Mike Allen stopped by with a 1966 recording of his band, The Realm, from a Fine Recording Studios 45 rpm. Mike’s vocal was as soulful back then as he is today. He was wearing his A.K.O.S. (A King Of Soul) hat as we spoke. He threw a couple of live songs on the cd from a later band, Lake Road, playing live at the Dictionary in Webster in 1968. Mike sounds incredibly soulful at 16.
He noticed Peggi’s mom’s walker in our office and we explained that we were planning to take it back beacuse one of the handles broke. He took a look at it and directed us through the repair. We lost an Allen wrench on our camoflauged carpet during the operation but Mike eventually found it.
Peggi helped me hang the second half of my Crime Face Paintings at the Printing and Book Arts Center in the old firehouse on Monroe Avenue. She gave a twenty foot high wall a fresh coat of white paint. This is an awkward space with old printing equipment scattered throughout the room but the paintings look pretty good. Still want to fool with the lights some more before the opening on Friday. Mitch Cohen, who runs this place, has a nice sound system but there’s no jack for my iPod so I might have to truck something over there.
We finished hanging in time to stop in at the Little for the last few songs of AMP (Alex, Mick, Peter). They sounded great. Jan Cuminale was there. She went out to her car to get a gift that she was going to drop of around Christmas, before she hurt her knee. It was two tree ornaments of of cross country skiers. The arm on the woman was broken off but they look just like Peggi and I in our cross country dreams, all smilely in space age blue and white outfits. We love them. Might find a place for them year round.
I need to provide beverages for my opening Part II on Friday and I was thinking that Genny beer would go perfectly with the Crime Faces. I checked the price at Wegmans and then went next door to Walgreens. I found out they didn’t carry alcohol so I headed down the road to Walmart. They were so busy that I couldn’t find an empty shopping cart other than ones that had a little car attached to it for your kid to ride in. The beer section was about a mile back and they didn’t carry Genny.
Peggi’s birthday is coming up so I thought I would look for a book. I wandered around the oversized store until it dawned on me that books and Walmart don’t exactly go together. I found an English speaking clerk and she directed me to the book section with BestSellers (about seven of the top ten) and romance novels. Wegmans supermarket has more books than Walmart.
I took a photo of the logo on the way out. Is this a new logo for these guys? I don’t get here very often. It occured to me that Wegmans, Walgreens and Walmart all have the same logo now.
Vincent Gallo from Buffalo ’66 in NYC subway liquor ad
Somebody told me you’re not supposed to take photos in New York City’s subways but I do it anyway. Hey, I’m from out of town. Peggi and I really liked Buffalo “66 with Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Anjelica Huston, Mickey Rourke and Buffalo’s own Vincent Gallo (on right above). We made a mental note to put this on our Netflix list.
Women reading in front of Pipilotti Rist videoinstallation at MoMA
The survey of Marlene Dumas’s work at MoMA was an absolute sensation. I loved it! You have until February 16th to see it for yourself. I was like a kid in a giant candy store as we moved through the show. I didn’t want to make decisions on the work because I didn’t want to leave it. I kept going back to rooms I had already seen so the show wouldn’t come to an end.
I hardly ever take the headsets or those talking stick voice-over things around with me in a gallery. They distract and annoy me. But I caught a sample when I was standing too close to someone and it was Dumas’ voice on the thing. Peggi asked in the museum store if they had the narration on a cd and the clerk told her it was a free download at the iTunes store. I plan to do a personal tour with Marlene and the book back at home.
The Modern has a series entitled, “Artist’s Choice” where they invite artists to curate a show. The artist picks work from the museum’s collection that he or she likes. I could easily have spent the rest of my MoMA time with the Dumas show but Scott McCarney had recommended this so we had to do it. The Brazilian photographer, Vik Muniz, arranged his show in a linear pattern along the walls of two rooms. None of the work had identification tags although some of it was easily recognizable like Duchamp’s snow shovel, Picasso’s cardboard guitar and Joesph Buey’s wool suit. We snaked along with the crowd as if we were on a moving sidewalk. Each piece was related to the previous and the next and we were completely absorbed in the dialog when we heard a loud crash behind us followed by a woman’s voice shouting, “Jesus Christ!”
We instinctively moved toward the action. A guard was picking up the Plexiglas case that housed a work we had just studied. It was one of the more irreverent pieces in the show, a wrinkled up piece of paper by Martin Creed called, “Work #301 and it was part of a rock, paper, scissors combo that Muniz had arranged. An older couple stood by sheepishly, the man who knocked the case over with his bag and the woman who chose that opportunity to publicly berate her husband.
Peggi and I were with Duane Sherwood and we had hooked up with my brother, Mark, at the museum. The four of us were studying the case, which was now cracked, and marveling at the new location of the wad of paper. It was up against the side of the case and you could see a little gob of clear glue in the center of the bottom panel where the paper used to sit.
A women guard behind us let her frustrations out by repeating to all those nearby, “People have to watch where they’re going. It could have been worse. He could have tripped over that rock down there (she pointed to another work in the show that sat on the floor). People have to watch where they’re going.”
The chief security guard came briskly around the corner with a walkie-talkie in is hand. He was sporting a really bad hair piece and it became the center of attention for us. He studied the crumpled up piece of paper and said, “Jesus Christ!”
This theater of the absurd completely overshadowed the show. I don’t even remember finishing it.
