PopWars

Used to be we had two painting sessions, “Fall” and “Spring” for lack of better descriptors. And then the Creative Workshop of the Memorial Art Gallery divided the Spring session in two which I guess you could call pre Easter and post Easter. They keep dropping weeks too so the Fall session starts later and finishes earlier and the Spring session doesn’t start until mid January and of course the price keeps inching up. But I try to block all that out.

I show up to confront painting issues and our painting teacher, Fred Lipp, is always ready to ratchet it up a notch. I know that I am a better painter than I was ten years ago and I know I have a long way to go. If I felt that Fred was not able to help me get better I would not be taking his class each week. The situation is pretty clear for me and the price is worth it. The interesting thing about all this is how Fred is always there like Sly Stone to take you higher.

Did anybody else think Sandra Bullock’s lipstick was too red last night? Nothing stopping Ms. Bigalow though. And that “This Is Your Life” section, actors told other actors what they liked about them in front of the whole world, was really creepy. I liked Jeff Bridges in the Fabulous Baker Boys but I wasn’t buying his his country thing. Of course I haven’t seen the movie so I’m only basing that assessment on his appearance at the Oscars. I miss the streakers. That guy holding up the “Text Dolphin to 44144″ sign was as close as we got to spontaneity. We haven’t seen any of the movies that were up except for Food Inc. We did put a few on our Netflix list today.

It was near fifty today and the snow will be gone soon so we’ll be able to clean up the mess in our street’s pool. We had a couple of trees come down with that heavy wet snow. Peggi and I are still the pool presidents for another few months so went down there today to take a closer look.

Ruth Kligman, the woman in Jackson Pollack’s 1950 Rocket 88 when he crashed, has joined Pollack in the great beyond. She was a painter too but she was more famous as an art groupie as she also had affairs with DeKooning and Kline. Franz Kline kind of steals her NYT obituary with this quote.

‘Art is my life,’ is my motto, ” Ms. Kligman wrote, and in an interview she once said that she knew better than many how hard such a life was. She recalled running into Kline at the Cedar bar and telling him that she had just finished what she thought was her best painting. He bought her a drink and told her, of the world: “They think it’s easy. They don’t know it’s like jumping off a 12-story building every day.”

Peggi dreamed she was a contestant on “Dancing With The Stars” and then woke up to “Reality 4D“. We have been behind in couple of big jobs and we can’t seem to put them behind us. You can’t really complain when you don’t have to set the alarm or drive to work but every once in a while you get roped into doing a job that wasn’t defined properly in the beginning. So the scope of the job grows while you’re doing it and the client feels entitled to unlimited rounds of revisions while you’re stuck with the price you quoted. Like I said, you can’t complain.

I starred at a reproduction of a Luc Tuymans painting last night for about twenty minutes. It’s called “Lamproom” and it is deceptively simple looking but rich in wonder. I would love to see the painting in person at SFMOMA where Tuymans has a retrospective but I don’t think I’ll be out there before May 2nd. I only have the book which I ordered from Amazon and I finally had a chance to spend some time with it last night. I flipped through the whole book and can’t say I like all of his work. In fact I only liked about ten percent of it but the paintings I like just knock me out. So maybe I will warm up to the rest and maybe I won’t. Some artists only hit home runs like 300 . . . I started to use a baseball analogy but I’m confused. When a hitter has a batting average of 300 that means he gets on 30 percent of the time, right? So why do they call it 300 and not 30? Anyway, if the guy has a 300 average he probably only hits a home run 3 percent of the time? And that’s considered really good. So Luc Tuymans is a great artist. It’s not easy to paint like he does even though his paintings can look tossed off.

We celebrated my father’s birthday tonight. I picked up some Nino’s pizza and Peggi’s mom and we sat around my parents table for most of the evening. My brother, who works for Xerox, argued that “print is not dead”. I told him I like paying my bills online. I can’t imagine printing another photo because they look so good on my monitor. We plan to order an iPad on March 12th when they start taking orders and I’m looking forward to canceling a few magazine subscriptions. But I still like art books.

We spotted Monica coming out of the woods with the dogs so we knew this snowwomanwas her handiwork when we came across this it in the middle of our ski path. The snow had started to melt yesterday and then it froze again today so it was quite slippery. I fell three times before getting off our property but we stuck with it and then really zipped along in the relatively flat woods behind our house. It was warm in the sunny spots and we spotted a chipmunk surveying the landscape. They hibernate all winter and breed first thing in the Spring. Come to think of it, maybe that snowwoman is breeding.

We had been buried in work, a brochure for the Cancer Institute, and unable to get out for the last two days. But today we walked out of here just like that dramatic scene in “Buñuel’s “Exterminating Angel” when the bourgeois party goers finally decide they are able to leave the house they have been holed up in for days. Well, it was almost that dramatic. There were plenty of fallen limbs in the woods as a result of the heavy snow we had over the weekend but the skiing was surprisingly good. We stopped along the path that follows the shoreline of Eastman Lake and I took this photo. This tree has been sticking out of the pond for years but it looked especially good to me today.

We’ve used a few different shopping carts over the years and Peggi has decided to give X-Cart a try on our newest project. She has chatted with and emailed the Russians that work for the company and they seem quite friendly. Not sure what that cold war was all about. You download and set up the software for free and you pay when you implement it. So far, so good.

Speaking of shopping carts – I grabbed one of the small ones over at Wegmans but I was shopping with two lists, one for us and one for Peggi’s mom. I filled the cart with Depends and Dr. Pepper. I wasn’t sure if the cashier could get all the groceries back in the cart so I apologized for filling up the buggy. Buggy? Where did that word come from? Another era and I was there.

Indiana had some fierce poison ivy. A girl I knew when I was going to school there got it so bad her eyes were swollen shut. When I was a kid I could pick it up and not get it but my body chemistry changed and I got it real good one year. We skied by this poison ivy voodoo like installation over the weekend. I would be afraid to even look at it in the summer. Our friend, Steve Hoy, told us poison ivy thrives where the earth has been tortured in some way. You see it on the side of roads where the highway department is continually cutting it back. It has a vengeful streak.

We sold two “Live Dive” cds to people in Germany in the last week. Can’t figure out what that is all about. I know Jack, who plays guitar with us often, loves Krautrock. Maybe they are returning the favor.

Kathy called this morning and asked how our weekend was. I said, “Really nice. A little bit of work and a little bit of skiing.” I sort of lied about the work part. We’re doing a big job for Kathy and except for a few hours we pretty much blew it off this weekend. She said “I don’t understand the skiing part and I don’t like snow.” Thought provoking comments to start the day. I don’t really think of it as skiing. Its just something different on your feet while you walk in the woods.

This weekend we drove to opposite ends of the county to ski and dine with friends. The groomed trails at Mendon Ponds on Saturday made it a lot more like skiing than walking. I now have a much clearer picture of our trudging style after watching people in spandex skate/ski/whiz by us. And the bushwhacking through deep snow and vines in the marshlands of Scotsville on Sunday was much closer to walking. Both were thoroughly enjoyable and I keep replaying the conversations we had over dinner about art and mindfulness.

We called the Eastman House to confirm that they were still having the opening for Roger Ballen’s photos on Friday night. The show went on but the heavy snow made for a small crowd. We had a delicious cup of hot cider, chatted with photographer, Brian Peterson, and dove into the show. I was looking forward to this show based on the few reproductions I had seen in the promo pieces (like the twins above) but the more we saw in the show the less I liked.

The Eastman’s website says, “Ballen creates visual ambiguities as universal metaphors of the human condition.” He forgoes a strictly documentary approach . . . collaborating directly with the subject to create the sculptures and drawings that appear in the photographs.” The arty wall drawings and staged positioning of slightly strange people left me feeling manipulated. I loved the square format black and whites but to me they they look better small online and they don’t hold up at two or three feet. And this collection which is billed as a retrospective of sorts has too much of the same thing. He has been compared to Diane Arbus and Arbus is always accused of manipulating her subjects but for me Arbus celebrates humanity while Ballen uses it as a prop.

We watched a Frank Lloyd Wright documentary last night and my favorite scene was the black and white footage of a Mike (cigarette smoking) Wallace interview where Frank’s says, “I put a capital ‘N’ on Nature. That’s my idea of God.” I would second that but skip the cap. It is absolutely beautiful in the woods today!

I love this expressive snowman. It is either singing an aria or asking “Is That All There Is?” which just happens to be my favorite song of all time. In fact if anyone ids taking notes I would like it to be played at my funeral, along with George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Eric Dolphy’s “Serene.” Everyone’s talking about the “Hurricane Blizzard” with “Heart Attack (heavy) Snow” so if I die out there in the driveway my affairs will be in order. I used Nolo’s “Willmaker” to to do the office business and I’m still trying to decide where my ashes should go.

Peggi’s mom is still going strong and with the help of an aid she was able to come out to see Margaret Explosion last night. We have been invited to dinner at our neighbor’s house tonight. We should be able to make it back up the hill even if we do get some old fashioned winter weather.

Listen to Margaret Explosion’s 56 second long song entitled “Entonic”
http://www.popwars.com/downloads/DanceTrance.mp3
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