Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Not all observations are worth noting.
Besides the eye candy, Spring comes with equally impressive scents and sounds. The nearby wetlands vibrate like a post modern symphony with small frogs (peepers) gurgling in unison to attract mates. It is as calming and beautiful as Tuvan throat singing monks but more organic, freer in time with overlapping monophonic harmonies. This is way beyond om.
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I rode my bike past this display in the front window of a house on Culver Road and couldn’t resist stopping to take a photo. Even after reading how that guy came out of his house and shot that kid. Someone who puts Easter animals in their window probably wouldn’t tote guns would they? This display is either a week late or these people are on the Eastern Orthodox calendar like our neighbor, Helen.
Raised as a Catholic, and still mystified by that whole thing, I was never taught the significance of the bunny and chick. You can hardly even speculate anymore with Wikipedia right at your fingertips but I would have guessed that the chick has something to do with being born again. And maybe that’s why Catholics scoffed at these pagan symbols. You are born Catholic and then stuck with it. You don’t have the option of being born again. I certainly knew the bunny showed up with the an overdose of candy just after we had given up candy for Lent but this guy was suspect too. The focus, of course, was supposed to be on the most suspect of all Catholic legends, the resurrection.
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This morning’s “Beer Guys” column in our incredibly shrinking newspaper was about seasonal bock beers. Legend has it they were originally brewed by monks in Germany during Lent and that the bock beer had extra nutrients for the those who were fasting. They reviewed a few bock beers and I agree with their opinion that the locally brewed Genesee Bock is one of the best. And I was happy to read that it is selling briskly. At $5.99 a twelve pack at Wegmans (w/ Shoppers Card) it should be. When I worked as a stock boy at the old Super Duper they sold Genny Beer and Cream Ale for $1.09 a six pack as one of their “in store specials”. These were products that were sold at or below cost to get people into the store. That was a long time ago. The yesteryear price of the back beer matches the retro packaging perfectly.
My uncle worked for the old Topper Brewing Company, they also brewed Standard Ale, and I have always pulled for the local companies. I don’t understand why they can’t come up with a good craft brew. Both Rorbach’s and Custom Brew Craft put the Genesee/High Falls/LaBatt’sUSA product to shame. Our friend’s, Pete and Shelley drink Genesee Cream Ale, and I gather it is more popular in the mountains than it is here. I like it but I have a hard time with their packaging. Maybe they should bring back Jenny.
Jenny seemed wildly exotic when I first tuned into her. The dark hair, the slinky low cut barmaid outfit, the red lipstick smile, the choker necklace, the mole. I couldn’t wait to meet her in a bar but I was only ten or eleven. I found this picture of her over at Small World Books on North Street.
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click photo for Maira Kalman’s advice
We bought copies of Maira Kalman’s “The Principles of Uncertainty” as a Christmas gift for Peggi’s sister and for our friend and neighbor, Monica. We don’t own it our selves but it seemed like a good gift idea. I followed Kalman’s blog on the NYT’s website and loved it. So why should we pass up a free lecture by her at RIT? We couldn’t think of any reason.
It is always cold and windy on that damn campus. They designed it that way. It and the giant sprawling mall give Henrietta a bad name. No amount of wind is going to blow that Albert Paley down though. We sat next to our siter-in-law. She teaches a design class out there and had told her student to come but she only saw three of them there.
The person who introduced Maira said that she and her late husband ran the influential design company, M&Co. I never connected those dots before. Maira Kalman said her mom is the centerpiece of everything she does. She explained that her mom simply allowed her to daydream and never pushed her in any sort of practical career direction. She recently illustrated a new edition of Strunk’s The Elements of Style and she projected slides of that work from her MacBook while she told funny stories like how she’d marry Lincoln in a nanosecond.
The Memorial Art Galley has a show of her work (play) opening on May 2nd so she will probably be back in town for that.
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Remember when state license plates were distinctive? Remember when cars didn’t all look alike? I was following these guys yesterday as they cruised down Culver. I never get tired of this drive. I’m guessing this car is a 1968 but I could be way off.
I ripped some old vinyl over the weekend. Screamin Gypsy Bandits from Bloomington, Indiana, Sun Ra Italian pressings on Horo that never came out on cd and a live Archie Schep from Germany (I borrowed these from Tom Kohn) and Dr. John The Night Tripper lp, Gris-gris, that I heard in Rick Simpson’s basement and just had to have. And then Brad Fox called a while back singing a song from an lp that we used to listen to. I recognized the tune as being from a Keith Jarrett/Jan Garbarek lp called “Belonging” so I ripped that for him. And then I thought I would might as well make a digital copy of the Hi-Techs singles.
When I took the shot above I was headed to the Eastman Theater to pick Peggi and her mom up at the opera. I was listening to WPXY and kept the station on as we cruised back down Culver to our house. We were all singing along to something that had the refrain of “You’re a womanizer, womanizer, baby”,”You spin my head right round when you go down” and “you’re hot when you’re cold and you’re in when you’re out”. Top Forty is a little raunchier than the Invictas “The Hump” was in the mid sixties but it’s still based on the same catchy melody/riff/rhythm thing.
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Detail from “A Lot Besides” by Ricky Sears at Rochester Contemporary. Click photo for full shot.
RoCo’s new show opened last night with “In Between”, paintings and sculpture by Brooklyn based artists Malin Abrahamsson and Ricky Sears. Bleu Cease, RoCo’s director, introduced us to both artists last night and we had a nice chat about their work. Malin said she felt as though Rochester was a third contributor to the show because their reaction to the city was right there on the walls.
I’m not sure if i ever would have determined that this work was based on Rochester if I didn’t read the blurb in the small round room that was stuck to the wall above a delightful book that the the two artists had put together as worked on this show. Malin’s paintings were done on canvas and Ricky’s were done on glass, old window panes in fact, and they are quite beautiful.
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Peggi had a few problems with her hard drive and before we ran the disc utility we confirmed that we had back-ups of everything. She found a bunch of photos from a few years back and we got sidetracked looking at them. The one above is of the main part of house getting redone by us before we moved in. We scraped the stalactite like textured ceiling off and we repainted and pretty much reworked the whole place. I love the way it looked back then (click the photo for full effect) and I’m wondering if we can go back there. It was such a blur at the time but it It looks like an art installation now. I’m glad I photographed it. Then again, I photograph just about everything.
Today started like most with a cold call from India. They wanted to talk to us about graphic design or something. I have very little patience for these guys and hung up on him. Next call was from a sweet sounding woman who wondered if we did the the little programs that they pass out at funerals. Despite the rotten economy I turned her down. I’m wondering if a listed phone number is still a good idea for a business.
Last week we did a quote for lawn care company. They wanted a logos for their trucks and business cards etc. I love doing logos but these guys had four letters in their name and they wanted graphics in each of the letters. I told them I didn’t think that was a good idea but I couldn’t talk them out of it. So we gave them a quote and never heard back. We do have work so I’m not worried yet. If it does get bad I’l hear one of these Indian guys out.
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In a sure sign of Spring they have put the flags up on Durand’s golf course. Beer and golf are really made for each other. We came home with a ball that we picked up as we crossed the course and a can that we found along the road.
I did the math. These big cans of Budweiser are equivalent of two 12 ounce cans. And they are not the sort of thing that comes in six packs or cases. In fact the only way you can buy these giant cans is singularly (or in groups of single cans). Beer sold singularly in a 24 ounce can is marketed to people who are not taking it home for later. And once you open a can you pretty much have to drink the whole thing. So that leaves two types of beer buyers. Kids, who we first thought were responsible for tossing all these empties on one of our hiking routes, fit this profile but so does an alcoholic who doesn’t want to bring the beer home to his wife or get caught with it in his car. The later is our neighbor’s theory and he told us who he suspects.
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I met Monica this morning out by the mailboxes as I was grabbing the soon-to-be-extinct newspaper and she was heading off to work. She rolled down her window and said “Isn’t this a beautiful day?” Before I could say “yes” she continued, “I say that to people and they say, ‘Yeah, but it’s cold’ “.
I’ve talked before about the beautiful color of everything this time of year. Only a few early flowers are up and the buds have not popped on the trees and it has hardly rained in a while so there is very little green.
At first it bugged me that the town left these cones and black plastic here all winter. But I’m realizing that I am attracted to these construction sites at the same time as I am repulsed by the need to constantly mess with nature. In this case a housing project that the town allowed to go forward not only leveled the woods but altered the drainage and overloaded this low lying area so that it is now a certified wetland. They spent most of last Fall raising the level of this road so it will stay above water in the Spring. Just a little further up Hoffman Road from here is where we find most of the big Bud cans.
Anyway the cones look great against our gray brown world and I’m savoring it. I’m starting to think that these people at the Town are more creative than I give them credit for being. I’ve also noticed that I’ve been looking at the stuff in Home Depot like it’s all art supplies. I think they even sell these cones.
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Two of our nephews each had horn solos in their band concert at Brighton Middle School so we had to be there. Their younger brother plays horn too and the three of them have a band called “Rubber Chicken”. The band concert was great but the Science Fair going on upstairs was something else. Both nephews had exhibits. The youngest demonstrated a method for collecting static electricity. The oldest determined which method worked best for getting gum off your show. Burning it off, freezing it so it cracks off and squirting DW40 on the shoe were all explored and the DW40 worked best.
Other kids examined which sandwich bags would keep bread from molding longer and which cleaning product got the dirt off their gym socks. For some reason three separate kids examined colored candles to see which one burns the fastest. Probably because they got to play with fire. One kid studied toilet paper and declred “37 per cent of the people in the US use Wegman’s brand. but our favorite was the experiment to determine whether plants grew faster with loud music , soft music or no music. The kid declared that soft music was the best but the graph that he produced showed that the plant exposed to loud music grew the fastest. That was a good part of the fun, shooting holes in their “controlled studies ” and reading their “conclusions”.
Last night we watched Let The Right One, a really cool Scandinavian movie about kids the same age as our nephews except these kids were vampires.
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I had a meeting today with a client at his office. He showed me his logo and then explained that it is not intended to be an oval. His flat panel monitor was distorting everything he looks at by a long shot, even the picture of his son that used as his wallpaper. He asked me if I could remedy the situation so there I was duking it out with his clunky Windows pc.
This afternoon my father sent me this Word doc that he had spent most of the day on. It was given to him by a pc user and he added a bunch of stuff and sent it back but the guy wasn’t able to open the file. All I had to do add the “.doc” suffix to the file name and send it back. You’d think a Windows machine would recognize a Word doc.
A friend of ours programs data bases for web sites and he laughingly told us that he just stopped previewing his sites in Explorer. He said the people who use that program are idiots and he doesn’t care about them. I was reading a bad review of Explorer 8 today and they had a link to stats that showed two thirds of all web users use IE. That’s a lot of idiots. The economy would get a real sot in the arm if all web developers could quit wasting time with IE workarounds.
I was reading about the new system for the iPhone and Touch and an app for them that will allow users to see other users on the same network and exchange virtual business and it reminded me that we haven’t done new business cards since we moved. We have been using the “we just moved” excuse for four years now. We had some business cards printed online for a client they came out great. They offer rounded corners too. So I spent some time today playing with the 4D Advertising logo. I love coming up with logos and haven’t done one in a while.
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Olga took the afternoon off to help Doug Rice prepare for the opening of his funky new performance space, MuCCC. She called from the place, an old Baptist church, to make sure we were coming. We were still working and hadn’t thought about the evening yet. Then John Gilmore called and wondered what was up so we made plans to go to the opening with him. When John got here he found us out in the road helping our neighbor with his garden tractor. First time out this year and he had two flat tires.
John needed batteries for his new camera so first stop was Walgreens. Peggi and I stayed in the car and switched the radio station. Jamie’s Crying came on and we cranked it. All may not be right with the world but Van Halen still sounds good.
We stopped at a light and an egg yolk yellow Hummer was facing us. I know they’re hogs and all that but they are one cool lookin’, bad ass, military grade auto.
We passed the Playground Tavern and Simple Truth Ministries and it occured to me that everything is all right with the world from the back seat of John Gilmore’s car.
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The art changes monthly at the Little Cafe and this month it is the employees who have the spotlight. I particularly liked these photos by one of the projectionists, Alan Charlesworth. Four kind of big guys just standing there in various settings.
Speaking of big guys, we took my parents out to Tony D’s for dinner tonight. We were celebrating my father’s birthday and I tried making reservations but they would only take them for parties of six or more. So we showed up and hung around the bar for about forty five minutes watching sports bloopers. We had a delicious calamari salad and greens and beans and my father picked a surprising spicy set of ingredients for goat cheese pizza. They were cranking the soul music in here. Good Times, Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Atomic Dog and Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing all sounded great but it was almost impossible to hear each other and on the way home I noticed my mom was hoarse.
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Some pretty good sized pieces of wood landed on our porch this morning and woke us up. It’s warm but it seemed too windy to walk in the woods without helmets so we stayed on the street. Peggi had the foresight to bring two plastic bags and we filled them both., one with deposit returns (mostly Budweiser products) and the other with plastic recyclables (mostly flask sized vodka bottles).
Rich Stim wrote that he liked it when I discussed my technical problems so here goes. I have two subtle spots on every picture I take with my Nikon P5100. A friend, Corrine, has 5100 too and she just had her lens replaced to correct the same problem. Mine is still under warranty but I am trying to decide whether the spots are bad enough to have to live without the camera for three weeks. The last camera I had was a Sony DSC V1 and it started eating my cards so that is sitting by the door on the way to the trash. Before that I had a Kodak 4800 and I was going to put that on eBay but it is probably worthless now. I was trying to determine if I could use it for the three weeks of downtime so I opened the first photo we took with it back in 2000 (above). It does have a 2×3 aspect ratio and I dig that.
Last week we recorded our Margaret Explosion gig with three new recorders that Bob Martin borrowed from Sound Source. They were a Korg MR1, a Tascam DR1 and a Tascam DR7. The Korg had some amazing stereo imaging but the DR1 sounded the most natural and the best to us. They all have built in mics and run on batteries. Tonight we are checking out a Zoom H-4N that Bob has picked up from the House of Guitars. It has a built in stereo mic and two mic inputs with phantom power so it records four tracks. Sounds amazing on paper.
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Norman Rockwell painting
When I was growing up there was nothing but Catholics in my family but then my parents jumped ship and switched us to public schools and we really took advantage of the freedom. There were six of us before my youngest sister came along and I remember the thrill of entertaining “pagan” names for her. “Amy” won out and there was certainly no Saint Amy then. There may be now that the last pope named more saints than all others combined.
Two of my cousins became nuns, my aunt became a Jehovah’s Witness, Amy married into a Jewish family, Peggi’s sister did too and one of my brothers converted to Judaism. His oldest son had his bar mitzvah a few years ago. His youngest, shown in the middle above becomes a bar mitzvah tomorrow. This happens automatically upon turning 13 years old. No ceremony is needed but since the 15th century it became customary to mark the occasion by whooping it up. Further adventures into the melting pot have me playing my djembe behind Hebrew chanting at the Temple.
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Latest “Crime Face painting. Painted from photo on Crimestoppers page of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
Rome Celli did his annual client appreciation night at the Little Theatre tonight so we had our choice of five movies. We chose “Slumdog Millionaire, “Nixon & Frost” and “The Wrestler” in that order thinking it might be crowded and we might need aback up plan. We got into Slumdog and it was kinda predicable and corny but we really enjoyed it.
Rome had cookies and coffee for everyone after the movie and we ran into a couple we sort of know. They asked how I liked the movie and I said “I loved it”. (Peggi was in the bathroom). They said they were shocked at how bad it was. I said “Really? It wasn’t great but I liked it”. Then it became clear to to me by something they said that they were really affected by how bad the situation was for the kids in India. Peggi came back from the bathroom and said, “Wasn’t that a great movie?” These people were almost crying.
Across the room I saw a woman come in who, the last time I saw her, had asked me why I painted these people who had caused some much trouble in our community. I did not really want to have another discussion with her.
My painting teacher, Fred Lipp, went down to New York to see the Marlene Dumas show at the Modern. About half my class saw that show. Fred bought he book and brought it into class and my father said “I think Marlene is a disturbed individual” (based on her subject matter).
I am beginning to question whether I too spend too much time looking at the dark side. I already knew there was some incredible poverty in India. I thought that was a pretty light movie. And that Bollywood dance number certainly had nothing on “West Side Story”. I told Kathy Palokoff that I was going to start painting babies and she said, “Please don’t”.
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We were in the house last night for “Hat Night” with Watkins and the Rapiers at the Little Theater. Sue was was taking the official band photo while I butted in to grab this shot. It was also Haiku night and band members were on a role with pieces based on the celebrity paintings that are currently on view.
I had an appointment at the Hair Zoo this morning to discuss their web site. Stan the Man recommended us and I hope it works out. I parked right next to a Cadillac Escalade near a big sign that said “Walk In”. I tried walking in the front door and it was locked so I went around back. There was a guy there cleaning the windows. When he left, he turned to the people in the waiting room and said “I have feeling someone in this room is going to win the lottery today”. I guess you would have to play it to win it and I don’t even know where to go to buy those things. And how do you know if you win. Is that stuff in the paper? I probably should have gone out and bought a ticket.
We had received a couple of calls urging us to vote “yes” on the proposal to move the senior living facility on Pinegrove to the empty plaza across from Bishop Kearney. Hard to believe they would hold a special election on this but I guess it is a hot button issue. We went over to vote as a hoot and were surprised at how crowded t was. There were Irondequoit cops directing traffic in and out of the Town Hall. In class tonight Peggi’s yoga teacher, Jefferey, said we should have voted “No”.
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Keeping busy in the new economy is pretty easy. We spent most of the day yesterday trying to access our wireless access point at its default address. Our network just disappeared. Our Netgear MR814 wireless router lost its ability to broadcast a year ago but the Ethernet connections still worked so we bought a NetgearWG602 v3 Wireless Access Point and hooked it up to the MR814. That worked for about a year and now it has disappeared. Can’t even connect to it to re-set it up. I’m headed out to buy a new router and I’m hoping my purchase will stimulate the economy.
We took a walk up in the woods and came out on Hoffman Road where the town has just finished its infrastructure improvements to manage the wetlands that they inadvertently created when they allowed a housing project to go in off Titus. The Budweiser guy has been busy down here. He can drink and drive. I’m keeping his deposit.
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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.
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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.
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