PopWars

I check the temperature in seven locations with my iPod weather app. Rochester (where we live), Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla (where we traveled), New York, LA, San Francisco, Paradox NY (where we have friends) and Huntsville, Canada (where we camped last year). It is not often the case that Rochester is the warmest but today it is. So there.

I work under the premise that it is possible to become a better artist by looking at Beckmann and Guston and Matisse and Rouault and Bruegal. And by extension it is possible to become a better musician by listening to Sun Ra, Miles, Ornette and Dolphy even though I never practice. I may be deluding myself but it is a heck of a ride.

The old world image of the parish priest as someone who you saw on the street and not just behind the alter, someone who came in to your home and laughed, who brought you books that didn’t have anything to do with religion but most of all someone who your parents respected and turned to for guidence when they wrestled with bone-headed dogma, manifested itself in “Bill” Shannon, as my parents called him. A life long academic as well as a counselor, he championed the work of the in-house rebel and Trappist monk Thomas Merton who showed how we can practice true contemplation in everyday life.

Father Shannon died over the weekend, the day after the old feast day of Saint Paul of the Cross, the Italian mystic and my namesake because I was born on that day. I say “old” feast day because the last pope named so many new saints, more than all of the popes in history combined, that he had to rearrange the calendar to work in his new rotation. I still have the relic of Saint Paul, a tiny charred chip of something, that Father Shannon bought for me on a trip to Italy. When late night conversations turn to religion I dig it out and proudly show it off. I understand he truly believed the church could change so he worked within toward that effort. I hope he was right.

When we were in Spain years ago we did a bit of the famous Camino de Santiago, a religious pilgramage across the top part of of the country. We did our stretch in a rented car, passing hundreds of people who were doing it the old fashioned way on foot. I felt the same guilty twinge this weekend when we drove down the east side of Seneca Lake and then back up the western side. The Seneca7 relay race was the same day so we passed runners, each from a group of 7, as they ran the 77.7 circumference of the lake in the same direction as us.

The exaggerated gestures of German Expressionism are some of the most exciting art of all time so I planned to celebrate my birthday surrounded by works from the “Age of Discontent” at the Johnson Museum on Cornell’s campus. Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff are all there but Beckmann steals the show here with his intense, jam-packed compositions of people at home, in concert halls, taverns, strip clubs and opium dens. And how about this chimney sweep?

An added bonus at the Johnson is the “Witness: 20th-Century Photographic Images from the Collection of Gary and Ellen Davis” show with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and a disturbing “Bravo 20″ photo of a bomb crater by Richard Misrach. Bravo 20 was the name the U.S. Navy gave their illegal bombing exercises in the American west on a site the Native Americans called the “Source of Creation.” Coming back from Ithaca you pass 9,500-acres of land between Seneca and Cayuga lakes, the old “Seneca Ordnance Depot”, that is still fenced in and rather imposing except for the beautiful white deer and I couldn’t help but think of Misrach’s photo.

The Finger Lakes region is gods’ country, a wild mix of Indian reservations, Mennonite communities, mobil homes, luxurious second homes ringing the lakes and hundreds of vineyards catering to the stretch limo hoards. We whizzed by a sign mounted on someone’s mailbox that read “God’s Judgement Will Come” and then passed under a giant electronic sign on the NYS thruway that read, ” No Texting While Driving.” Peggi said, “Didn’t New York State just text us?”

Vinyl does sound better even when it’s an mp3 file made from a 45 from 1967 and especially when the song is by The Creation.

In my reading the newest release from MX-80′s Bruce Anderson and Rich Stim, the heroic “Bar Stool Walker” nods a few times to Rochester’s Margaret Explosion. The music is lyric free, there are songs called “Happy Hour“, a video shot on the Golden Gate Bridge and “Tall Boy” and they have a clumsy drummer.

Bar Stool Walker is a multilayered project and I can’t say for sure that this is the case but we haven’t found any sax in there yet. Rich Stim taught Peggi to play sax. Her first song was “Hava Nagila”. Rich Stim wrote “So Hard“, a popular Personal Effects song.

Many of the songs on Bar Stool Walker are already fully realized videos but it looks like we will have to wait a bit for the luscious Beach Boy cover “The Warmth of the Sun.”
Happy Hour
Calcutta Cutaway
Smoky
The Unsuspected
Major Pipe
The Bridge
Paper Hat
Hodaddy Humanoid
Tall Boy
The Warmth of the Sun
Bar Stool Walker

The Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, defines filmmaking as sculpting In time. “The Sacrifice” is a magnificent sculpture. We spent three nights with the movie, watching it and the extras a few times. Tarkovsky says an artist doesn’t look for a subject, “the subject grows within the artist.” This film is so beautiful that it hardly matters that the story is about Armageddon.

Police find eye witness information some of the least reliable. People see what they want to see or what they have been taught to see rather than what is there. We lose our ability to see at a very early age. The peak period for most kids’ art is around age five. Relearning to see is huge project but worth pursuing.

One of our neighbors still has their Irish flag up from Saint Patricks Day and some others fly a Puerto Rican flag but I had never seen a 9-11 flag until I spotted this one flying under an American flag on Culver Road yesterday. I googled “9-11 flag” online and didn’t see anything like it so maybe it’s homemade. The towers are kind of short. My mom made a peace flag back in the sixties and we flew it out front until someone stole it. We always suspected it was the youngest son of one of the neighbors. His mom had called my mom and asked “How dare you fly a peace flag when my (oldest) son is fighting in Viet Nam?” Patriotism comes in all stripes.

Peggi was telling me she stopped at a light behind a pickup with two NRA stickers in the window and a bumper sticker that read, “If the earth is your mother I walk on your mother.” That goes beyond patriotism’s borders. As the light turned he blew smoke out the window.

Coming back from the Margaret Explosion gig at High Falls last night we pulled up next to a car that was cranking’ the tunes. I looked over and it was white haired dude with a baseball cap on and he was bobbing his whole body with the music. I rolled down my window to hear what he was playing and it was Ozzie “goin’ off the rails on the crazy train.”