Each week covers an important era in music or the making of a famous album, and last week it was Frank Zappa. Readers of this blog may have noticed that I'm a bit of a fan of a good Zappa quote, but despite one of my friends who is a huge fan urging me to check out his music, I must admit that I'm only familiar with a few songs - and they are pretty weird to say the least.
Something mentioned in the show really got me thinking. I've quoted Frank saying this before:
The computer can't tell you the emotional story.
It can give you the exact mathematical design,
but what's missing is the eyebrows.
What I didn't know is that the eyebrows was one of Zappa's favourite terms - he used it to describe adding that special touch to a piece of music - adding the eyebrows became a well-known concept with the musicians who worked with him.
It got me to wondering (and I do have a point here! ) - every now and then when I finish a scrapbooking page or collage, I feel like I have expressed the emotion I wanted to successfully. It doesn't happen every time, but when it does the page feels so much more important to me, more poignant somehow. And it has nothing to do with fancy new products or using great photos. It has nothing to do with whether other people like it or not. Just purely that the page somehow has expression or emotion attached to it that is personally significant. It communicates something effectively. It has eyebrows!
Just sat here trying to think of an example layout, and I think this might be one:

when I was a child
I didn't see her much
she passed away before I was five
I was so young that it barely
affected my life
then one day when I asked
you told me she was magnificent
all that I had was
your word and a photograph
but one look in your eyes
told me all that I needed to know
I stitched around the outside of the page to create a pocket, and inside I put some documents - the eulogies that my five uncles read at the funeral, and some information about Nana's life.
I know that this layout is fairly plain in style and design, and the products are probably quite dated now in scrapbooking world terms (more than 6 mths old ;-), but it's special to me and I know that it will be meaningful to my family. My younger sister told me that when she first saw this page in my online gallery, she printed it out to keep a copy herself.
Another page which to me has eyebrows, but no particular or important family history or record keeping attached to it is this one, just a feeling...


Now that I have all that philosophizing out of my system - the program is now up for the Scrapbook Expo in Brisbane - I'll be teaching two different classes each day. You can read about them here. I'll be posting some sneak peeks soon!
2 comments:
From one music tragic to another, i couldn't agree more - lol
Just delurking. I loved the story about eyebrows. And I loved your Nana's story too. Now I'm hung up looking for the eyebrows in my own work. Thanks
cherill w
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