Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
When the snow is this deep it takes a while to get through the woods. And then, of course, it takes a while to get back through the woods but I’m not really keeping track of the time, I’m just trying to figure out where the day went. And a funny thing happens around here, guaranteed. When you go north and you go downhill. If it was the other way around Lake Ontario would overflow. Still, it’s flat enough to be a one speed bike town.
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We usually put our skis on at the front door and ski through our neighbor’s yard and down into the woods up to the lake but we never got around to sawing up the big oak that fell across our path last Fall. And the snow is so deep we would surely have to cut the trail all the way to the golf course so got in the car and drove down to the lake and skied around the ponds. The sun went down while we out there but we hardly noticed because it was a full moon and there is so much of the white stuff out there.
We worked up a good appetite so we drove right past our house on the way home and cruised down East Ridge Road looking for a spot to eat. We hadn’t been in in Gigi’s Italian Kitchen yet and used to like it a lot when it was La Trattoria so we gave it a shot. It’s still funky, the food is great and on Fridays and Saturdays they have Dick Tosti playing live music in the dining room. We were there kinda early but the place filled up fast. Dick had a really light touch, a great sense of rhythm and a really cool voice. He was doing a sensational job with “This Guy’s in Love With You” when we left. We had him pegged as a Continental who played in local bands in the sixties and he might have but he goes way back. We did a little research and found this video when we got back home. Somehow this video led us to a string of Abba videos. You know how it goes with YouTube.
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The Little Theater Café had already let two employees go home by the time we showed up to play. The forecast for twelve inches kept all but the die-hard home and their dinner hour was the slowest in months. Does the band care? Hardly. We play for ourselves and reliably sound best when hardly anyone is there. There is more room for dynamics and space to let thing get to the brink of falling apart. But somehow the place filled up and by the end of the night Sandy told us we were only a dollar fifty short of the bonus so Peggi and I bought a peanut butter cup brownie and cashed in.
We shoveled for a good bit of the day today and were still out there when our neighbors walked by with their three Jack Russell terriers. One was wearing a sweater and anther had four little booties on. They told us they had been skiing in Durand on the newly groomed trails. They started grooming last year but we never got any snow. We prefer the un-groomed trails that run through the woods and snake around the ponds. When the driveway was clear we skied until dark. The conditions were perfect. I fell four times, twice while I was just standing there, and it was a soft landing each time.
Leave a commentI took this video of Lakeshore Boulevard a few years ago with my old camera and finally got around to posting it. Christmas day was the perfect time time to stumble through iMovie. Peggi was driving and I stuck the camera out the window. We started at Durand Lake and immediately turned to drive west along Lake Ontario toward the Genesee River outlet. My mom used to take us swimming here when we were kids and it is still the place to be in hot weather.
Had we traveled east along the lake shore we would driven by the scene of Monday’s massacre. Joe Barrett and Jeff Munson have both emailed to ask if we went to school with the shooter. He’s our age but he wasn’t in the yearbook. Maybe he didn’t make it to senior year.
At my parents house on Christmas the conversation naturally turned to guns. One of my brothers led with “It’s not the guns” and my niece, who was always getting in trouble in high school, had many run-ins and then was mentored by the fireman/cop who was killed, agreed. My brother-in-law’s two eldest both had “Call of Duty” at the top of their Christmas/Hanukkah list and both were disappointed. It was a pretty well rounded discussion with most agreeing the gun lobby will say whatever it takes to sell more guns.
So, eight to ten inches tonight. Perfect weather for the Margaret Explosion. 7:30-9:30. Last Little Theater gig until March.
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Not sure if these are self portraits but I love them. The tag reads “Art created by students from School 28, Philip Lange Art Instructor.” and they were on the wall at Canaltown Coffee when we picked up ten more pounds of “Rochester’s Choice.” The drywall guys that repaired our ceiling told us we have the best coffee in the world.
Kind of creepy having today’s top new story originate about a mile from our house. I just watched some video footage of the fire at the LA Times site. I know the NRA’s response to today’s shooting will be more guns but I can’t figure out the angle.
I’m wondering if the date is figured in to iTunes algorithm. We just heard two Christmas songs. We probably have about ten in the whole library. Im getting used to the new iTunes but you have to go through a few hoops with the recent elimination of iTunes DJ. I open the MiniPlayer at the same time as the big window and shuffle the whole library. I used to ask for 50 and show 5 recently played but the mini player only shows 20 upcoming and the little clock icon lets you go back. Guess they slimmed it down for the mobil set. I should get out more. Maybe when this holiday is over.
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We found it impossible to keep a candle lit in the cold wind behind Holy Trinity Church in Webster so we put the candles in our pocket and brought them home. We’ll probably burn ours later tonight. Our niece died twenty years ago from an infected heart and her two sisters organized a remembrance at her grave. Nicole was twelve when she died and three of her friends from back then, some with their own children now, were also there to share memories. I babysat for Nicole and her sisters on Wednesday nights for three years and I couldn’t decide which memory to share. She was so full of life and ready to go on all fronts.
Just before she got sick she asked me to paint her portrait so I said I’d bring my camera out the next Wednesday and take a photo. Nicole made a big deal of this sitting, picking the white chair on the porch as the location and wearing her favorite t-shirt and then spending over an hour in the bathroom putting on make-up. By the time she was ready to sit down it was getting dark and there was barely enough light for the film in our old Canon FTb. She died before I got around to doing the painting.
We headed back out to Webster last night for calling hours for Brad Fox’s mom. Brad flew in from Oakland, just in time for the first snow fall and the whole Mahoney family, who lived a few doors down on the same street, was there when we arrived. Brad’s mom was the sweetest person in the world. Years ago I made her a cd of old country songs and she told me how much she liked it every time I saw her. My favorite memory of her was from way back. The Who’s “Substitute”was out and Brad was singing “I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth” at the top of his lungs when his mom laid into him. “What do mean you were born with a plastic spoon?”
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One of the joys of keeping a blog is sorting through the spam folder, comments from anonymous senders who hope you will post links to their illicit site. They are pretty easy to spot and read like they were written in Russian and then translated to English through Google. Here’s one from Ethelene Pimentel.
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When Record Theater in Midtown starting dumping their 8-tracks they poured boxes of them in bins and kept reducing the price until they were gone. We still had an eight track player in our car so I was picking up all the crazy stuff for 50 cents. I still had boxes of them when we moved but no player so I gave them to my brother-in-law, CalZone, all but one that is, Sun Ra’s magnificent “The Magic City.” That artifact is sitting right next to me as I type this.
There is very little reason to own anything anymore and I love it. My favorite possessions are all digitized. Music, photos, memories. It’s all going to the cloud. Let’s say I want to play this Sun Ra eight track. It is at my fingertips.. Together we can reduce clutter.
Many years ago, more than thirty, I worked for the Rochester Police Department as a graphic artist. I had access to the mug shots, which at the time were kept in filing cabinets, and I used them in flyers that I produced on a small AB Dick press. The mugshots were real photos pasted on the files. David Bowie’s had already been ripped off his rap sheet. I was hired under a grant and my job duties were slim. I would read the New Yorker at work and visit Brad Fox who was a watchman at the County office building next door. For me there is nothing worse than a job without tasks and deadlines but the mugshots were cool. I had already taken some of mine own back in Indiana outside the trailer we lived in. And I took another batch at the Bug Jar in ’98. I used a Kodak one megapixel camera, reduced the photos to bit-mapped halftone pixels and tiled the print-outs on our HP Laser Jet. At a holiday party on Saturday Martin Edic told me the shot of him from this show is his favorite photo of himself.
I feel as though people wish I would paint something else They have told me as much but I really am not obsessed with mugshots. I don’t even look at the crime the people are charged with. I just like the raw range of expression, from defiant to vulnerable, and it’s fun using them as sources.
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We were at my brother’s house outside of New York in late 2009 and planning to take the train into Manhattan and then eventually out to Duane’s place in Brooklyn. I was reading the NYT over coffee. (My brother makes it strong, so strong one of my other brothers had an anxiety attack down there.) I spotted an Roberta Smith penned announcement for a show at the McKee Gallery of Philip Guston’s Small Panels, paintings he did between 1969 and 1973 when he switch from the abstract to figurative. I was ecstatic. That was a while ago but I am still ecstatic about these paintings and they are still up at the McKee site. Be sure to click though on the enlargements for even larger enlargements.
Pete Monacelli, who has been helping us with our project, has been creating work that explores the the connection between a a small group of the abstract expressionist and the spiritual realm. Pete mentioned that Guston is in that group but he said he didn’t know that much about him.There is no book on the Small Panels so I went to Amazon to order a book I thought Pete would like called “Philip Guston: Roma.” I bought it for 29 bucks or so but it’s now 225 And the retrospective book I have is just gone! Oh well, just gonna have to savor the McKee website.
Guston painted the KKK while he was living in LA. They were active there and didn’t like Jews any better than blacks. When he returned to figurative work the hooded figures became stand-ins for bumbling humans of all stripes including himself. I love how animated this conversation (above) looks even though we can’t see their faces. He is my favorite painter but then I have probably said that before.
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We don’t have a dumpster out front but we have managed to fill our green Waste Management trash containers to the brim every week for the last few months. With the project creep our little home improvement task is surely helping the economy. We did a Home Depot run this afternoon and Peggi and I each a had cart over there. Peggi had electrical outlets, paint, drywall screws, and Ploy Foam CaulkSaver in hers. I had backing board and a bag of Thinset in mine. I noticed the guys who did our drywall drink those 24 ounce Mega Monster energy drinks. We count on coffee and are so tired we may just watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents reruns tonight.
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This plywood nativity scene went up last week in front of the Church of the Transfiguration on Culver Road. I love that word, “Transfiguration.” The Transfiguration is an episode in the New Testament where Jesus is transfigured or metamorphosed. He becomes radiant and shines with bright rays of light. Moses and Elijah appear next to him and Jesus is called “Son” by a voice in the sky, assumed to be God the Father.
Last Wednesday, Jack Schaefer played guitar with Margaret Explosion and tried this holiday number (below). We might try it again tonight when Bob Martin returns on guitar and Pete LaBonne joins us on the grand piano.
Here’s Margaret Explosion’s version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
My father told us he received an email from Apple about the one terabyte Seagate internal drive in his iMac. Apparently two many of these drives had failed and Apple was replacing them for free. We encouraged my father to do it before his drive fails so we made sure he had an up to date backup and as an extra measure he tidied up his desktop by dragging all the clutter to his documents folder.
Apple replaced the drive the next day and he restored from the most recent backup but something was amiss. His documents folder was empty. He called me and I had him go into his Time Machine preference panel, click on the options button and read me what he saw in the list of “Items to be excluded from backups”. Along with the names of external drives he read “applications” and “Documents.” My heart sank. My father has been a heavy user since the eighties. How could these items ever have been selected for exclusion?
We called the Apple Store back, they gave us a Genius appointment and told us to bring the computer and BU drive out there. The store was jammed with fans ogling the iPad minis and the genius bar was a hotbed of people troubleshooting problems with their mobile devices. As far as I could tell we were the only old-timers with a clunky desktop machine. We begged them to give us the old drive back so we could rescue the docs but we were told the drive had already been destroyed for security reasons.
One Apple genius told another, “These guys have an interesting problem here.” Interesting! This was is a disaster! I franticly rummaged through the backup folders and found a documents folder from a few months back and then a month before that I found a folder with his apps. The geniuses were at loss as to how this could have happened. And then in the backup from the day before the drive was replaced we found the hundreds of files that were on his backup before he cleaned house for the Apple guys.
For our efforts in bailing him out my father took us to Nick’s Seabreeze Inn for dinner. Nick smokes cigars and keeps a heated trailer parked out back for smokers to hang out in. There is a little tv in there and the place looks pretty cozy.
Leave a commentThe abandoned Central Bank building on State Street is an absolutely perfect venue for “The City Is Asleep And Dreaming,” a building wide set of installations and performance art organized by Jason Bernagozzi and Evelyne LeBlanc-Roberge. We had a little trouble getting in the door last night. That too may have been part of a performance piece. A piece of red duct tape on the lock had worn thin and the dead bolt was keeping the door shut so we knocked for entry. This formerly grand section of town is still creepy but I have faith that it is only sleeping. Jason’s piece is stunning, the setting, the sound, the movement, the whole package. Evelyne’s two video projections on glass doors in this same chamber are otherworldly and beautiful. Remember Init Two?
Onward. First Friday comes but once a month. My father told us about a show at the Axom Gallery on Anderson Avenue of recent paintings by Kurt Moyer entitled, “The New Arcadia.” Kurt’s oil paintings of bathers in woods-like settings combine touches of early Picasso chunky figures, Cezanne’s bather paintings and Maxfield Parrish’s color sense with luscious paint handling. My father had run into Kurt in the woods off Westfall. Kurt was painting Mayflowers and my father, who often paints and sketches in the woods, was cataloging leaves and tree types.
A few more stops and we were home in time to watch “Gerhard Richter Painting.” We were prompted to watch it by an Angel Corpus Christi’s post. I knew I would love this because I love his paintings. I did a portrait of him a long time ago when I was painting my favorite artists. I threw his away because he looked like Henry Kissinger. Whether abstract or near photographic, his paintings are jaw-droppingly beautiful. I was struck by how he paints, blank canvases hung on white, gallery-like walls, and the way he works on multiple paintings at once. I loved his answer to how he knows when to stop. “When there is nothing wrong with the picture.” I don’t really care about the man behind the work but Gerhard seems like a likable chap. I loved his German assessment of the American openness, how they tell you exactly what they think.
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Some years ago our friend, Duane, met Charlie Watts at a book signing in a Manhattan. Duane bought a copy of Charlie’s book, “From One Charlie To Another,” for us and had Mr. Watts autograph it. The illustrated book was a tribute to Charlie Parker and I think I still have it but I just spent twenty minutes trying to find it. Anyway, Duane nervously snuck a picture of Charlie Watts, shooting from the belt, and it looks like Charlie spotted the camera because he is looking right at it. The photo is awkwardly cropped but that became a quality and Peggi did a watercolor based on the photo and submitted it the 22nd Annual Members Show at Rochester Contemporary.
The opening was last night and the place was mobbed, so crowded we couldn’t find Peggi’s art on the walls. Each time we took a few steps we would be sort of trapped in conversation and we were way in the back when director, Bleu Cease, made the big announcement about RoCo having bought the building. Someone had already spilled the beans on that one so we were just sort of stuck in the crowd. When the festivities ended I worked my way to the front and spotted Peggi’s piece on the front wall next to Lorraine Bohonos’s, Heather Irwin’s and Anne Haven’s work.
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Bob Martin’s newest guitar is a black Strat but it hardly sounds like one after his artfully applied processing. Guitar players are always coming up to him to talk shop and they are usually looking down at all this gear while they talk. These days Bob sits down while he plays. His pedals are on the floor but the effects units are all on another chair that sits in front of him so he plays them by hand.
I took this shot last week as we were setting up for our Margaret Explosion gig and looked up some of the gear when I got home. I’m guessing most of the magic comes from the M5 Stompbox Modeler but I found the rotating speaker system effect from Strymon pretty intriguing. Bob’s playing has been amazing lately but he’s going to miss tonight’s gig. He’s on the disabled list with a pinched nerve. Jack Schaefer will be joining us on bass clarinet and guitar.
Margaret Explosion “Juggler” with Jack Schaefer on bass clarinet
A few weeks ago my girlfriend from high school sent me a message on fb saying she was downsizing and had come across some old soccer clippings that I might be interested in. She sent them along with this picture of the volleyball team. I looked at it for a while trying to recall who these people were and then dreaming about old friends. On Saturday another classmate, Jeff Munson, emailed to invite us over for dinner. He was making homemade pasta with kale and his old buddy, number 13 in the photo above, in town for the weekend, was also going to be there. Looking back, Kit Bower probably picked the number 13. He is that kinda guy. But would he still be wearing those fashionably clunky, horn rimmed glasses? I hadn’t seen him in forty years.
No, he was not wearing any glasses. Funny that number 5 doesn’t have his glasses on in this photo. I have worn them non stop since fifth grade. Kit is little heavier than he was back then and I am a little lighter but then he’s the head chef at a fancy country club in the Hamptons and my family can’t gain weight. He brought some fresh Long Island Bay scallops and sautéed them as an appetizer and reminded me that we were both dancers in the high school musical. I had forgotten about that but I was stuck by how much our personalities and goofy interactions were exactly the same as they were back then.
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