PopWars

We flew Delta but I’ll bet all airlines share a similar game plan in their race to the bottom. They took our bottled water at the gate and gave us a short lecture for having it in our bag. Bottled is $4.50 at the concession stand on the other side of the gate. There is a charge for the disposable headphones and the monitor on the back of the seat in front of us works fine when they’re showing you ads for Lincoln Continental and Coca Cola but you have to swipe your credit card for movies and special programing. The plane is equipped with WiFi but it costs $12.95 for the flight. We paid $31 for two sandwiches and a drink and they wouldn’t take cash. Tiny bags of salty peanuts are free, just like in bars where they want you buy more drinks, but on our flight the attendant announced “we were traveling with a passenger who is highly allergic to peanuts so in order to ensure that passenger has a safe trip we will not be serving peanuts.”

My nephew is considering a move to New York to continue making his top tier chef inroads. We asked if he could handle real weather and he said it was a concern. LA is unreal. You forget. My sister-in-law said, “If I lived in Seattle or a place like that I would kill myself.” That is SAD or seasonal affect disorder in a nutshell. I’m a minor key kinda guy so I don’t even notice when its cloudy. If fact I found it hard to take photos in LA because there is too damn much sun. You need a polarizing lens to minimize all that glare. My skin gets so dry out here that my feet pop open and wearing a hat and all that sun screen in eighty degree weather is whacky. But I do love LA and I was sad to leave.

I took my Nikon P7000, a point and shoot that David Pogue described as “like carrying a brick in your pocket”, out to the UPS Store yesterday to have Nikon repair the lens cover again. It is less than a year old and it spent a full month at the Nikon plant in New Jersey about five months ago when they repaired this problem for the first time. Little black blades spin open to uncover the lens when you push the power button but over time they only open part way and you wind up with Lomo style photos. I have the camera in my pocket at all times and feel naked without it. Maybe I should wait for it to return and put it on eBay.

Our big garage sale was a real eye opener to the underground economy. The dealers who stormed the gates in the two hours before the sale began and the Craigslist “Curb Alert” responders at the end of the sale are the unseen American worker bees. And of course the casual garage sailors are the backbone of economy. My brother-in-law sold our old 8-tracks on eBay.

We were too exhausted after the sale to fully appreciate our neighbor, Rick Simpson’s, performance art. All our neighbors had watched us fuss with the boxes of stuff in our garage for weeks leading up to the sale and little did we know Rick was hatching this plan to bring us back to earth, clown style. He is a professional clown after all so while we manned the tables in Alice and Julio’s driveway Rick filled our empty garage with his stuff, a boat, lawnmower, bicycles and a couple stacks of old tires. When we popped the door that night we were stunned!

I spotted two giant puffballs down in the woods while riding by on my bicycle and mentioned them to Shelley when I got back to the house. I knew she knows her mushrooms. They have been eating mushrooms all summer up in Adirondacks. We hiked down across the creek and over to where I had seen them but they were a little past prime. We spotted five or six different varieties along the way but nothing for dinner. I feel better getting my mushrooms from Wegmans.

How this all fits together, I’m not sure. Maybe it doesn’t. We decided to eat out tonight but we wanted to go somewhere close. There’s Osteria overlooking the lake and Shamrock Jack’s and Churi’s Thai food or in the other direction Monte Alban or the new Puerto Rican spot or Pasta Villa. Stop. The citadel of Italian food in Rochester with the dining room frozen in in 1975 with the Ramon Santiago prints on the wall and mirror trim and marble wallpaper with two loud air conditioners cranking. We’re there. Gnocchi with greens and beans and Chicken Picata, Chianti, Dean Martin music, the painting in the bar of the Guido family owners!

On the way home we got stuck at the intersection on Culver where the owner has a couple of pressure treated picnic tables that he is trying to sell for 175 bucks each. This place is a marvel of whacked out tackiness, an American flag on the pole, a circular driveway with at least three cars in it at all times including a shiny black, Chevy 4-door Silverado pick up truck, died black wood chips in the circle and potted marigolds with an angel statue holding out an empty bowl, a deck on the front of the house with an umbrella table. Is it any wonder they have teenage age son running around with a trench coat and long died black hair in the middle of summer?

I almost forgot I had a blog going here. Just as it should be. With vacation and jazz fest chalked off I reached my hand in the job jar and came up with a good one.

I spend most nights painting in the basement and it is my favorite room of the house. I like the Adirondack siding that came with the walls down there (our cat does too and uses it as a giant scratching post) but I want more white down there at least on the wall I face. So I bought some 4×8 sheets of white panel board from Home Depot and then framed in the wall so I can cover the fireplace opening. The sheets were tough to hang. Peggi and I were wrestling with them when Julio stopped by. He pitched in and had some great ideas for trimming the edges in order to cover our crude cuts.

I went to Home Depot first thing this morning and bought the trim for the top and bottom of my new wall but I didn’t go as far a julio had suggested and trim the sides. But then I changed my mind and decided to add the trim on the side so I went back to Home Depot to buy the last piece. You cut your own lengths over there and then pay by the foot. I came home and carefully cut the wrong angle on the new piece and I didn’t have any to spare so I went back to Home Depot for a third time. This is how it’s gonna be when I retire. I can see it all pretty clearly.

Duane was in town for a wedding so we hooked up on Friday evening for dinner (Steve Lippicott leftovers) and then headed out to gallery hop. I dropped Duane and Peggi off at Anderson Alley and I headed over to Kurt Feuerherm’s opening at the Philips Gallery on East Ave. Kurt was my painting mentor at Empire State but last I knew he was doing abstract landscapes. This was a nice little show called “Ancient Images: Fayum Inspired Portraits.” I said hi to Kurt and reminded him I was a student of his. I remember Kurt encouraging me to go bigger and more abstract and I did that for while. I just ripped apart a pile of those old paintings last summer but I kept the stretchers. Peter Monacelli was behind the snack table at the opening. Pete taught drawing at MCC and has just retired. He’s a carpenter too and one hell of a drummer. He can make a snare drum with brushes sound like a whole kit. Turns out he went to Empire State as well and Kurt was his mentor. We finished up the evening wandering around the Hungerford building. That place was packed.

We printed the second color on the Margaret Explosion 45 sleeves on Saturday so now we’ll have to schedule a glue party. We’re planning to release it on Wednesday the 18th at our Little gig. We left the house with our earplugs thinking we’d check out SLT at a club on Monroe Avenue but the printing took forever. Actually the printing went pretty fast. It took us a few hours to get the registration right. In the end it was close enough for letterpress.

The temperature barely got in to the fifties today but it felt warm in the woods. Last year Spring came on like gangbusters so everything was in bloom at once and it was over before we knew it. This year it’s taking its time and that’s ok with me. We cut through the park to check on the magnolias. The pink ones are dropping, deep red ones are just starting to open and the yellow ones are still tucked in their fuzzy cocoons. The colors look more dramatic on cloudy days so quit yer complainin’.

I came to class unarmed last night. That is I only had a few small watercolor/drawings to show for the week. And of all nights to be so empty-handed! Our teacher, Fred, was a little late. He’s usually a little late and I’m always early. Punctuality is not one of my traits but painting is different. When he walked in I was only one in class. A lot of people were way late or just took the night off. I showed him the paintings on paper and we talked for quite a while. He liked one quite a bit and complimented me on my brush language but I had painted myself into a corner on another and it provided the perfect opportunity to rethink my process.

Fred characterized my overall approach as conservative, trying to get the proportions of the head right, the eyes the same size and adding an ear because the model has one or two, those sorts of things. He suggested I look for the characteristics I want to paint, in my case it’s always the expression, and paint that. Forget about the ordinary concerns, the mechanics, and go for the art. He offered an analogy I could grasp in the way jazz musicians play. Make a move and improvise on that, compliment it, amplify it, contrast it, provoke it. A dialog full of surprises. Add one mark at a time and keep them all in play like a juggler. He surmised that I get into trouble when paint something without confidence so I would be better off if I didn’t paint that which I am not confident about.

I’m getting so I can talk a good game.

You don’t have to be a drummer to like Toko Imports in Ithaca. The owner, Tom, carries hats and hammocks as well as congas, djembes, gongs and every type of percussion instrument imaginable. Peggi rattled a donkey skull with the teeth still in their sockets, a primitive Vibra-Slap.

I bought some brushes and commented on the huge leaves on the wall behind the counter. Tom confirmed that they were indeed real, locally grown leaves from some common plants. He told us that we knew what these leaves were and pulled the right answers from us by giving us well rehearsed clues. Sunflower, Burdock, Rhubarb and Horseradish. The woman from Holland who was standing next to us had never heard of Horseradish.

This Witch-hazel, along the road leading into Durand Eastman Park, is in full bloom now. Your nose detects it before your eyes but it but it is not as fragrant as the winter Witch-hazel which bloomed, like a miracle, up in the park in February. Still to come is the Witch-hazel that will blossom to much less fanfare in our back yard in the Fall. They remind me of Geri McCormick’s paintings.

Bill Jones asked for a little help moving his type making equipment around. The router, the band saw and every one of those big green woodworking machines are heavy. Bill makes wood type from oversized patterns. You can’t be around all this stuff without dreaming about type projects, signs or posters that you could put together with all these little wood pieces. I’m thinking about a letterpress cover for the upcoming Margaret Explosion single.

On the way over, a ten minute ride, I scanned the college radio band and found Matt & Kim’s “Silver Tiles” on WITR, Althea & Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking” on WRUR and Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” on WBER. I thought my iPod on shuffle was pretty good.