Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Since we play about once a week and don’t usually do a song more than once we have a lot songs in the kitty. We had this idea to get one hundred downloads up on our site site by Christmas but that took some doing. We spent the last week listening to things like “Prom Night 2” from a few years ago and now retitled “Submarine Races.” And this afternoon at about four o’clock we uploaded the hundredth song.
Choose from 100 songs to download here.
Listen to Submarine Races by Margaret Explosion.
I am anxious to get back to painting but I’m digging charcoal. I’ve been drawing with it for the past few months and really having a good time. Same subject matter (as if it it matters) but more freedom. If I get off to a bad start I can always crumple the thing and start over but I am enjoying the paper trail. That is I like it when I see the struggle. That’s why they call it drawing. It’s messy as hell. This is the way my work table looks.
3 Comments
I think we might have walked in on somebody’s play at the top of the big luge hill in Durand Eastman. The lighting was so dramatic and the trees were posed so theatrically. We just kind of stood there. It was a slow moving play but it didn’t last long.
Leave a comment
The First Friday Gallery hop gets bigger every month, so big I heard talk last night of venues switching to the second Friday of the month. Places that don’t have any real gallery space at all are jumping on the bandwagon. How would you like to have your art featured on a bright yellow wall on the down ramp at the Record Archive? Only Frank DeBlase could pull that one off. We checked out a few of these not-really-an-art-space shows last night. Geri McCormick had some beautiful letterpress prints in a show at Joe Bean on University. We had never been to this coffee bar, a real bar format but without the alcohol. They roast their own Fair Trade beans and prepare each cup to order, your choice of coffee and brew method. We bought a bag of beans to take home. It took me about a half hour to get the bag open but the coffee was delicious.
Next stop was Jembetat on Park Avenue where Heather Erwin was holding court with her Barbara Kruger meets Russian constructivist prints. I had my iPod Touch with me but was afraid to whip it out because of the rather hostile “Please . . . No Laptop or WiFi use. Please refrain from cell phone use.” signs. Meanwhile the owner was plopped on the couch cruising fb on his smart phone. I wanted to check the First Friday site to see what else was happening. Turns out we missed Pete Monacelli’s “Thoughtful Influences” show at the Philips gallery. We saw Pete at our last stop, the annual Rochester Contemporary Members Show. We talked art for a bit but mostly drums and the art of playing minimally.
I was so happy to see that Alice de Mauriac’s painting, “Interval Before The Brink” (detail shown above, click photo for full painting), won the Record Archive Award at RoCo. It was the strongest, most beautiful piece in the room. If only the MAG would feature her work in one of their biennials of regional artists. She has many more where this came from.
Leave a comment
Our neighbor, Monica, was telling us that there have been some beautiful sunrises lately. We wouldn’t know, but the sunsets have been sensational. I caught this shot while stopped at the light at Culver at Ridge. The golden hour was coming on. Does anybody remember Suburban Hair when it was on this corner? I usually skip the flu shot thing.
2 Comments
I spotted this orange glove in the middle of Culver Road and had to turn around and grab a shot. It might make a good Margaret Explosion cover. Pete LaBonne played with us at the Memorial Art Gallery opening for “Extreme Materials” and maybe one of those tracks will get his graphic..
1 Comment
I am going to miss Dr. Cupolo or “Rocky” as other dentists call him. He retired this summer but his reputation lives on in his son’s restaurant which is named after my dentist.
I shopped around for a new dentist and was taking recommendations from anyone I talked to but decided to go back to the dentist I had in high school when I lived out in Webster. I even dated the receptionist while I was there. Dr. Miraglia is no longer practicing but his son (with the same name) has taken over the practice. I had my first appointment today and liked him quite a bit.
My Irish teeth are not as bad as Shane MacGowan’s but nothing like the fake teeth on the dentist’s counter either. We just watched a Pogue’s documentary the other night. Kind of hard to watch the alcohol ravaged Shane but I came away loving the Pogues more than ever.
I left the dentist and found an art supply store right in the village near the four corners. I needed some spray fixative for my charcoal drawings and I found one here. This was a cool little town back in the day. Bowman’s, The Candy Kitchen and Utz’s Bakery are all gone but Burkes is still there and the shoe repair. The shoe repairman also drove our school bus while he smoked cigarettes and swore at the kids. There was no music store back then but there is now. I found a nice 22 inch Zildjin K Custom Dark Ride cymbal. It was 349 bucks so left it right where I found it. I stopped in Barry’s Old School Café and Pub for a cup of coffee and found out they just opened a few weeks ago. This place on the four corners was a gas station when I was last there.
I was in fifth grade when my family moved out of the city. Webster was a charming little village surrounded by farmland and woods. They’ve torn up the town in rampant overdevelopment but the village is still pretty cool.
Leave a comment
Just about any day is a good day to walk around the old water tanks in Washington Grove up on Cobbs Hill. They are constantly evolving. In fact we interrupted a guy who was painting over an already densely covered section when we stopped by last week. Bill Jones did a short movie while walking around one of the tanks about ten years ago and the work shown in it is long gone.
Leave a comment
Three days in a row with temperatures in the sixties. We headed down to the lake and crossed the seasonal swing bridge that connects Culver Road to Lake Road in Webster. This tiny strip of land between Irondequoit Bay and the lake used to have houses on both sides of the road but quite a few on the north side were washed away years ago before they got he lake levels under control. The Army Corp shored it up with a pile of rocks and the town of Webster turned it into a nice little park. Next time we come down here we’ll bring some sandwiches.
A permanent bridge was planned for this spot but the money for the project was diverted to San Francisco after their earthquake and we’re stuck with this winter only solution. If anybody asks I’m all for keeping the bridge open all year. And while we’re at it let’s keep daylight savings on all year.
2 Comments
I helped my nephew manage his iTunes library before Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. He was getting duplicates of the stuff he downloaded and running out of hard disc space on his netbook. Seems everyone has a glut of music. He told me I should get “Spotify” so I installed that this morning.
There was a review of the Stones remastered “Some Girls” lp in the paper. It comes with an album’s worth of extra tracks. I don’t have a digital copy the original so I previewed the new tracks at the iTunes store and thought about buying the package but Mick redid his vocals on some tracks just like he did with the “Exile” outtakes and that pisses me off. That really should be illegal. Keith does a Waylon Jennings song but that just made me want to hear the original. I decided not to buy now.
I was reading Sasha Frere-Jones’s column in the New Yorker on the Russian dj, “Oneohtrix Point Never” and that sounded pretty interesting so I checked that out at the store but didn’t buy anything.
We watched the Gram Parsons documentary the other night. Kieth was in there too, scolding Gram for ODing. I never really caught on to Gram Parsons but I liked the Byrds. They shouldn’t have included the vintage clips of George Jones and Merle Haggard in this movie. That sort of put Gram in his place too.
Leave a comment
Ronny Stackman, “Your Selector”, has been spinning roots reggae forty-fives in the upstairs lounge at Abilene on Wednesday nights for a few months now. He knows how to work a room extending the format by playing both sides of a single and dubbing it up on top. Last night he was joined by Jon Nugent on sax and they sounded amazing. If you thought the sax line in Errol Dunkley’s “Black Cinderella” was cool you have to hear what Jon can add to a scratchy dub reggae tune. Prince Far I was in the house along with Toots & The Maytals. Margaret Explosion plays Wednesday nights so we have a bit of a conflict but this is the coolest spot in town.
Our iPod treated us right on the way home. I swear “shuffle” knows the situation and knocks your socks off with random surprises. “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down” took us from downtown to the crib.
1 Comment
I finished this guy last night, another face from Crimestoppers page in our paper. I’ve been painting these guys for quite a while. I used to paint directly from the tiny pictures and then I started scanning them, blowing them up and painting from print outs. It was a little easier to paint from a bigger source but the quality didn’t improve any. And then I discovered the police were putting the files online at a decent size with no dot pattern! I downloaded the pdfs for a few months and worked from those. I just checked the site for the new flier and it’s a tiny .gif file so I called their hotline and asked the officer if there was any way to get a bigger file. He had me call an Officer Renee but her message said she’d be out of the office until after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theater Café tonight – 7:30-9:30
People used to identify themselves when they called you but they don’t do that anymore because everyone has cell phones and they know who’s calling before they say hello. In fact people don’t even say hello any more they just start talking. Well we don’t have a cellphone and I’m often completely thrown as to who I’m talking to. Someone will prattle on about something while I’m running through my mental rolladex trying to figure out who the voice is. Is it work related or a friendly? No big deal. I’m just saying.
The phone rang during dinner the other night and our nephew was laughing at the quaintness of the answering machine on our land line and that led to a discussion of the old full size cassette answering machine that we had and how we’d record over and over the tapes until they were layered bits and pieces of voices from the past. I set a few of them aside and went downstairs to check to see if I could put my hands on them. I found a cassette deck and put on a white label advance copy of Colorblind James’ “Why Should I Stand Up?” from 1991 that had been put into service.
Brad Fox called and started with a joke. “Why did the Siamese twins go to England?” No punchline. A snippet of Colorblinds’ “That’s Entertainment”, Deb calling from Massachusetts asking for help with her computer which was suddenly in a foreign language. Peggi’s mom letting us know she didn’t like the answering machine. A snippet of “Ride Board.” A wrong number where someone left a message for someone we’ve never heard of. Our nephew calling for help getting a stuck floppy out of an Mac SE. He’s majoring in artificial intelligence today. Another snippet of “Ride Board.” And plenty of people complaining about the quality of our outgoing message which as I remember had either James Brown or Miles Davis blasting in the background.
Sometimes the machine would record our part of a conversation if we failed to pick up the phone in time. So we heard Steve Black from Singapore answering a call from Steve Hoy while we were out somewhere. Directions to Jeff and Mary Kaye’s house for the first time! And then Peggi’s dad and Gary Bennet calling from beyond the grave. Are people saving their cellphone messages these days? This stuff is priceless.
Leave a comment
For weeks we’ve been speculating about what the new building at Culver and Norton might be. They tore down the tuxedo shop and dry cleaners and threw up a wooden building in matter of weeks. I figured it had to be a chain store of some sort because the various crews have been in and out of here so fast. They were putting a brick knee wall around the front sides on Sunday when we stopped in at the QuikFill across the street. Peggi asked the gas attendent what the new building was going to be and found out it will be a Dunkin’ Donuts. That will probably be a good thing for Palermo’s across the street, better than the new smoke-shop that opened next door.
While I was taking this photo one of the brick masons shouted, “What are you doing?’ I kept my eye on my camera and said, “I’m taking a photo.” He didn’t hear me and shouted again, “What are you doing?” I turned my head toward him and yelled, “What does it look like? I’m taking a photo” and I hurried back to our car.
Leave a comment
I started the day by donating $5 to keep Wikipedia free. It didn’t quite make sense (Donate To Keep Wikipedia Free) but I went for it. We were only trying to learn something about Ignatius of Loyola who I was confusing with Saint Francis Xavier who was only a student of Saint and not the founder of the Jesuits. We were talking about the northeast corner of Spain near the border with France where there is some sort of Romanesque monastery in the mountains and planning our next trip to Spain.
We made the rounds at the Public Market and ran into Richard from Abilene. We apologized for not not making it out more often. I don’t know what our problem is. Maybe when Bobbie Henri does their Christmas show. We bought a few sandwiches at Flour City Bakery and took them over to Washington Square Park where we sat on in the sun on the steps of the war monument, a gentle nod of sololdarity to OWS.
Leave a comment
Our nephew is taking the train up to hang out for the weekend. He asked if we needed anything from NYC and I emailed back, “more culture.” As if the city has a lock on that sort of hint. It does have more people.
This morning’s paper had an article about the newly proposed Rochester train station. The architects drawing shows a building that looks quite a bit like the old station, the one the city tore down in 1965 in middle of a destructive urban renewal rampage. That old one was actually the third Rochester train station. It was designed by Claude Bragdon and it was a showpiece of art and culture.
Leave a comment
When I was in Indiana playing in a C&W band we did this gig on a flatbed truck by a big barn way out in the country. It was a coon hunting convention where hunters partied til dark and then followed their dogs into the woods to “tree” raccoons. Last weekend Margaret Explosion played a a “Chili Cook-Off” at the Genesee Center for the Arts and it was almost as strange. We set up in the pottery room and Ken stood in a doorway with his stand up bass. The sound was great though and I think we got a good recording.
After our set we sampled some vegetarian white chiIi from Mex Restaurant and some homemade beer from Three Heads Brewery and then bought a two dollar raffle ticket which proved to be the winning ticket for a pound of Starbucks Antigua coffee. Photographer David Johnson has a great show in the Community Darkroom Space. He studied with Ansel Adams and took this picture of a bass player on his back at the Primalon Ballroom on Fillmore Street in the 1950. I’ve always been partial to 1950 for some reason, something to do with a wide eyed departure from a warm and cozy spot.
1 Comment
We helped Leo’s relatives clean out his old place over the weekend. Another neighbor pitched in as well and he described the scene as something from the show, “Hoarders.” Leo used to pick junk up from the curb and squirrel it away. He picked stuff out of our trash and we laughed as we threw the same stuff away again this weekend. Our neighbors on the other side did a little dumpster diving this morning and we joined in. I found a few choice pieces of scrap metal for Sparky and then this afternoon WM hauled the dumpster away.
Note to self: Start divesting while you still have your marbles.
1 Comment
Scott Regan held court in the Little Theater Café on Sunday night as he signed copies of his just released book of sketches of musicians playing live. Everyone knows Scott’s voice from his organic morning show on WRUR and anyone who regularly sees live music may have spotted him looking over his glasses as he creates these beautiful sketches. The show included a large pastel by Scott, the original art for the Colorblind James lp, “Why Should I Stand Up?” Jeff Spevak supplied the artful haikus and Scott’s wife, Sue, had a few nice drawings in there but the night belonged to Scott’s sketches. The café was more crowded than I have ever seen it, too packed to really see the art work and too loud to hear Jaffe at the piano but perfect for celebrating Scott’s work. Not all the sketches on the walls were included in the book and many from the book are not on the walls so you should really do both. Margaret Explosion made the wall. The one above, of Pete LaBonne on the grand piano, was missing in action.
The Polish Film Festival was in full swing in the theaters so we bought tickets to “The Mill & the Cross,” a film by Lech Majewski about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1564 masterpiece, “The Way to Calvary.” I have been a fan of his art since I saw a poster in the old Rochester Club Restaurant when they changed their name to Gerry’s and hired us to do a logo. No much, in the traditional sense, happens in the movie and it’s based on a book. I can’t imagine. But we were given an abundance to observe. Computer-generated effects and painted backdrops mixed with some astounding location shots and fantastic cinematography made us feel like we stepped inside one of these Bruegel marvels.
Leave a comment
A couple of days ago I posted a photo of the sculpture Ai Weiwei’s has in the courtyard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has been in the news and on my mind for weeks now. The Chinese Government put him in jail for 81 days recently and grilled him about his activism. They released him and ordered him to stay off Twitter. He refused and now they claim he owes $2.4 million in back taxes. The bill is due on Tuesday and he has collected a million so far, some of it tossed over the fence in front of his house by supporters. Ai Weiwei says he considers the aid a loan and he will repay it. His art is wrapped in activism and this is your chance to buy a piece from one of the world’s hottest artists. Fold a dollar bill into a paper airplane and send it over his fence.
Leave a comment
.gif){kind=link}
