Author: Paul

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Everything Is Connected

Everything is connected. It better be or else it would all fall apart.

We went to the Mercury Opera production of Don Giovani at the Eastman Theater. Peggi’s mom bought the tickets so we had great seats. The story is a pretty simple one about a pre AIDs cad who has an assistant with a black book of conquests, un mil y tres in España alone. He reminded me of this guy, Karl, who lived in my dorm at IU and sold pot. He drew notches on the wall for each of his scores. The music was nice and this was a 2 PM performance, but for some reason I kept falling asleep, maybe because it was nice.

We had dinner at Mario’s Via Abruzzi. Their grilled calamari is fantastic. Our waiter had just moved back to Rochester. He had been working as a techno DJ in LA. His family is from Milan and told us that techno was huge in Europe. He spins all vinyl which I thought was odd. I was thinking something like that would all be done on a laptop now.We finished the evening with a fire in the insert and “Fistful of Dollars” in the DVD drawer. We had just seen “Yojimbo” which this movie is based on so it was sort of disappointing. “For a Few Dollars More”, the follow-up to this movie was fantastic. Now there is an opera.

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If The Question Comes Up

I had this kid’s eye looking good. It captured perfectly the “oh god, what have I done look”, rolling back and not focused on anything but a thought. I stepped back to check it out and wondered if possibly the eye was too low on the face. I tried to talk myself out of it to no avail and so I scrubbed the whole thing out. I was reminded again of one of Fred Lipp’s rules for painting. Of course he has also said “show me a rule and I’ll show you that I can break it” but this rule is one you can almost bank on. “If the question comes up, the answer is almost always yes”.

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For The Love Of God

Edith Small “Skull” After Damien Hirst
Edith Small “Skull” After Damien Hirst

The one on the top is called “Skull” After Damien Hirst’s “For The Love Of God”. Bob Martin, our regular guitarist, was at a trade show in California so Phil Marshall from The Horse Lovers sat in with Margaret Explosion last night. The event, an art opening for the Edith Small retrospective, was really well attended.

We set up on a balcony overlooking the crowd and spotted Wendell Castle wandering around with his round glasses. It was a pretty swanky affair. Edith was a doll and her art is thoroughly enjoyable. We made the whole evening’s songs up on the spot and the crowd seemed to like it. Stephanie Aldersley asked us if we would like to play the upcoming opening at RoCo.

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Glass Half Full

4D work has slowed way down so I’ve been organizing our backup drives, writing some files to DVD and getting them off our computers and then I’ll install Leopard on two of our main machines and set up Time Machine. Finally a backup scheme that makes sense.

Peggi is doing the taxes. All this activity is something that should be covered by our regular billing as part of doing business but it doesn’t work that way. Maybe it will in the future. I am optimistic. Mike Deming told me, “You’re a glass half full kinda guy” and I guess I am for now.Margaret Explosion is playing an art opening for Edith Small at the Dyer Gallery of RIT and we start at 5 so we are making an early day of it in the office.

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Ice And Clouds

Arthur Dove "Fog Horns" from 1929
Arthur Dove “Fog Horns” from 1929

Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan wrote a song entitled “I’m in love with Arthur Dove.” Dove grew up in Geneva, New York and nearly starved to death as one of America’s first abstract painters. Alfred Stieglitz and Duncan Phillips championed his art. I love his work. I did a painting of him in my painters series. I like this quote from him, “Ideas are the only property worth having. Taxes are the penalty you pay for wanting things.”

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I Vote For The Ugly

It has taken us three sittings to work our way through “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” (El Bueno, el Feo y el Malo) and I’m still trying to come up with a good response to the voice over question it poses, “If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?”. If we are supposed to pick one of these three characters, I would vote for the Ugly (Eli Wallach). He steals every scene he is in and makes Clint Eastwood look silly.

Painting class started up again last night and there are only six people in Fred Lipp’s Advanced Painting class. I can’t figure out why more people don’t take this class. Peggi goes to her yoga class and that seems like a good alternative but what else would you be doing on a Tuesday night?

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Dear Diary

Sunflowers In Winter
Sunflowers In Winter

On the front page of our local paper yesterday there was a story about some remarks that either Hillary or Obama made about race. We couldn’t tell from the article who said what or why it was controversial. But the headline made it sound as if it was newsworthy. The article came from the Associated Press and it was probably so heavily edited by one of the few full time Gannett staffers that it came out incoherent.

Which brings me to the comment that Steve Hoy made on the “Send Us Your Problems” entry. Steve bailed me out when I was a freshman and we were roommates. I had a paper due the next morning and I was grumbling about it and Steve said, “Let me write it”. He banged it off and called it “Time, The Fourth Dimension”. I had my doubts but turned it in anyway and got an “A” along with a comment addressed to “Mr. Dodd” with an explanation point after it. And I work for a small company named 4D.

My nephew who is a senior in high school and one year younger than I was when Steve wrote that paper for me is in San Francisco for MacWorld. I’ve been following their adventures on his blog, The iLife. He and his friend got in line yesterday for today’s keynote address by Steve Jobs. They were first in line and were interviewed by Justine from iJustine.tv.

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Stumble On

I have noticed that the sloppier I get while painting, the better my painting looks. I don’t mean that the painting looks sloppy, it’s the floor around the easel. And I’m not aware that I am being sloppy until I look down. I drop paint and then step in it and walk around in it. I get paint on the handles of the brushes and then on my hands and my clothes. I wouldn’t think this is anything to aspire to. It is probably some sort of phase that I am going though. And speaking of phases, I feel as though I am stumbling along and proceeding as if that is a method. I don’t know exactly what to do next so I paint something, react to it, correct it by scraping it off or wiping it with a paper towel and then move on. My paintings look better to me and that is all that really counts.

Our friends and neighbors, Rick and Monica, invited us over for dinner last night. Monica made what she calls “comfort food”. The dish had biscuits and chicken and peas in a milky broth and it was delicious. I felt like we were back in Bloomington, Indiana having dinner at the Workingmans’ Cafe. After dinner we watched “Yo Soy Cuba”, a wild 1964 Russian made film about the Cuban Revolution. It reminded us of Sun Ra’s “Space Is The Place” with its unreal setting, exotic characters and otherworldly soundtrack.

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Not Easily Impressed

Peggi’s mom’s church had their monthly Jazz Worship this morning. Two of the band members are former students of Peggi’s and so Peggi joined her mom out there for the service. I stayed home and painted crime faces in the basement. I went to the church of Ornette Coleman. I kept running upstairs to tend the fire in our new insert. I stoked that thing and got the temperature up to 82 in the kitchen. It was probably near 90 in the living room. Peggi’s mom is always cold in our house and I wanted to knock her out with the heat. When Peggi walked in with her I asked if she was warm enough and she said, “Yes”. My mother-in-law is not easily impressed.

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Rat Race

Peggi dismantled the xmas tree while I read yesterday’s paper. I will take the tree out back and cut it up into little pieces to recycle it. I painted for about two hours and then headed out to rake leaves. Won’t have to do that again until next year. Wait a minute. It is next year.

We helped our neighbor split wood for about two hours and he let us borrow a Jean Renoir’s “Boudu, Saved From Drowning” to watch. It was remade as “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” with Nick Nolte and Bette Midler. He also invited us over to use their hot tub tonight while they are out. We will definitely take him up on that offer.

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Intellectual Property

Peggi is teleconferencing at a webinar meeting and we are planning on going out walking when she is done. We want to check out the damage in the woods from the seventy five mile an hour winds that we had the other day.

I’ve been Reading Rich Stim’s intellectual property blog and have become infected by the format. “Dear Rich, I have a question”, “I’m so glad you asked” followed by the concise answers. I want the whole world to work like this.

I would like to know why Google doesn’t follow links on photos. That is, the robots that Google sends out to catalog your web site have instructions to not index pages that are linked from a photo. In my case I have hundreds of pages with instructions to “click photo to advance”. The photos have the standard “a href=” link tags on them but Google blows them off. So if I have content on a page that you can get to only by clicking on a photo, then that content will never get indexed. I will redo those pages but I would like to know why it is that they don’t follow these links.

I wish Rich’s blog covered this territory.

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Low Expectations

After the Margaret Explosion gig last night, our bass player, Ken Frank, told me that he was going to bring his stand up bass again next week now that they have taken the holiday tree down. I guess there wasn’t enough room where we set up with the tree. I told him I never even noticed the tree. We still have ours up but I’ve stopped looking at it.

We got our fireplace insert installed today and I can’t stop looking at that. I thought my camera had gone haywire because when I took a photo and switched to review mode to check it out, it always showed the same photo from a few weeks ago. But I saved all my photos tonight and noticed that the number on the .jpg files had reached its limit of 9,999. It’s hard to believe I’ve taken that many photos. I certainly haven’t saved them all.

Bed & Breakfast near Ithaca

I just saved this one from the bed and breakfast we stayed at on New Years’s Eve. Taughannock Farms Inn is located just up the lake a bit from Ithaca. You can see the lake off to the right and the old yellow house with the widow’s walk is where they serve dinner. The state park and falls are next door with some beautiful hiking trails.

We have had a party on New Years for many years and we always waited to the last minute to invite people. If somebody had something better to do they would not be at our party. The key ingredient to a good party is low expectations.

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Thread in the Labyrinth

Holland Cotter reviewing a Stuart Davis drawing show in the New York Times says, “We are a linear-thinking, line-making people, a nation of surveyors, measurers, calculators, plotters, mappers, dividers. To our forebears the fearful wilderness was something to build a straight road through. The horizon wasn’t some romantic Beyond; it was a goal to be reached in x number of days, months, years. Drawing anchors us in space, gives us coordinates and direction. It is the thread in the labyrinth, guiding us through.”

That reminds me. I have to do a site map for the Refrigerator.

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No Heavy Machinery

Peggi driving leaf picker upper
Peggi driving leaf picker upper

Here is Peggi driving our neighbor’s leaf picker upper. She had to wake up at four this morning and drink the second half of her MoviPrep. The doctor’s office was cozy. I brought the paper and then moved on to some of the reading material that they had there like “Diseases of the Liver” and “W, The Biggest Issue Ever!”.

The routine procedure went well and her doctor told her that he would see her again in ten years. We drove directly to Golden Dynasty and had Chinese food. Peggi ordered General Tsang Soy but still under the influence of her narcotic, it came out “General Chang Choy”. Her fortune was, “There is beauty in simplicity”. It was about seventy degrees when we got home so we went out to rake leaves. Peggi had instructions not to drive or operate machinery and not to make any major decisions. She broke the first rule and the night is still young.

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Let The Drummer Take A Ride

Stella with two small snowmen

Coltrane’s drummer, Elvin Jones, is quoted as saying, “Usually, the material we played was new to us in the studio. We would only do second takes for technical reasons, not because of the musical content”. And the only time he was given charts was for the “Africa Brass” album that John and Eric Dolphy arranged and scored. So all this amazing music was a first take. Miles Davis is quoted as saying, “There are no mistakes”. Easy for him to say.

I’ve been listening to “Africa Brass, The Complete Sessions” as I paint and I am completely taken by the alternate take of “Africa”. There are three takes of this song in this package so there must have been some technical problems and I am thankful for that. The bass playing is so strong it comes off as a lead instrument. The horn arrangements are unlike anything in jazz. Of course, Coltrane is superb. And Elvin Jones takes his sweet time developing his solo section. His playing is beautiful. He never loses sight of Coltrane’s melody and only heightens the impact when it returns.

I’m thinking about this first take approach as I make mistake after mistake with my paintings. I have been trying to roll with my mistakes, correct them and use them to develop my painting. I’m seeing how valuable my mistakes are. I know that I have to paint the parts with the melody or theme in mind and not lose sight of it.

In the early eighties when drum solos were way uncool someone slipped a note to our band, Personal Effects, that read, “Let the drummer take a ride”. Even if I could talk a good game, the proof is in the pudding. Elvin made some good pudding.

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It’s A Plus, Plus World

Before Christmas I stopped in this women’s clothing store near Starbucks called Avenue. I saw a brown hooded sweatshirt that I thought Peggi would like but they only had one size. It looked like it might fit so I bought it. When she tried it on at Christmas it was to big and we finally got around to returning it.

Peggi saw this sign on the way in that said “for women size 14 plus”. She asked a clerk if they had anything under size 14 and she said, “No”. A large women standing nearby said, “You’re just too teeny, tiny”. As we stood in line to get our money back it couldn’t have been more obvious that this was a plus sized store. We were marveling at the size of the clerks behind the counter and the other customers.

The sweatshirt was only $14 bucks. We walked over to another store called AJ Wright where everything they sell is marked down or discounted and Peggi found a sweater that she liked for $7. On the way home we went by the Dollar Store and Peggi told me she stopped in there before Christmas and someone had just puked so she left. It seems like the whole world is a flea market these days.

Peggi is preparing her insides for inspection. So it was no nuts or fruit with seeds today. We spent some time discussing whether or not that would include apples and pears and figured that they would be OK. She made lentil soup in the Crock Pot and we took that over to her mom’s apartment where we ate in front of 60 Minutes. Roger Clemens told Mike Wallace that he didn’t use steroids. Tomorrow it’s all liquids, the three tablets and the liter of MoviPrep.

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For A Few Dollars More

Our NetFlix cue has reached the Sergio Leone clump that we stacked up a few months ago. We watched “For A Few Dollars More” last night and I was struck by how intriguing each character looked before they even uttered a word. The director sought a strong visual impact with the introduction of each figure even going overboard with a hunchback on Klaus Kinsky.

Crimestoppers from local paper.
Crimestoppers detail from local paper.

Which brings me to selecting faces to paint. I should probably have a “duh” category over to the right because this is so obvious. The more intriguing the source, the more likely the work will be of interest. I have mostly been trying to draw, to capture the essence of a pose and some snapshot of a personality from the source, and in the process I bring my own experience with people, the way I feel their presence, to the characters that I’m trying to draw. Why not help myself by choosing more animated sources, accentuate or even exaggerate the features? Why not give the few people that look at my paintings a break? Why should they have to look at these mundane characters? I prepared myself to be more discriminating in selecting source material instead of just trying to paint every mugshot on the Crimestoppers page. But I’m looking at the most recent version from the Democrat & Chronicle and every one of these photos has potential. Duh.

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No Vacation From Painting

If you are a painter there is no downtime. This is the way it is. My painting class is in recess for the holidays but we will soon be back in the basement of the Memorial Art Gallery on Tuesday nights. And in the meantime, we paint or think about painting. Thinking about it heightens the moment when you are are standing in front of a blank canvas. “This time it will be different”, for why would you want to repeat yourself? This isn’t rock and roll.

I just posted some photos of paintings by people in my painting class. Lorraine Bohonos and Alice de Mauriac are two of my favorite painters and it is a joy to watch them paint. I think you will like their paintings.

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Big City

Rochester’s Eastman Kodak Company announced that they were discontinuing the manufacture of infrared film on December 30th. So now only some digital cameras will be able to take infrared shots. Luckily Duane Sherwood’s camera is one of them. I just spent some quality time with his new show, “Big City“. The human eye cannot see infrared radiation, but the camera lens can and Duane’s photos of buildings in Manhattan bathed in infrared radiation are beautiful.

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