ken zirkel

Video 2 You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch Slideshow

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Daughter played a flute solo of The Star Spangled Banner to open her fifth grade band concert. Star Spangled Banner from Kenneth Zirkel on Vimeo.

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Daughter has been taking up the flute. She practices regularly, and she’s getting pretty good. She knows some good Xmas tunes, and tonight we sat together and sang and played. Son has taken guitar and drum lessons in the past, but he hasn’t stuck with it. However, here he picked up the mandolin and pretended [...]

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I’ve used PearLyrics to add lyrics to my iTunes songs for years (even after the program was withdrawn). PearLyrics was a widget that would automatically search the Web for song lyrics when a song was playing in iTunes, then add the lyrics to the song metadata. This was a pretty good system when I had [...]

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Dan Zanes played a free concert in our town, so of course we had to be there. He doesn’t seem to mind cameras at his concerts, so of course I took my big camera and my big lens. Afterward, Dan signed autographs and posed for pictures. The kids were too shy, so The Wife posed [...]

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Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, performing at an outdoor concert at the local university. How did I get that spectacular angle? Why, it’s the old “put the camera on a monopod and hold it over your head” trick. The concert itself was spectacular. I had never heard the Flaming Lips before. After the concert, [...]

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For the past few weeks I’ve been, um, just a little bit obsessed with the melodies and lyrics of Sufjan Stevens. Here are two cool free Sufjan links I’ve found: Interview on KPBS radio in which he explains the meanings of some of the songs from Illinoise Lord God Bird, a song he recorded for [...]

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We’ve been listening to the music of Dan Zanes for at least a year in our house. Today we got the chance to see him in concert in Somerville, MA, near Boston. It was such an enjoyable show. There were at least ten performers, counting all the special guests, and they played with great energy [...]

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Lisa Loeb, alumna of the University I work for, performed at an alumni-only concert:

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A few years ago, when Daughter was very young, a friend told me we should listen to Dan Zanes. He’s one of those musicians who appeals to both kids and grownups, she said, but I didn’t really follow up on it. Well, I ran across one of his songs on the compilation album For the [...]

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