ABBA GOLD JAM

Posted on April 17, 2018 by Anne Ku

Our first ABBA GOLD ukulele jam will take place on Tuesday 1st May 2018 at 7 pm EDT in the common room of the Walter Baker building in Historic Lower Mills.

We will celebrate ABBA’s announcement of new songs, first time in 35 years with a trivia pursuit game and aim to play all 19 songs on their gold album. Join us!! RSVP via meet-up for this FREE singalong to ukulele accompaniment.

While compiling our ukulele songbook for “Easy Beatles” I came across a triibute concert to ABBA on Wednesday 2nd May 2018. Suddenly I remembered how much I love ABBA. How can we devote an evening to the Beatles without one for ABBA?

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Easy Beatles Jam Session

Posted on April 10, 2018 by Anne Ku

As I explore music for ukulele jam sessions, I keep discovering Beatles songs I’ve never heard of before. In London, I chuckled at the politically incorrect “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and the funny “Octopus’s Garden.” George Harrison’s “I’ll Follow the Sun” and other songs by individual members of the Beatles are all so very interesting. They wrote more than 300 songs though not all were performed or recorded.

Sadly, on this day 10th April 1970 the band officially broke up.

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The freedom and friction of fiction writing

Posted on April 9, 2018 by Anne Ku

“Pick up a postcard on your table and write your address on it. Take what you’ve learned in this conference and write to your future self. Which words of encouragement would you impart?”

Among the postcards of city scenes and outdoor landscapes, the beach scene is the closest to me. I felt a lump in my throat.

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Anita Shreve, I never got to meet her

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Anne Ku

A pop-up window flashed “Anita Shreve dies at 71″ while I was on FaceTime.

Suddenly, I felt a pang of regret. I’m attending a major writing conference in Boston next week. I’ve moved to New England, where Shreve had set most of her novels. Everywhere I go, I remember her writing — all those love stories set in Maine, and other parts of this area of the country.

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This time last year in California

Posted on March 29, 2018 by Anne Ku

We think in cycles, every full moon, every birthday, every St Patrick’s Day, every Valentine’s Day.

This time last year, I was clearing the home of an 84-year old woman named Maureen. A sudden fall on 4th of July 2016 led her to call 911 and subsequent ambulance transport to a hospital and then a private nursing home. She never returned to her three-bedroom condo in San Fernando Valley since.

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April 15: ex’s of evil in Texas

Posted on March 23, 2018 by Anne Ku

In my quest for songs to fit thematic jam sessions and repertoire for thematic concerts, I came across two things that perplex me. Axes of Evil and Exes of Evil. Maybe it’s a play on words, but it made me wonder why someone referred to his ex of 20-years as “mean-spirited”. Do all exes or ex’s become mean spirited? Is mean same as evil?

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Culturally themed concert: from New Zealand to Hawaii

Posted on March 22, 2018 by Anne Ku

Music can transport you to another world, another place, another time, another feeling. Such was my motivation yesterday in South Boston and today in Brockton, Massachusetts when I gave a culturally themed concert to take my audience first to New Zealand, then across the Pacific Ocean, to Hawaii.

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The validity of student evaluations

Posted on March 20, 2018 by Anne Ku

Whoa! A new Slate article entitled “Student Evaluations Can’t Be Used to Assess Professors” caught my attention today. Research shows that it’s biased in favor of white, cisgender, American-born men. This could explain why my ex-colleague, a white alpha male dog owner, consistently received outstanding evaluations, while I, a female minority, have not.

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The next essay

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Anne Ku

Since October 2017, I’ve been looking forward to writing an essay on “music and relationships” — a topic I’m not only intimately familiar with but also crave to research and write about. Yet, I procrastinate writing the first word. It’s due next week, and I’m still fidgeting over the central thesis. Is it another familiar writer’s block?

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Temptation of the tropics in winter

Posted on March 8, 2018 by Anne Ku

It’s been over a year since I last posted to my Maui blog for newcomers. I had long left and travelled to mainland USA and Europe, back and forth. However, every winter I experience withdrawal symptoms, that is, looking back and wondering why I left that tropical paradise called Maui? If everything was so perfect, why did I leave?

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