Red Land Presents...

Here is a video of the marching band playing our show at our most recent competition. We have new uniforms but you can't really tell. See if you can spot the points where we speed up way to much... Also I'm the big bass drum at the end of the line

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rysUptIGZfE

lots and lots of love,

Luke

Death Stalks Among Us

As it stands now the alleged pandemic is very close to home. More and more people are being struck down with Das Schwein. Apparently on July 17th the World Health Organisation stopped recording individual cases of H1N1 but in the last count I could find there were 1748 confirmed cases in Pennsylvania and four deaths.
Now when I say it's close to home I mean it. The other day at Crossroads Middle School which is just across the road from my school there were two hundred students absent and they were sending an average of twenty students home at the end of every class, and even at my school there are noticeable gaps in the student body. I'm not certain how many of these were cases of Swine Flu, but I do know that at least some proportion of them were as someone I know caught it.
It's really hard to gauge how serious it is as what people say about it varies so much. I've heard alternately from a lot of different people that if you have it in you're in hospital sick as a dog barely able to move and isolated in quarantine or that it's not that much worse than a cold, plus everything in between. The only thing we really hear from school is WASH YOUR HANDS, WASH YOUR HANDS so I'm really not sure what to think about the whole thing although it's hard to argue with the fact that there have been multiple deaths from it...

Also I joined the lumberjack club, biatch...

Lots and lots of love,

Luke

Be Gentle!

Okay before I begin... I know I'm completely useless when it come's to photos so from now on the camera is going to stay strapped to my wrist, hopefully...

So I had Homecoming in the weekend *flinches under rain of abuse for not having pictures* and it was a rather unusual experience.
"an annual school or university reunion for graduates" thank-you google dictionary... Basically it's this semi-formal dance that is allegedly a chance for alumni of the school to return and say hello but as far as I could tell there was a distinct lack of graduates. Except for my date, heh. It is a date dance and the vast majority of people took a date, in fact I'm relatively certain I didn't come across anyone going who didn't have a date. I took a friend of my host-sister's called CJ, who is rather cool.
When I say semi-formal I mean that you still dress up but generally speaking the dresses are a lot shorter and not everyone is wearing a suit. One tradition involved that I hadn't come across was the corsage; which is a little bracelet of flowers which the boy is supposed to buy for the girl. Nancy sorted this out for me but then I left it in my date's fridge while we were at her house getting ready, but fortunately neither of us really cared and she hadn't even wanted me to get her one. For some girls however, it is much more of an issue and in the days leading up to Homecoming I heard several girls bitching about how they'd had to sort out their own flowers because they knew their dates would be to useless to do it.

Now I'm sure you're all assuming that Homecoming is just like the ball; but you would be wrong. From what I can tell the ball has a lot more in common with prom (which is at the end of the school year)than with Homecoming. Homecoming is just held in the gym at school and is purely a dance (plus it only costs about ten dollars) and my god, nothing prepared me for the dancing. Everyone was grinding on everyone else and there were even big trains of it, it was truly a sight to behold and I have to say I'm kinda glad that CJ wasn't into that. It was funny to watch though, especially when you see a guy who must be at least six foot five dancing with a girl around Clare's height.

Also I saw Where The Wild Things Are and it is pretty darn shweet. Go see it hen it comes out.

Sorry for the short post but there's not really all that much to write about, feel free to ask though, and once again I'm really sorry for the lack of pictures...

Lots and lots of love,
Luke

What?

Here's a little fail I made/found that you guys might like. It's a small town near where I had my exchange student camp a few weeks ago, and that ain't coon as in raccoon.

Lots and lots of love
Luke

Some Nasty Things

Some of you might actually have heard about this but most people around these parts seem painfully unaware. The G20 summit was recently held in Pittsburgh PA which happens to be about a two hour drive away from me and there was a large amount of protesting by "anarchist groups" in the city. They began a march towards the conference centre where the summit was being held and were told by ranks of riot police that their protest was an illegal assembly and that they would be teargassed if they didn't desist.

This however, is not the horrific part of the story. As well as assaulting the protesters the riot police also beat, arrested and teargassed Pittsburgh University students who were on campus and just happened to be casual observers in the wrong place a the wrong time. Is it just me or is that a little out of control? And as I stated earlier hardly anyone even seems to be aware that it happened, watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etv8YEqaWgA

About a week and a half ago at school this girl suddenly came in with this ridiculously huge pink/purple mohawk. I'd seen this girl before and previously she'd had really long beautiful brown hair and then she just shaved the sides and dyed it. I saw it and was kinda like ok that doesn't look that fantastic but that's pretty gutsy, especially at Red Land High School. BUT THEN, I was walking behind her and she started talking to this guy at his locker and he just looked and her and went "that's embarrassing" and walked away from her so she followed him (and I did to) and she kept trying to talk to him and kept saying that he was her best friend and why wouldn't he talk to her and he wouldn't even look at her he'd just shake his head say "that's embarrassing" and keep walking. It was all very sad...

This one is a little raunchier so smaller children should perhaps not be perusing this one... So the other day in English I left to go to the toilet and I went into a cubicle and the guy in the one next to me WAS HAVING A FRICKING WANK, I could hear him gasping and flapping away the whole time I was in there and then there was an incredibly awkward moment when I was washing my hands and he came out and we met eyes and just quickly looked away while he grabbed some paper towels and hurried out. I really wanted to say something but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, it was just so weird. Come on though, can't you show just a little self control? Instead of having to go rub one off in the school toilet at like twelve in the afternoon? Jeeze...

lots and lots of love *sigh*

Luke

...This One Time At Band-Camp

First of all I would like to apologise for this incredibly late post, it's a combination of having been really busy and being a little apathetic heh. Anyway, the main topic of this post is as the more intellectually inclined amongst you may have guessed; marching band.

Marching is probably the most demanding thing I've ever done. I have to put so much time into it, I have two three hour practices every week and then gridiron games every Friday night where we play before the match or at half time and then we sit in the stands and play when our team scores. Then we have practice on Saturdays from nine till five but I have to be up at about five-thirty to go and get breakfast with the drum-line, then after practice we have competitions with other marching bands, after the last competition I didn't get home till one on Sunday morning.

On top of this time commitment it's also physically tough. You may or may not have seen the pictures which are now up on facebook but I have to carry a gigantic bass drum strapped to my chest the whole time. Now under normal circumstances this wouldn't have been so bad, but on top of that I have to play it, and walk... in time!! Now this may not mean a lot to some of you but to give you an idea of the marching speed I have to march in time at up to 192 BPM, basically that's rawlz fast..

Now the bad has apparently been going since March and I didn't start till late August and as such I missed band camp *sigh*, but I'm pretty proud of what I've managed to pick up in the time I've been involved. Before I go any further I'll explain how the band is organised. It is divided into several sections; woodwinds which is composed of flutes, clarinets and saxophones; brass which is trumpets, sousaphones, mellophones and trombones; the colour guard who essentially run around waving flags and fake guns; and the drumline. The drumline is divided into two further parts: the pit, which is set up at the front of the field and contains xylophones, marimbas, vibraphones and various miscellaneous percussion instruments; and finally the battery, which is what I am part of. Four bass drums, two snares and one set of tenors. One important fact to note is that the pit doesn't move but the battery marches with the rest of the band.

At practice we arrive at around quarter to six and help the pit to set up and then we get our drums and head off to warm up. Until recently after warming up we would go out to the car park and learn drill. Drill is the actual marching, and comes in the form of sheets of gridded paper (in our bands case 109 sheets) which show a top down diagram of how the band is arranged on the field. We head out into the carpark and find our dot (which is wherever we're supposed to be on the field), mark it with chalk, march between that and the previous dot a few times, and then rinse repeat, rinse repeat. To begin with this was quite an issue as when I started they'd already learnt the drill for the first two and a half movements and so I had to learn it by following around the guy in front of me, not the most efficient way of doing things but I've got it now. After this we practice the drill we just learnt with our drums on and playing the corresponding music and then the whole band comes back together for ensemble practice. At the moment however we no longer do drill as we know the entire show.

Our show is entitled "Serengeti" and has this rather cool African theme. It's made up of four movements: sunrise, gazelles, cool shade, and brush fire and rain. As the show is built around this prominent African type thing percussion plays a rather important role. In the pit as well as the more traditional instruments there are djembes, congas, bongos, some freaky little plinky hand piano thing and some others which slip my mind... Meanwhile out in the field the battery (that's us) generally end up playing cool little groovy rhythms, especially in movement three, which is crazy fun to play.

As much fun as band is, it really does feel like some kind of crazy cult analogue; once your in your in and that's it. Skipping practice is a HUGE deal even if it's for legitimate reasons and quitters are more or less totally ostracised. On top of this each section of the band has it's own little rituals, which is kind of cool but also a little odd. I can't speak at length about any other sections little traditions but in the drumline there are several I can comment on. Every Saturday before practice (almost) the entire drumline goes out and gets a huge breakfast at this diner by school, and there's this one kid who never shows up and he gets a LOT of... flak for it. Most of the little rituals rear their heads a the competitions however. When we pay at competitions we have these little wrist flair things called gauntlets which are taped onto our uniforms and after every competition the tape is added to this ball of tape (which is allegedly twenty+ years old, but I could easily believe that) only a little smaller than my head and this HAS to be done. Also while we're waiting to go on we all huddle into a circle and say the lords prayer and then we shake hands with each other and say 'good morning',

I'm not sure how the one came about. Finally while we are waiting to go on and the band before us is playing we're not allowed to face the stadium.

To go with these there is also several rules that everyone is supposed to follow while in uniform: no swearing, no running, and sort of just no silly-business in general.

While I hope this has been interesting and informative for you all. If you have any questions or anything about it, ask away. Also if I could direct you to facebook where the are some pictures of band, I'll also try get some video or something.

Once again sorry for the radio-silence but I'll make it up by doing posts to sink a battleship today.

Lots and lots of love... FROM AMERICA!

Luke

May We Remember...?

The other day was 9/11, so apologies for this slightly belated post. It was kind of interesting to see how the day is treated in the country that it happened in, because I mean, in NZ it's not really a big deal, It's sort of something that happened long ago and far away. Here that is not quite the case. September 11th has been officialy commerated as Patriot Day, and although there is no day off for it there are certain things that must be observed. Any flags flown from homes or goverment buildings must be flown at half mast and there is a moment of silence at some point during the day.

Also in psychology we watched a movie called '102 Minutes That Changed America' which was essentially pieced together footage from various sources that covered (funnily enough) 102 minutes starting just after the first plane hit the World Trade Centre. There was some unsettling stuff in that video that I'd never seen before, but the two that got me the most were shots of people jumping out of the buildings and falling ALL the way to the ground and the huge dust cloud.

When the first tower collapsed it sent this gigantic wave of pulverised concrete and debris flooding down the streets of Manhattan and you could see people running full tilt down the streets with it following them but tey would just be enveloped. Once particularly eerie sequence was some guy with a camera running down the street away from the cloud but it catches up with him and everything turns this horrible murky brown.

As far as respectfulness and honouring the day goes it's to varying degrees, my psychology teacher made a huge fuss out of it but I suppose that's fair enough. People at school though seem a little nonchalent about the whole thing but I can sort of understand why. They were all seven eight or nine when this happened and so it's a little hard to summon up the kind of horror that people who were older at the time must have felt when it occured, they remember, but only just. Some people said they didn't even know what the World Trade Centre was at the time (neither did I), a lot of the staff refer to it as 'your generation's Pearl Harbour' but it's not really, it's THEIR generations Pearl Harbour because they are the one's who are able to identify most strongly with the tradegy, most of them wouldn't have been alive (or if they were they would have been of a similar age; 7, 8, 9) at the time of Pearl Harbour (December 7th 1941 if anyone's wondering, but you could always ask Harry) so they would have been similar to people my age in regard to 9/11.

Also I thought it might be more of a big deal in Pennsylvania because of the hijacked plane that crashed in the field but I'm prety sure it never even got mentioned

Ok I'm done with that convoluted ramble, I hope you can undersand what I'm trying to get at. Also I know I obviously didn't take the pictures but I felt like I had to put SOMETHING up.

Lots of Love