Kinda Day, revisited :)

 Well okay then.

It's nearly Christmas, and I am a happy old dad with both of our children in my city of birth for a few days. Miranda, of course, lives in Brentwood and is blowing away her career in social work at her highly responsible position at the Sexual Assault Center in Nashville. Anytime we can get together and I can get a hug and look her in her beautiful eyes is a good time, but it's especially so when I can look over and up at her "little" brother, Colin. He's sleeping this morning in our guest room beneath my artist's studio here on the 2nd floor. It's only been a few days, but we are enjoying every moment we have with him. 

I'll get up before dawn's crack on Friday to get him out to the airport and on the way back to his life and home in Missoula, Montana, where he's 

1. going to school at the U of Montana, 
2. majoring in sound design and engineering,
3. working one part-time job at a food cart and 
4. starting another when he returns home, as production engineer for the college radio station, KBGA 89.9,
5. Producing and deejaying his own weekly show at Missoula Community Radio 101.5,
6. working with Daisy Chain Presents, a small group in a founder's position to bring a constant stream of live bands into Missoula venues,
7. playing music with other extraordinarily talented friends in 3 1/2 bands,
8. and producing music independently, writing and playing on bass and electric guitars

Here in Nashville, he's thoughtfully balancing his time with us with a slew of friends, some of whom are passing through our fair town enroute to other places these holiday weeks, side-tracking through here especially just to see him. Missoula is a long way away. He's visiting old and new Nashville haunts with these old friends and with new ones he's meeting. 

Anyway, I just wanted to pop in to share something kinda special. It's one of my songs we jammed on together in our living room a couple days ago. Present were Matt Mellon (yes, of Magic Metal Designs fame), my dear son-in-law Tim Buell (yes, of "You're Good, Get Better" podcast fame), the famous Colin Merrick, and moi, obscure songwriter, sometime blogger, and rogue painterly artist. 

Matt is an artful songwriter himself, and I am sad we didn't record some of his songs we did together. In fact, the only song we recorded, thanks to Tim's suggestion we do so and to Colin's iPhone on the coffee table, was one of mine. If you've listened to my "Songs for Alaska" album, long available on streaming platforms, you've heard it. I really liked this version, thanks in part to Matt's work on my acoustic/electric bass, Colin's on my SG Standard electric guitar, and to Tim's masterful drumming on his very cool Toca Percussion Kickboxx Suitcase Drum Set (thanks, Sweetwater!).

It's a one-take kinda thing, but boy-o-boy was it fun. It's a happy song and I'm proud of it, and of my dear dear friends and family. Matt's soliloquy at the beginning and our chatter added some real color to it. I totally agree with Matt's assessment at the very end. Thanks to my compadres for a fun-ass day at Chez Merrique. Listen to...

a weird pano

Kinda Day, by li'l ol' me

Everyone have a wonderful end of 2024 and stay well, safe, and sane in the upcoming dumpster fire year. Keep your head down, your heart up, and your creativity cookin'. 

Some Family Ties

From Merrick Villa in Nashville, Tennessee on this third day of January, 2014 I send greetings, a promise to post at least once a week this year, and some family links.

First of all, in honor of Colin's birthday, number 18, a link to the work he's doing with songwriting, production, and performance. These are demos mostly created by him at his MacBook Pro and all written and performed by him, every voice, every harmony, all of it. Click to visit and LIKE his new Facebook brand for all his music, then visit the Dazeless SoundCloud:

Miranda is working at Brilliant Sky Books and Toys over in Green Hills and coordinating their online branding efforts (it's a VERY cool store) and burning up Instagram and Twitter. It's been a while since she blogged but her observations are consistently insightful and thoughtful at "Words for Faith." Check out her Pinterest site, "Truth & Wisdom," and her erstwhile boyfriend Tim Buell is out on the road with his band, Remedy Drive, who garnered a Dove Award nomination this year.

Lee Ann, love of my heart, is burning up the epicurean domain with TinWings, her artful, ambitious, and joyful venture with her partner Ursula Norris. Visit (and LIKE) their amazingly successful startup at their TinWings Facebook page.

Finally, the best kept educational secret of Nashville Public Schools is about to be let out of the bag. See why at the "About" page at MNPS Virtual School.

I rest my cases.

Wait, I guess given the title here I should share an old poem, still one of my favorites:

Family Ties

Most of my ties are dead man's ties.

Real doozies, all, hanging in my hall

closet, inherited sans will, from my father

and the father of my wife, given new life

by my own need, or by my need to own.

Did I need to rescue clichéd neckwear?

Or did I need instead a piece of cloth

to perform a job my memory ought?

Some come from vintage clothing stores:

Skinny, woven thinly, these create within

me something of a false nostalgia,

a longing for a time I never knew.

If I were you I'd be wondering now

what is his point? Does he intend to

share some kind of insight here? Is it fair

to assume that ties to the past indeed survive?

Of course knot, you say.

But maybe sew, says

I. Some say each time an entity, alive,

recalls the aspect of one dead, the dead one lives.

Spirit, called, responds in kind: a re-animation born of mind.

When I touch a tie it cries out to me,

and its former owner stirs, is realized.

If in that lifelessness re-creation be, then pardon me:

I only mean to tastefully accessorize.

A Fawn at Dusk

I'm sitting by the same window out of which my children and I watched a yearling feeding just last evening, and thinking that a gentle surcease of intensity is just what's needed at the moment. So as a little gift, here's my brief slideshow of the moment last night:



My boy and I are driving home this morning, back to a week of summertime at home, after having breakfast with his sister, who's working at a nearby family community kidsitting for the rest of the week. It's beautiful up here, and it makes me wonder if someday my love and I might have some woodsy place to call haven. It would have to have a pond stocked with lake trout and catfish, though, now wouldn't it...

I wish you all the love and restful reflection you can manage to eek out of the pressures of work and other necessity.

Why Schools Don't Educate--"Disaster of Ignorance"

I sometimes wonder why I put so much of my time and energy into maintaining a network of learning that so floods me with information. This morning, sorting through my email, I noted one from the "Independent Schools Collaboration Group at Diigo.com" and its content drew me to investigate the bit of information it was sharing. This, I think, is why I network with other educators, the lagniappe learning that a sharing online teaching and learning community provides.

Why Schools Don't Educate - The Natural Child Project --- Add comment

- Tag: education independent teaching - Shared By: Sarah Hanawald 2008-05-03 03:19:45

is how it displayed in my email. I clicked to read, and though I don't always completely "read," more likely "scan" full documents, this one is so thoroughly thought-provoking I had to read it word for word. It was only when I reached one passage that mentioned "today in 1990" that I realized the comments from New York's "Teacher of the Year" were made by the 1990 recipient, that I was reading an 18 year-old document.

In part, he said,

I don't think we'll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

I'm not sure I agree with everything Gatto had to say, but I'm less sure when I consider it in the light of my personal very powerful push-back to the "homework" my son has been so thoroughly saddled with in his sixth grade year of "schooling." If you can read this in its entirety without having something to say about it, you're perhaps a very well-developed product of what John Gatto describes as an "anti-human" process of education. If you'd like to share what you have to say, please comment here.

Happy 60th Birthday to My Brother Ed!!!

Today is the 60th birthday of my brother Ed, of whom I'm justifiably quite proud. Ed's a successful cutting-edge industrial safety consultant with a Masters degree in Metallurgical Engineering, and founder/CEO of the Augustus Group (website build in progress).

My son Colin and our cat Ruby, along with a (posthumous) guest star who's one of our faves, just concocted a little happy birthday song for me bro'.

Listen hear (sic).

May you have manymanymany more, brother mine!

YouTube After Dinner

Okay. I don't know if anyone else's family is going through this, or if we are as unique as we'd like to believe we are. But again (perhaps for the third time in a month or two), after dinner, my senior-in-HS daughter invited us to the family computer to share a video, which turned into two sharings, punctuated by my middle school son's insistance to watch the "remix" of one fo them, which turned out to be hiLARious. Here are the links:

Charlie Bit My Finger--Again!
Little Kid Trying to Say "Blood"

and the "Blood" remix

Times have changed: We didn't even turn ON the tv tonite...

YouTube reports views in the millions for one of these and near that for the others. Clearly, times have changed...