ‘kindergarten’ two years later in 1840. That Bad Blankenburg Infant school used play, games, songs, stories, and crafts to encourage children’s imagination and widen their physical and motor talents. “Kommt, lasst uns unsern Kindern leben” Come, let us live with our children’ turned into the catchphrase of the early childhood education.
