Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
The class is called “Advanced Painting” and I’ve been taking it for more years than I can remember. I did my first oil painting in this class a long time ago and then last year I switched mediums to kid’s Tempura paint. This year I haven’t done a painting yet, just a pile of charcoal drawings. It’s a funny kind of progress.
ad·vanced
1. Far on or ahead in development or progress.
2. New and not yet generally accepted.
It was great playing with Minneapolis’s Dreamland Faces at the Extreme Materials show but because they were playing at the same time as Margaret Explosion we didn’t get to hear much. We chatted before the show and Andy said they were going to do their “dissident stuff”. We heard from others that Karen didn’t sing for some reason. I caught part of one song while we were on break and it didn’t sound dissident to me. It sounded other worldly. Andy’s from Rochester so they’ll be back. With two accordions, two saws, two totally unique voices they are a marvel. Here’s a clip of Andy from Prairie Home Companion.
We have a mouse in our spice cabinet but it’s not going after the spices, it is stripping the labels of the Cream of Tarter and other containers in order to use the paper in it’s nest. That’s not so bad but the droppings are sort of unappetizing. Our cat has been looking at the walls like there is something going on in there so I’m thinking it’s time to bait the traps.
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The misty white center portion of this photo, what I thought was a light leak, turns out to be dust on my lens. The lens cover on my Nikon P7000 is acting up again. Here it looks like an apparition as volunteers who help the county maintain the park hosted another of their weekly arboretum tours. The last tour of the year is next Sunday at 2pm and starts in the parking lot of the old zoo.
The shot above is from weeks ago. Yesterday’s crowd was so large they had to split it into two large crowds. Sun will do that. We went with the one that did the tour in reverse. The tour is interesting enough to do more than once. We found cherry blossoms in full Fall bloom, the once “extinct” Dawn redwoods, blue Juniper berries that smelled like gin. We learned how to tell fir trees from spruce. The cones on a fir tree point up and the ones on a spruce point down. Our guide pointed out that “fir” has less letters than “spruce” like “up” is to “down”. I remember “forks on the left” with a similar trick.
When the tour was over one of the guides urged us to vote Democratic in the next election because the “Republicans could care less about the environment.” He said they rejected spending 15,000 (that would been matched by the state) on the parks in the the last year alone.
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Pete and Shelley are coming down from the mountains for tonight’s gig at the George Eastman House. Shelley emailed from the library that she was bringing her shakers so we’re in for a special treat. How do you think this tree lost it’s needles?
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I look at the Spanish papers most days, El Pais, El Mundo and ABC. I look at the headlines mostly and if I must read an article I’ll ask Peggi to translate it or use Google. Big news there today with the Basque separatist group ETA announcing an end to their violent tactics with this theatrical video.
Mickey Mantle would have turned 80 today if he was still alive. We’re watching our first baseball game of the season and it’s almost November. I’m not really crazy about red but I’m partial to the National League unless the Yankees or Detroit Tigers are in the series. The Rochester Red Wings used to be a farm team for the Saint Louis Cardinals so that’s reason enough to root for them and George W. used to own the Texas Rangers so that’s reason enough not to root for them.
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Margaret Explosion records most shows. We never rehearse (we sound it, I know) and we hardly ever play a song more than once so it takes a while to work our way through the recordings. Some songs survive multiple listenings and stay on the “A List” until we can give them a title. “Strip Club”, from October of last year, is one that wouldn’t go away. It features Jack Schaefer on bass clarinet and Pete LaBonne on piano. I just added it to the site today.
Pete LaBonne joins us for Friday’s gig at the Eastman House opening and Saturday’s gig at the Memorial Art Gallery. Jaffe, former keyboard player with Colorblind James, said he might stop by and sit in tonight at our Little Theater gig. Stop by. Live a Little!
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Splitting wood is a perfect Fall activity. I used to swing a sledgehammer at a maul but my elbows hurt for days afterward so now we borrow my neighbor’s wood splitter. It’s a Heathkit. He built it from a kit in the fifties. The chainsaw is technically borrowed too. Bill Jones had one of his trees fall over his neighbor’s driveway a few years ago and bought the saw to clean up the mess and then he loaned it to us. We use it all the time and even let Bill borrow it back to cut down his way overgrown arborvitae.
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Last week’s camping trip is just a memory but the photos are real. Aren’t they?
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Our neighbor, Leo, was always one step ahead of us. He made us look like slackers without even trying. Up first in the morning he’d have our paper at the door and he already be involved in a project before we crawled out of bed. He shared his garden with us, his gardening skills and then the fruit from the garden, potatoes and carrots and raspberries. Leo could fix anything. He was not only a craftsman but and an equally inventive creator, an inspiration. He was non-stop until yesterday when he passed away at 94.
Our neighbors on the other side lost their grandchild yesterday. The sweetest little girl in the world developed a brain tumor that eventually got the best of her just short of her second birthday.
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Margaret Explosion played last night at Visual Studies Workshop, the first of our four art gigs. We played up on the stage in the auditorium in front of a fifty minute propaganda movie that Rochester Gas & Electric made about the city back in the early sixties. We did the the gig as a trio, just Bob (above), Peggi and me – no bass. Ken was rehearsing with his other band, SLT. They’re opening for Hugh Cornwell from the Stranglers in a few weeks and Blondie’s Clem Burke is playing drums.
The auditorium had some big sound and we took it to some new places but we forgot to turn the recorder on so it will have to live on in our memories.
Here’s Margaret Explosion – Turntable recorded last week at the Little Theatre Cafe.
We mentioned our camping trip to a few friends and neighbors and they offered to let us borrow all sorts of gear. It is amazing that an old fashioned activity like camping would have so many new products. We really hadn’t done any backwoods camping since our honeymoon when we were chased out of a Smokey Mountains virgin forest by a bear. We have a tent and some sleeping bags but none of the modern camping paraphernalia our friend’s offered.
Rubberized dry bags, like duffle bags but they keep your stuff dry.
Pots and pans without handles, sort of a backwards invention. They all share a detachable handle so the pots are easier to stack in your pack.
A tiny propane stove for making coffee.
Polar fleece outerwear that is incredibly light when portaging.
Battery operated headlamps so convenient you forget that the lamp you are wearing is shining in your partners’ eyes.
Slim sleeping pads that self inflate (sort of) and cushion and warm the space between you and the ground.
We had so much stuff I felt like we were packing to go away to college.
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Deer wander in the Canadian woods looking for food just like they do here but up there they have moose too and they are a bit taller than deer. You can see how they’ve trimmed these trees along the shoreline in Algonquin with branches eaten as high as the animals can reach. They look like manicured shrubs in an Italian garden. Philip Guston painted trees like this in his “Roma” series.
We were camping with Jeff and Mary Kaye and they’ve have been up here many times. Jeff was calling this the “browse line” and I kept thinking, “That can’t be right.” I think of animals as “right down to business”. Of course Jeff was right. This has opened my eyes to the possibility of a wide range of motives in the animal kingdom.
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This detail from a Carrie Levy photo is part of the “The Unseen Eye” at the George Eastman House. Margaret Explosion is playing the opening party Friday, October 21. We have four art gigs this month. Pete LaBonne joins us on piano for Eastman House and Memorial Art Gallery opening. Dreamland Faces will be at the MAG that night as well. We’re at the Little Theater tonight and the first of the four art tour stops is tomorrow night at Visual Studies Workshop where director, Rick Hock, has us performing in the darkened auditorium while a movie about Rochester is projected on their big screen.
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I can’t think of a better place to spend Indian Summer than Algonquin Provincial Park up north of Toronto. We spent the last four days there, backcountry camping and living in the moment which makes it all sort of hard to describe.
There were highlights that transcended the moment like the shooting star, the beaver we followed for a half hour or so and the midnight canoe ride to the dark side of the island where the shoreline reflected on the still lake like a wild hallucination with Rorschach attributes.
The 3000 square mile park is astoundingly beautiful and pretty much the same as it was one during the first Indian Summer.
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This white wooden block was screwed to the wall near the light switches in our painting class and someone stuck some blue tape on it. It looks like a Richard Tuttle piece.
Our class, with many regulars and a handful of newcomers, is so full that the moments of engagement with our teacher are compacted and all the more intense. There is no time to fart around and Fred Lipp rises to the challenge. The class description emphasizes honesty and he cuts right to the chase. He pointed to the way I laid in a neck on a pencil drawing and said, “You’re boring me.”
I didn’t say anything at first but when he left I thought, “thank you.”
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I can’t remember the last time the 5 day forecast, on the back page of the sports section, had five solid, full sun icons. So gorgeous this time of year, incredible colors and such low humidity you can see for miles. Even the deer were stunned. We came across a family in the woods and they checked us out but didn’t run. Peggi says they’re thinking, “Oh, them”.
We heard the news that Steve Jobs died while we were on break last night at the Little and we read so many obits and tributes today that it cast a melancholy spell on the day. We certainly had a soft spot for the guy that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life and then pretty much designed our lifestyle.
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John Gilmore sends us oddball emails at odd hours. Thankfully they’re the type that don’t require any action on our part. We can ignore, delete or read and we don’t have to respond. They are never stock, forwarded crap and are often tailored directly for us.
In the last few weeks he’s sent us links to a site that sells the striped shirts that Picasso favored, a link to the Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs” inclusion in a list of “Ten Best Songs Based On Books”, and this link to Wikipedia’s page on “Ostinato.” John’s email was entitled “Shek It Tout.”
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Interesting that the shoreline at Charlotte beach and Durand beach in Rochester is sandy while what used to be the beach at Webster Park is all rocks. I guess the bay that forms the Rochester harbor is more protected from the rough seas. I feel a lot better now.
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There was some sort rift that developed in my family years ago. Drinking was involved. Pa beat Ma. People took sides and today all is forgiven or forgotten, or most of it anyway. We had reunion in Webster Park over the weekend and Peggi I threw our tofu dogs on the grill along side of our cousins’ hot dogs. The daughter of my grandfathers’ brother showed us a scrapbook full of old family photos and I popped a photo of the one above. It shows my grandfather and his fellow workers in front of his grocery store on North Avenue. “Of course you’ve heard all these stories,” she said. But we really hadn’t and the time flew by as the stories unfolded.
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Brad Fox told me he used to get depressed every year at this time when the days get cooler, shorter and grayer. He moved to California to remedy that situation. My good friend and neighbor is also affected by light deprivation. And Anne Havens goes south in the winter but thankfully always returns for productive art-making, something that she is sharing by appointment only before she hightails it out of here. You can contact her through her site.
Me, I get overwhelmed in the summer and look forward to hunkering down in the winter months.
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