Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Ken Frank has returned from Puerto Rico, Bob Martin flies in this afternoon from Las Vegas. Four band members in one city! I just stepped outside. It’s a perfect day for the Margaret Explosion. 7:30 tonight at the Little Theater Café, free admission.
Listen to Margaret Explosion “Juggler” with Jack Schaefer on bass clarinet
Our neighbor emailed us that he has an overload of spinach, some of it wintered over and then then three rows that he planted in early March. He has also stated these new plants (above), some more spinach and some lettuce. We went down there with a shopping bag and we easily filled it without making a noticeable dent in the plants. And while we were there we planted two more rows of spinach and some cilantro.
Spinach, for me, will forever be associated with the superhuman strength the it gave Popeye. Our friend Bill needs his spinach now as the battles the cancer they found last week. We plan to make our favorite spinach dish for him, garbanzos con espinacas, and drop it off this afternoon.
from wiki — In every Popeye cartoon, the sailor is invariably put into what seems like a hopeless situation, upon which (usually after a beating), a can of spinach which he apparently regularly carries with him falls out from inside his shirt. Popeye immediately pops the can open and gulp the entire contents of it into his mouth, or sometimes sucks in the spinach through his corncob pipe. Upon swallowing the spinach, Popeye’s physical strength immediately becomes almost superhuman, and he is easily able to save the day (and very often rescue Olive Oyl from a dire situation).
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Mile Davis famously said, Do not fear mistakes – there are none. ” I like that but I like this quote better. “Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there.” ― Miles Davis
Remember the two tone pencil/ink erasers with the beveled ends that we used when we were kids? Have you tried to buy an ink eraser anywhere lately. It is next to impossible. I tried Walgreens in the School Supplies (my favorite section of any drug store). I tried Staples and then two art supply store until it became obvious that they don’t make them anymore. I realize it’s the last thing a paperless office needs but I need one to scrub some charcoal drawings. And I’m still trying to get used to this ‘no mistakes” concept.
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We still had some credit left on the gift card that Heather gave us for doing her web site so we stopped into Good Luck for dinner last night. Their red lentil, sweet potato soup is incredible so we ordered that again and then split shiitake mushroom, bok choy and red onion salad with barbecued trout and soy. It was as good as the best tapas we had in Spain but of course we weren’t surrounded by dozens of equally enticing options and there weren’t any giant hams hanging overhead and we weren’t standing at a bar with an assortment of interesting characters.
At some point I realized I had not transferred my wallet from my painting pants to my out-on-the-town pants so not only did I not have the gift card but I didn’t have our credit card either. Peggi felt pretty confident that she could recite our credit card number so we continued eating. I guess the pressure of coming up with the number when it really counts got to her and she transposed two of the groups of four numbers so it didn’t go through and they brought the manager out to our table. Peggi decided to call our neighbors. Rick was off doing his radio show. I had played horseshoes with him earlier in the day and he told us he was going to play a Margaret Explosion song in a juggling themed set with The Incredible String Band and Waylon Jennings. Monica gave us her credit card number and our debts were settled. We were off to Geva for a one woman show about the black experience. Other neighbors who both had the flu gave us their theater tickets. Mark Gage was in the lobby but we didn’t have time to chat. He seems to have slipped into Vapourspace.
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We walked up to the Lake Ontario this morning along the trail on the west side of Eastman Lake. A bicyclist whizzed by us, all suited up in bike drag and moving too fast for us to say anything like “Bikes aren’t allowed on trails in this park.” We used to walk over to Tryon Park when we lived in the city. It was a neglected county park at that time and still is really, even though the county has officially reopened it They created a parking lot and put up a sign with Maggie Brooks and Larry Staub’s names on it and someone has already shattered the plastic cover on the sign and the trails are littered with Hawaiian Punch cans but it is still beautiful in a apocalyptic sort of way. ” I found this comment about the park on the RocWiKi page – “When I was a kid (in the 80’s) my friends and I loved to take acid and wander around here at night. Great place to trip.—SavageHenry”.
The 82 acres overlook the basin of Irondequoit Bay and lowland valley that extends south through Ellison Park. Unlike other county parks there’s old car parts in the woods and the remains of old concrete structures and decaying drainage infrastructure. We came across this fallen tree and at first thought it was the work of a beaver but then realized it was the handiwork mountain bikers trying to clear the trail. The park is now a test site for trail biking, the prefered sport of overgrown boys. There are bare trails everywhere sometimes six feet away from one another with exposed roots from ancient trees running through the paths. I’m not sure how long this experiment will run but the way it’s going if we return here in ten years I would guess the undergrowth would be gone, trampled or just washed away, the trees will have fallen over and the place will be a barren rutty hillside. Perfect for mountain biking.
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The phantom Budweiser guy is back with a whole new look, the newly designed 24 ounce Budweiser cans. He dumped three of them in the his favorite, exact same spot in the last few days. I don’t really care for the new look. If they had asked me I would have suggested something clean with lots of white space or maybe red space and a bold retro looking crown icon. Certainly not the hideous bow tie if they they’re going after young kids.
I also came back with a golf ball that I found when we crossed the course. It must be left over from last year because they haven’t opened the course yet. A groundsman told us “maybe tomorrow.”
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San Francisco’s Kathryn Clark has some handmade quilts that are actually maps of neighborhoods with some of the highest foreclosure rates in the United States. She is one of four artists in Rochester Contemporary’s new show, “Work It” where four artists address labor and unemployment, an art topic even more dreary than crime faces.
Since the the recent art attack piece on 60 Minutes I’ve been thinking about the inescapable relationship between money and art. This weekend’s death of Thomas Kincaid, the “painter of light” who said that God guided his brush, was another interesting study. He’s regarded as the master of kitsch and genius of commercial marketing and had a signature Lazy Boy chair and a California housing tract designed after his painting. Joan Didion wrote “A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.”
It’s easy to knock the guy but I couldn’t paint those cozy little cottages. I might be able to crank off some of these Obama paintings though. That is, if my heart was in it.
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They really were better actors in the silent days. If you don’t believe me check out 1928 movie “The Passion of Joan of Arc”, “one of the greatest movies of all time” according to the Netflix envelope. The expressions on the actors faces are so over the top I kept wanting to pause the dvd and take a photo. Cindy Sherman could have shaped her whole career with this movie. No movie has ever effected me this way. I couldn’t wait to watch it again in the morning before the sun light steams into the room and wrecks the mood.
Joan is a heroine in France and a saint but in the fifteenth century her claims of divine guidance were met by the church hierarchy with a drawn out trial and death by burning at the stake. This movie portrays the leering old men of the cloth in devastating fashion as they challenge Joan on her manly dress and push for details on her vision of Saint Michael at one point asking “Was he naked?” They wish. And they couldn’t wait to pile into the torture room to exact a toll on nineteen year old Joan.
The poor church did not like the way they were portrayed and the movie was denounced, cut, and burned just like Joan was. So little has changed this movie could have been made today! Perfect fare for a Good Friday evening. I hesitate to mention that the entire movie is available on YouTube because you really should see the higher res Criterion Collection dvd.
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I have always wanted to have my own Sam Jones photo. I’ve admired his work for years and I was thrilled when he asked if he could use my camera to take a picture of his first Mac, a Macintosh Plus with a broken floppy drive.
Sam had taken me down to their basement where the old computer sits near the laundry tubs. I noted that the black and white screen is not any bigger than an iPad. Sam told me he pats it every time he goes down there to do his wash. His father had scanned a batch of Sam’s Polaroids and put a slideshow online years ago but I wasn’t able to find that link so we’ll have to make do with this one shot.
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We watched this red winged blackbird for quite a while. I even took a movie of it while it sat there in the sun drenched marsh surrounded by golden leftovers from last years invasive species. I tried to record it’s bird call but once I turned the camera on all I got was a few chirps. The bird seemed to sum up all of life somehow. A minor masterpiece.
The student run new music Eastman collective, Ossia, is performing Ruben Seroussi’s “Jazz… à propos de Matisse.” tonight at Kilbourn, 8pm. I have no idea what this piece will sound like but the title is intriguing.
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Fred Lipp altered my drawing last night by strategically placing a small piece of white paper on top of part of the drawing. His collection of black, white and mostly grey paper is his primary teaching tool and it is incredibley effective. You use your eyes to see what he is talking about. My father was standing nearby and questioned something Fred said. Fred snapped back, “Forget about logic. We’re talking graphic.”
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Don’t you hate it when someone makes a point of noting that no Photoshop was used in a photo. Who cares? The camera lies and that’s why we like it. I snapped a shot of a statue in the window of the Baobab Cultural Center and wound up with this magical composition full of reflections I didn’t see.
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I like to say “the only reason I have a blog is so I can understand the content management system well enough to do blogs or cms sites for other people.” When someone asks for a website I recommend WordPress which pretty much puts me out of business and that is use fine by me. Peggi just did a site for Heather and it’s been fun watching her populate it. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to put content on their own site through a simple browser interface. This is 2012 for cripes sake. I also like to say I have a blog to keep track of things. I’ve used to search box on this site many times in order to remember what I did when. And then there’s the ability to share things. It sure saves a lot of “what’s new” conversations.
I suppose FaceBook is enough for most people but I know a few people who’ve recently dumped their fb pages because the whole creepy over-sharingthing thing. My nephew dropped out of fb and has gone twitter crazy so I ca still keep tabs on him. He’s out in Hollywood now walking a fine line. Maybe some day I paint a portrait of him.
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This is where Spring comes from. We found the source. All that moist green stuff comes out of this low lying area in Spring Valley.
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There’s hardly ever a line a Wegmans. They like taking your money. Speaking of “like”, the like button in the sidebar of this page stopped working. Not during an upgrades or anything, it just just stopped working out of the blue. But I discovered that when I sign out of fb the counter begins working again and shows the 433 that have clicked. I tried updating the wp page with a plugging-in but it wanted to start counting from zero so I disabled the plug-in. Just like Sparky‘s site I have a broken counter.
Anyway back to the line at Wegman’s. I had enough time to scan the magazine covers at the check out. Men’s Health magazine, “Melt Your Gut.” Women’s Health magazine, “Sculpt A Butt That Defies Gravity.”
3 CommentsTwenty years ago Chris Schepp organized the first Infest, an all day concert with ten bands in the Olmstead designed Genesee Valley Park. Pete LaBonne put a band together for the affair and called it “Pete’s Rock Band.” Buffalo’s Bruce Eaton played bass and I played drums. I can’t remember who the other bands were but SLT must have been one of them because Matt Sabo, Pat Lowery and Marathon Mark can all be seen in the video footage we have. I used to have an “Infest” t-shirt and an “Infest” cassette but they’ve slipped away. We came across this vhs tape and Peggi edited a clip for YouTube.
Pete joins Margaret Explosion on piano Wednesday night at the Little Theater Café.
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Fred Lipp wanted me to look at this etching by Matisse, a drawing really, and now I want to look at it, over and over. It’s a portrait of Baudelaire and, wow, does it look simple. Except that every line is absolutely perfect. None of the lines touch each other and they are all pretty much the same weight. They float in space while decribing physical form with supremely confident expression. There is so much volume in here and not one false move. You want to take each lines’ journey.
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With tree blossoms a full month ahead of schedule in this part of the country farmers are concerned that a cold snap could damage this year’s fruit crop. That would be a shame but it hard to find fault with this gorgeous weather. Some people say we’l be punished for this. My father say’s we’ve earned it. Shelley is upset because the nights have not been cold enough for the sap to flow. She has given up on syruping this year.
I’m hoping this will be the year when the lilacs will have come and gone by the time the officially announced celebration begins.
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We renewed our passports today. I say “today” but it took us the better part of the week to get the damn things off. You can’t just go downtown and do it face to face with a county employee anymore. We had to print out a form from the government’s site that included a bar code that “must be legible”. Legible bar codes are impossible to do on an inkjet printer so we made a trip to the library for that phase.
Our laser printer bit the dust. If I could figure out how to recycle the damn thing it would be gone but it’s still sitting in the corner next to me. It served us well, a 660 dpi HP LaserJet that we bought to do early desktop publishing work for Lawyers Co-operative Publishing back in the day. The oldest company in Rochester for a while, West Group bought them and then Reuters bought West Group. We used to layout law books, print the pages out and then they would shoot film negs from our print outs. Not very creative but cutting edge production in the dark ages.
You would think in 2012 you would be able to upload a passport photo the same way you put a photo on FaceBook and fill out the passport forms electronically instead of wrestling with all this old technology. We have three inkjet printers, ones that came free with computers. “Free” with outrageously priced toner cartridge replacements. Our Canon S9000 is giving us an “Unknown Error”. Where do you go to figure that one out? So we printed our 2×2 inch passport photos on our our Epson. We’ve really moved beyond printing and hardly do any of it anymore. I can’t understand why anyone would print a photo anymore. They look so much better on a monitor. So we loaded the coated paper upside down and got the other worldly looking photos above.
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I’m thinking about doing a drawing of Florida’s Trayvon Martin in his hood.
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