Music Show #01 – 6/25/2016 – Positive Upbeat Songs

This Friday’s show is focused on the positive contributions we can choose to make each day while living and singing our own Fresh Toones. Each song will have a brief intro on air with some positive encouragement for all. 

Song #1 “You Can Do It” – For years I didn’t use this title for the song because it was such a cliche. After a while I came to the decision to use it because it’s exactly what I was singing about

Song #2 “Plant Those Seeds with Love” – A song that encourages us all to invest our love in the seeds (our life endeavors) that we plant each and every day of our lives.

Song #3 – “Do Justice to Yourself” – A happy upbeat song that reminds us all to do what’s best for ourselves by making good thoughtful and loving decisions in our lives. We need to become the prophets that we seek with less dependency on directors and preachers outside of our own sincere efforts to discover the love we want to become.

Song #4 “Friends Come in All Shapes & Colors” – The song is about appreciating the diversity of our friendships and was originally written for an after-school animation program for the kids.

Song #5 “Gonna Sing It”  A upbeat positive song that encourages us all to sing with all our might.

song #6 “I’ve Dreamt About Living on a Mountain” – A song about looking back at the dreams we had when we were in our 20s and how they may well appear pretty silly now. Without them that energy and enthusiasm might well have been lost forever. 

Song #7 “The Fresh Toones Theme Song” – This song sets the mood and philosophy for all the other Fresh Toones. Basically, it espouses the motto “If you can hear the Song, you’ve got Fresh Toones.”

 


More Posts for Show: Fresh Toones

Fresh Toones Music Show


Fresh Toones top banner image

The Fresh Toones Music Show is the creation of Dave Puls, a songwriter and musician who has been writing songs since 1971. It will air every Friday afternoon from 2:00 PM ’til 3 PM.

Dave Puls

Dave Puls

The show will be composed almost exclusively of original songs written and performed by him. He’ll be sharing some of his thoughts about the creation of those songs and hopes to inspire others to create their own fresh toones.

The show is particularly dedicated to fostering the creativity of anyone who struggles on their own with little or no public support to share their artistry with the world. Whether it be music, animation, song writing, painting or any creative endeavor, there is much for us to share and much more for us to discover.

You might ask yourself “What exactly are Fresh Toones?” Here’s a brief explanation from the Fresh Toones website.

“Fresh Toones are any creations that have resulted from an honest attempt to detect and call upon the universal vibration or thread that connects all of us. The sound that resonates through us, but is usually unnoticed do to our rush to solve our most immediate needs. These creations will stem from our own particular life experiences and by sharing them they may lead to a wider sensibility to the total life experience. Sometimes a Fresh Toone may be misguided or may fail to connect to something larger that our selves, but the critical element is that the attempt was honestly made. The results will be there for each of us to consider and accept or not.

In the end Fresh Toones should speak for themselves. We should all create our own Fresh Toones without fear of failing. If our attempts are sincere then we can be assured that it is better for the results to exist than not.”

http://freshtoones.com/pages/whatwhywho.html

The Fresh Toones Music Show will air every Friday afternoon from 2:30 PM ’til 3 PM.


More Posts for Show: Fresh Toones

No Military School in RCSD

Today, I participated in a focus group for the Rochester City School District.  The topic was whether the District should open a Military School.  Before I get to the focus group, let me put this a bluntly and simply as I can…peace hands

There should absolutely NOT be a public military school in Rochester (or anywhere else for that matter).

As for the focus group…working the sign in table was a member of the Rochester Police Department.  Not a good sign.  There were about 30 members of the community in the audience.  A few of them, fellow officers.  There were also people who I assumed are in ROTC, in full uniform.  Of the uniformed people, it may have been 50% of them were people of color.  Of the rest of us, I would say over 80% of us were white.

There were different categories you could could put yourself in: educator, parent, community member, etc.  I could have gone with a number of them, but I chose educator.  So I sat in a group of 5 people with a group leader and an “observer”.  All of us were white.  The “observer” is a teacher in the district who is also in the military.

In our group, the entire conversation was recorded and we were told that a report will go to specific committees of the School Board and they will be available to the public.  I look forward to seeing just how our comments will be represented.

I’m not going to use this blog to describe each person in my group or what they said. But I will summarize the conversation.  All 6 educators in that room agreed that the kids in RCSD are under insurmountable pressures, most are dealing with some kind(s) of trauma.  We also agreed that there shouldn’t be as huge an emphasis on testing.  We were all on the same page with the concept that we should be dealing with the Maslow stuff before we deal with the educational stuff.

[Side note: you may disagree that schools shouldn’t be handling emotional issues, homelessness, abuse, etc., but you literally can’t teach kids who have PTSD.  So people in education can’t wait for the rest of you to stop dicking around and get to helping our children.]

In the group, I added my own stuff.  What a military school would stress is not healthy for traumatized children.  The School Board should be leading the fight against the state and federal governments to end high-stakes testing.  The structure of a military school is not developmentally appropriate for our children. Having a school that teaches obedience and compliance instead of critical thinking and peace is not what our children need. We’re talking about a publicly funded military academy while the Regional Academy has been sitting on a shelf for almost 10 years; a school that was developed by over 150 members of the community including educators, parents and Nazareth College.

Except for me, everyone in the group was in the military or had family who is/was in.  So I quickly decided not to say the following.  It’s unconscionable that the idea would be floated to have the children who are abused, neglected and broken be led to become cannon fodder for our military, so that they can be abused there and spit back out to be neglected as veterans.  And children of color, I may add.

Peace with a pieceI’m sorry, but I don’t thank veterans for their service, because our military does not defend our country, but protects the interests of the ruling, corporate class.  I chose not to bring this to the focus group because it was not meant to be a debate, and I did not go there to directly insult life choices other people have made.  We were giving our individual opinions and I did not intend for the time to become an argument on this.  But when this gets pushed past the committees and comes to a vote in front of the full School Board, I will definitely be there saying these things.  And I will also say the following…

Any member of the Rochester City School Board who votes for a public military school should immediately resign, because those who do have given up and have no positive, productive ideas on how to improve this school district.

Which side are you on?

-Dave Sutliff-Atias

Broken Spear Vision Interview with Judy Bello

Judy

 

Judy Bello | Fellowship of Reconciliation 

A local journalist has taken the lead in drawing attention to the victims of drone strikes in Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Persistent drone attacks in this region have terrorized the community and disorganized the society that is the basis of support for the people. Noor Behram has dedicated himself to bringing the tragedy imposed on his community by a foreign army pursuing its own aims. He has compiled a dossier of photographs of child victims of the attacks, and of the general devastation of destroyed homes and lives.

According to Shahzad Akbar of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights in Islamabad, Noor came to town a year ago with his photos and asked for assistance in finding a venue where he could show his photos. When he couldn’t get a gallery to support a showing, he set them up on the street. Since then, his pictures have appeared in numerous news outlets from the Guardian of London to Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC. On October 7, 2012, posters made from these photos adorned and identified our buses as we headed for South Waziristan with Imran Khan’s Peace March.

Noor attended a meeting we held with some family members of victims of drone attacks. During the introductions, he busily sifted through a large envelope full of photos. When he spoke, he held up the images that would illustrate his words. Noor says that he has about 100 photos of children who have been killed by drone attacks, but there are many more whose bodies were torn to pieces by the Hellfire missile that took their lives, or who were already buried by the time he was able to arrive.

https://archive.org/details/TheBrokenSpearVision19

http://blog.deconstructedglobe.com/

Broken Spear Vision Interviews with Gary Pudup

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https://archive.org/details/TheBrokenSpearVision20

Gary was born in Rochester, NY and raised in rural Chili.

He attended St. Helen school in Gates, and was a member of Boy Scout Troop 157

He graduated from McQuaid Jesuit High School in 1972 where he played football and was an undefeated City-Catholic League wrestling champ.

Gary was fortunate enough to be accepted at the University of Rochester where he played offensive guard for the Yellow Jackets football team.

Wishing to pursue a career in law enforcement  he transferred to RIT and earned a bachelors degree in Criminal Justice.

Gary Pudup as a Young CopGary-Irondequoit PoliceGary began his law enforcement career in the New York Attorney General’s Office as a criminal investigator. He was also in the Rochester Police Department, Irondequoit Police Department and settled in the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office under Sheriff Andy Meloni. He had many assignments ranging from patrol deputy to watch commander. This included assignments in the western part of the county where he had responsibilities in Parma, Ogden and Greece. He was also heavily involved in the training program for Critical Incident Management and Command Post Operations. This training emphasized cooperation between emergency medical services, the fire services and law enforcement during critical incidents such as active shooter, terrorist and mass casualty scenarios such as chemical spills.

Gary retired after more than 29 years of service rising through the ranks to become a watch commander and head of the Internal Affairs Unit.

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Kathy Gary and daughter Kelly PudupDuring this time he became an FAA certified pilot and worked as a private contractor traffic watch pilot, FAA certified flight instructor and commercial Part 135 pilot to help pay for his daughter’s education.

Upon retirement he continued work as a pilot and returned to school going to St. John Fisher College to work on a masters degree in preparation to enter the private sector. Always interested in helping others he studied human services administration and served on several local non-profit boards.

Gary has on many occasions given  back to the community in a host of capacities, including being a member of the Center for Dispute Settlement’s Police-Community Advisory Committee, a school tutor for underprivileged children, a tax-preparer for low income families and senior citizens, a volunteer advocate for women’s issues and as a hiking trail maintenance worker for the ADK . Gary has also served on a variety of church committees and is a supporter of the Greece Historical Society.

Gary and Kathy Pudup at a hockey game

Gary is a long time Greece resident who resides with his wife of 36 years, Kathy, a life-long Greece resident. Kathy retired from the Rochester City School district where she helped children with hearing challenges as an educational audiologist. Their daughter Colleen attended Greece schools and is a now a special education teacher.

Broken Spear Vision Interview with Rev. Matthew Martin Nicoloff

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About Matthew Martin Nickoloff

If there are a “chosen few” then I am not one of them, if an “elect” well then I have not been elected. I am one who is knocking at the door. I am one whose foot is on the bottom rung. But I know that Heaven’s bottom rung is Heaven though the ladder is standing where I work by day and at night sleep with my head on a stone. -Wendell Berry No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history music, that we should begin with the simple exercises first and slowly go on trying the hard ones, practicing till strength and accuracy became one with the daring to leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down the wild arpeggio or faulting the full sentence of the fugue. And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once before we’ve even begun to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin in the midst of the hard movement, the one already sounding as we are born. Everything else seems beyond us, we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said is true for us, caught naked in the argument, the counterpoint, trying to sightread what our fingers can’t keep up with, learn by heart what we can’t even read. And yet it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi or child prodigies, there are no prodigies in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are, even when all the texts describe it differently. And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing against the world for speed and brilliance (the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her What makes a virtuoso?—Competitiveness.) The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives The woman who sits watching, listening, eyes moving in the darkness is reheasing in her body, hearing-out in her blood a score touched off in her perhaps by some words, a few chords, from the stage, a tale only she can tell. -Adrienne Rich

https://archive.org/details/TheBrokenSpearVision23

 

Broken Spear Vision Interview with George Dardess

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A pioneer in building Muslim-Christian relations, George Dardess has more than a decade of experience giving talks, lectures, courses, and retreats on Islam. Dardess received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University and his M.Div. from St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry. An English professor for nearly three decades, he is also a deacon in the Catholic church. He lives with his wife, Peggy Rosenthal, in Rochester, New York.
https://archive.org/details/TheBrokenSpearVision25

Marketing Consciousness

This isn’t connected to any TSBS. I was looking at my version of the book If the World Were a Village today. A nice book and a great concept. If all the world were proportionately condensed to a village of 100 people, what would the demographics be?

My version was updated in 2007. We had 6.6 billion people then. (7.4 billion now) The proportions haven’t changed too much – pretty much +/- 1 point either way for a lot of demos.

It’s a great concept to help us understand our place in the world… a concept that has been effectively commoditized. I couldn’t find an “official” video, paper, etc. that doesn’t cost money. Well, here’s a video with the same concept with a few more categories than the book.

– Dave