I’ve always kept scrapbooks. Who doesn’t? And I have a whole shelf full of them that won’t make any sense to anyone when I’m gone. They make sense to me and I’m still here so I put one online. Eventually I will have all my photos on Flickr, my movies on YouTube, my sign collection on Tumblr and my scrapbooks on Issuu. What am I forgetting?
4 CommentsDo Not Call
I still don’t have a cell phone and I realize some day I will wish I did. For now a phone call is the last thing I want when I leave the house. But I’m beginning to think a cell phone might be easier to ignore than the land line I sit next to. I started to yell at “Pamela from the Notification Center” but quickly realized it was a recorded voice telling me I had won some damn thing and I had to call back to claim my prize. A lot of good the “Do Not Call” registry does. Last week I got a call from someone at the National Riffle Association. They must really be desperate.
I had the choice to “Approve, Trash or Spam” this comment to my blog. I spammed it but I’m posting it as well. The guy writes better than I do.
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1 CommentReality Is Just A Consensus
James Turrell has concurrent exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Pick your poison.
1 CommentDay 9 Day-O
Festival Promoter John Nugent pulled a rabbit out of his hat by scheduling Monty Alexander’s Harlem-Kingston Express on one of the big East Avenues stages going head to head with Trombone Shorty to close out the 12th annual Rochester International Jazz Festival.
Monty was our festival favorite from a few years ago and this setting – Monty sitting amidst two bands, his jazz trio with drums and double bass on the left and his reggae heavy Jamaican band on the right – was nothing short of magical. Each band was featured and they traded portions of songs and all played at once while Monty winged it in true jazz master fashion. A seasoned performer and top shelf entertainer, Monty easily handled two electrical outages in the middle of the set by picking up his melodica and getting the crowd to sing along on the Banana Boat song.
It’s going to be so nice to stay home tonight and watch Spain vs. Brazil on the small screen.
Leave a commentMinus The Blues
Phronesis, a bass player led trio with a lyrical piano player and frenetic drummer, were last night’s hit for us. So much music and action packed dialog. They made the cavernous Christ Church sound good.
Youn Sun Nah & Ulf Wakenius came on like a morphine drip at the Lutheran Church opening with a slow, minimal thumb piano and voice version of “My Favorite Things.” Pristine and somehow detached from their material they managed to take the hurt out of “Hurt,” the NIN’s song that Johnny Cash killed before he died but Youn Sun Nah has an absolutely amazing voice and she delivered a completely unique take on Nat King Cole’s “Calypso Blues” and brought the house down. Her YouTube video of the song has twice as many views as Nat’s.
Leave a commentI 2 Heart Barcelona
Certainly one viable option to purchasing a Club Pass for the Rochester International Jazz Fest would be to just hang out on the streets for nine. The outliers surround the official sites and are scattered about between venues. I loved this group that was just getting going on East Avenue as we scurried by to our next event.
Leave a commentSpoiled
Peggi was chatting in the back of Xerox Auditorium while I held her seat. A big guy, who was breathing heavily after climbing the stairs, started to sit in Peggi’s spot so I told him it was taken. He said I looked quieter than the people on the other side of the aisle and then he proceeded to talk my ear off. He said he had taken online harmonica lessons from Howard Levy, the piano player in the group we were about to hear, Trio Globo. Levy used to play with Bela Fleck and the other two parts of the trio played with Paul winter Consort.
According to my new friend Levy plays chromatically and can play any note in any key on any harmonica where most players have harmonicas for each key. He does all this by “overblowing and underblowing” to bend the notes. “Howard is the show,” he said emphatically. And then added, Don’t worry about me. I’ll shut up as soon as the band starts.”
Anat Cohen, the night before in this same room, had incorporated world music into a jazz setting with such remarkable sophistication I found it hard to sit through Trio Globo so I left. That’s why they call it a “Jazz Pass.“
1 CommentNo Complaints
If you’ve been around as long as we have you know you can always find a free parking space in downtown Rochester regardless if a festival is going on. We usually find one near the Mens Fashion House on East Main.
We helped ourselves to three full sets of jazz last night, all performers we had never heard of and all sensational.
To cleanse the palette we’ve been listening to our nephew‘s new mixtape. Got his “Ridin” track stuck in my head.
Leave a commentGoogle Is Listening
I put a short video online of our nephew on his skateboard. It was taken a while ago but I sent him the link when he graduated from High School last week. He is more of a Warp Fest kinda guy but I dropped an obscure Archie Shepp track on the one minute video without giving credit to Mr. Shepp and got a warning from YouTube within minutes that my video would not be available in Germany because of copyright on “The Magic of JuJu” track. Next time I’ll drop a Margaret Explosion track.
I’ve been taking notes on the Jazz Fest
Leave a commentUnquote
I’ve been reading “Picasso and Truth – From Cubism to Guernica” but mostly looking at the pictures. Author, T. J. Clark focuses on the art and stays away from the personality and that is as it should be but I get awfully bogged down in the artspeak.
I came awake thinking about a memorable quote that was actually never said by anyone. I must have dreamed it but I believed it as I regained my footing. I’ll put it in quotes but that doesn’t make it so. Picasso said, “If I could have painted one of my late (1970s) paintings when I first started out I would have stopped right there.”
It must have been the Breaking Bad episode we watched before turning in.
Leave a commentXerography
After twelve years it finally happened. Not one of the big-ticket, Eastman Theater acts booked at the Rochester International Jazz Fest has anything to do with jazz, unless you count David Sanborn. I am certainly no purist but I drift toward the off beat while the festival goes mainstream and there wasn’t much to choose from last night.
We started with the French trio, Thiefs, at the Xerox Auditorium. While waiting in line I took this photo of the about to be renovated Midtown Tower and I was thinking about the early eighties Personal Effects gigs in the ballroom that juts out of the fourteenth floor. A security guard interrupted my drift with a stern warning, “This is private property and no photography is allowed.”
The Theifs were pretty cool but not quite ready for prime time. The drummer and lead singer was shy of all things. The trio of sax, bass and drums all had effects pedals. The tenor player had more effects boxes than Bob Martin and sampled a few loops to add to the rhythm guitar sounds the drummer was getting from the box on his floor tom.
We ran into our jazz buddy, Hal, on the street. He had already walked out of Kat Edmundson (“the girl with the squeaky voice”) at the Little, the replacement act at Christ Church and Patricia Barber when the fire alarm went off at Max’s. We were sort of at a loss as of what to do. The yee haw Hackensaw Boys, Quincy Jones Presents: Nikki Yanofsky, the comedy Trondheim Jazz Orchestra? We opted for Dr. John in the street. I felt sorry for him banging out his gris gris stuff at another festival.
3 CommentsSlow Cook
I feel exactly like this turtle. I want the summer to slow down. Today is the longest day of the year and this is as good as it gets.
Leave a commentPassion
I’ve been uploading photos for the last week and I could spend the rest of my life organizing them but I was anxious to check out this external embed flash code so I put my first “set” together and embedded it above. (Note: Flickr embed no longer works)These are all stills I took from the Passion of Saint Joan movie. I can’t remember if I stopped the dvd and shot them or did screen captures from YouTube. The movie is public domain and about a million times better than “Frances Ha” which we saw at the Little on a $5 Monday night. Our neighbor’s brother and wife contributed music and had a small part but what happened to that director? We really liked “The Squid & The Whale,” sort of liked “Margot at the Wedding” and hated this one.
And while I’m complaining, the new season of Breaking Bad, that is the newly released dvd season, Part One of the fifth and final season in the series, better turn around because the first six episodes are going downhill on the brilliant meter. I just know they’re setting me up though so I’m hanging in there.
1 CommentBlue Laws
The vegetation is about as green it gets, pea soup green, and it’s not even officially summer but we noticed a few limbs on some of the big trees near our house are still not green. They’re dead so it’s time for a visit from Bruce O’Neil, the tree surgeon. He told me he usually does his estimates on Saturday but this one is his birthday, 65, so he’s stopping by on Sunday morning. We normally would be sitting on the porch in our pjs reading the Times but I plan to be dressed like a lumberjack when he gets here.
Leave a commentJunkers & Junkies
I hadn’t seen our old neighbor in a few months so I gave him a call and suggested we go over to Krieger’s with some scrap metal that I had piled up near our garage. It was all stuff that we took out of our basement when we remodeled last year, an old fireplace grate, the chain-like curtain that went with the fireplace, the metal framework for the drop ceiling, two old cast iron music stands, some leftover conduit and a chunk of wire mesh left from the concrete pour. I was thinking twenty-five bucks at least but I just wanted to get rid of it and most of all I knew how much Sparky like going to Krieger’s.
We still call it Krieger’s even though Metalico has cornered every bit of the junk business around here. They’re located right by the tracks at the very beginning of Portland Avenue in downtown Rochester and the characters who work here are every bit as colorful as the assortment of junkers and junkies that patronize this place. Sparky though is more colorful than them all.
I looked straight in the camera at the cashier counter and received a paper receipt for $10.00 after Metalico’s “Rounding Adjustment” of -$.42. The cashiers handle no cash. The receipt has a bar code on it and you go outside to an open air money machine where you scan the sheet and “Take Cash Quickly.”
Leave a commentSearching
D. A. Pennebaker was in town over the weekend for a screening of “Don’t Look Back” at the Little Theater. I pictured him being chauffeured in at the tail end of the movie but he was in the house for the full ride and at eighty seven he got up on stage with a big smile and he was ready to talk and field questions.
He told the crowd he “wanted to see how the film held up” and I was thinking about the number of times we’ve seen the movie and how when the big “Don’t Look Back” letters come on the screen at the end of the film it is always a surprise. The movie is perfectly edited, lingering uncomfortably long on some of those back stage scenes and then cutting fast through performances, and it always whizzes by.
The opening scene with Dylan tossing hand painted placards of his brilliant lyrics is a hundred times better than any MTV video ever was. Donovan clearly got under Dylan’s skin and the scene with the two of them trading songs is is my favorite part of the film. D. A. told us Donovan helped paint those lyrics and he also said he caught Dylan alone playing Donovan’s record in his hotel room.
I will never get tired of seeing Dylan in his prime. There will never be another like him but Pennebaker was there and he caught it for us. You feel the presence of the camera in the hotel rooms, in the car and backstage but as Pennebaker says, “he was searching.” He is not out to tell a particular story or manipulate the action. He would pitch movies and the suits would ask him what the movie was about and he would say, “I don’t know yet, I haven’t made the movie.” He was searching.
Leave a commentJob Jar
If you don’t find me here this summer I’ll probably be chipping away at the job list. We want to reset some patio stones that are stacked up in the back yard and I have bunch small pile of concrete blocks back there left over from last summer’s project and people keep telling me I should build a BBQ grill out them so I’m thinking.
And then I want to fix the drawers under our bed and we want to wash the outside of our windows while its warm. We’ve been talking about extending our so called forever wild plot, a small portion of our lot with a green fence around it to keep the deer out. And it’s time to paint our metal chairs and while I’m at that I could paint the horseshoes with the same Rustoleum colors. It’s getting hard to tell them apart.
1 CommentUse Your Eye
How many times over the last few years have I heard Fred Lipp say those words? “Let your eye be your guide.” In other words, “Don’t think.”
I still go around in circles as I look for a solution to compositional problems but I am increasing finding the answers not in the source or in logic but in my eye. I am thrilled to report that I’m learning to trust my eye because I’m finding it works. When I see it I know that this is my solution. But I have to let my eye see it before I think about it.
I’ve been drawing from the same sources for the last few years, a bunch of mugshots from a Chicago paper. I’d rather use the local Crimestopper models but they’ve reduced the size of their photos both in the newspaper and on their website so I found twenty Chicago mugshots online. I’ve drawn each of them four or five times but increasingly I find myself working away without the source and when I go through the stack to refer back to the one I used I can’t find one that looks like drawing. I find this very exiting.
2 CommentsObsessive Observation
Marshes, wetlands, swamps are some of the most beautiful places on earth. The marsh down on Hoffman Road, one of the lowest elevation spots around here before the land gives way to Lake Ontario, is alive with bull frogs, snapping turtles, wild yellow Irises, buttercups and these beautiful Forget Me Nots.
Speaking of gorgeous landscapes Jim and Gail Thomas have a great little show in the 1570 Gallery at Valley Manor on East Avenue. Jim has a series of oil pastel drawings based on the ancient tree in Genesee Valley Park that recently split down the middle and Gail makes the local hills look like Cézanne’s work. Their “Shared Visions” rival the great outdoors in this sensational display.
I’m thinking about suiting up and going Ellen Altfest in the marsh.
1 CommentPolice Sketch Artist
We decided to start with the Hungerford building this First Friday because we hadn’t been there in months and that building seems to be in a constant state of flux. We used to get large stats at R. A. Ellis back in the eighties when they had offices up there and Richard Edic had a wood shop up there when we got our kitchen remodeled and then I remember a great art show by Ann Havens in studio there. Today there must be a hundred artist’s lofts up there and you can really get bogged down rather than recharged if you don’t watch it.
Bleu Cease had emailed earlier in the day wondering if I would be interested in taking part in the summer Art Tent that RoCo will have setup in conjunction with the Party in the Park concert series. I thought about it for bit but still hadn’t found a workable plan so I told him I talk about it when stopped in RoCo to see the 6×6 show. Two of Peggi’s clown paintings had red dots on them and none of my six split headshots had sold so my first thought was Peggi should be the artist in the tent.
I was thinking I could take mugshot style photos like the ones I took at the Bug Jar in 1998. I’m trying to figure out how I could get people to sit for that. Maybe just the promise of putting their anonymous shot online or maybe I can round up a printer for the evening. Give one print to the sitter and put one on the tent wall.
Another thought would be to get people to sit for charcoal sketches, 5 or ten minute poses with a “may not look like you” disclaimer. Guess I could just give away the drawings.
I have my choice of the ten Thursday nights. I would probably pick the worst of the bands so the people would be interesting. Only trouble there would be deciding between Blues Traveler, Moe, Southside Johnny and John Brown’s Body.
We finished the night at the Little Theater Café listening to Grr, a drumless trio with great players and really interesting arrangements.
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