Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
The second best thing about heading back up to the mountains for the weekend was knowing I would get another chance to photograph this sign. We kind of whizzed past it the first time and it’s beauty didn’t fully register until I was too far down the road to suggest turning around and driving back to photograph it. It haunted me for the last few weeks and I’m so happy that I had another shot at it. See more funky signs.
Leave a comment
We have enjoyed the best cross country skiing conditions of any year that I can remember and this weekend would been a good one if we had stuck around. We had talked with Jeff Munson about going somewhere out of town to ski this winter and time was running out. We considered Ottawa and Stillwater or Tug HIll and then Peggi found a place online that looked promising. She emailed the address and a women called us back on Thursday afternoon. She was calling from New Jersey but she said a caretaker would open up the cabin up near Indian Lake in the Adirondacks and she asked us to mail her a check, a check that she would not receive until we were back in Rochester. It was all knotty pine and perfect with a big fireplace. No cutesy stuff on wall just a sign that said “No Splitting Wood On The Hearth”. We brought enough food to feed an army. The firewood was plentiful. The rent was cheap. The cell phones wouldn’t work. The woods was sensational.
They had the same snowstorm as we did on Friday but the roads were pretty clear by the time we got going. We skied around a flow on Saturday and ate oranges deep in the woods. More snow on Saturday night freshened up the trails for Sunday and we headed out in the opposite direction.
On the way back we stopped for fuel and I gave Jeff a crisp hundred dollar bill to give to the cashier while I pumped the gas. I pumped twenty nine dollars worth of gas and went in to go to the bathroom. Jeff naturally assumed I was going for my change bit I had one thing on my mind. I found the gas station on a Google map and called the place. The drawer was over seventy dollars but Cassandra told me they couldn’t mail it it. They will hold it for me and I will have drive back to pick it. I asked to speak to her manager and she said Leslie will call me in the morning.
Leave a comment
Winter is getting away from us. The death knell is the Saint Patrick Day decorations that are going up all over. I took this photo while driving through downtown Rochester in Friday morning’s snowstorm. Most of that snow has already melted.
Leave a comment
I rode out to the Apple Store with my father and the place was packed, I mean really packed, because school kids were off for the week. My father is working on a presentation in Keynote that he plans to project from his iPad to group at the Buckland House in Brighton and he had all sorts of questions for the geniuses. Matt and Kim were playing on the sound system. I checked out the new MacBooks and grabbed a cup of espresso from Starbucks. On the way out of the mall we walked through FYE in the last days of their going out of business sale. All these kids were picking through crap marked 90% off while my father and I were standing in the jazz section talking a Buddy Rich record he heard at a friend’s house when they were kids.
Duane Sherwood called to discuss building a Facebook business page. They can look a little different than your neice’s page but not much. He sent me a few links to developers tips. I joined Facebook in order to help a business client use it and I let my own page just sit there occasionally checking in or cross posting a blog entry. Every few months I cleaned out the photos that populated my profile page, photos that someone else had posted with me tagged in them. If you don’t construct your own page Facebook pretty much constructs one for you with the photos your friends put up. I decided to do something about this and posted a couple folders of photos from my iPhoto library. I am only slowly getting with the program so I am probably the last person to ask for advice about using your fb page to get new business.
I spent a few hours yesterday cleaning up my YouTube channel. Actually spent most of the time watching my favorites like The Squires of the Subterrain “Sweet”, Rich Stim’s “Major Pipe” and Ornette Colman’s “Made In America.”
1 Comment
Bill Jones asked for a little help moving his type making equipment around. The router, the band saw and every one of those big green woodworking machines are heavy. Bill makes wood type from oversized patterns. You can’t be around all this stuff without dreaming about type projects, signs or posters that you could put together with all these little wood pieces. I’m thinking about a letterpress cover for the upcoming Margaret Explosion single.
On the way over, a ten minute ride, I scanned the college radio band and found Matt & Kim’s “Silver Tiles” on WITR, Althea & Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking” on WRUR and Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” on WBER. I thought my iPod on shuffle was pretty good.
Leave a comment
Sculptors and artists in general have their hands full competing with nature.
1 Comment
We walked to the library in last weekend’s snow and picked out a double sided dvd (Does anyone get books at the library anymore?)” We curled up last for the double feature.
I certainly admire people who do things.” Bruno said this to Guy as he sat down next to him on the train in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 movie, “Stranger On A Train.” Bruno, a mama’s boy, who was wealthy enough to not work hated his father and had hatched a plan to get rid of him. Guy was supposed to be the good guy but in the Hitchcock’s hands Bruno was more likable. Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley) wrote the novel and she makes a cameo in a record store. Hitchcock’s cameo has him hopping on a train with a stand up bass that is as big as he is. And Hitchcock’s daughter gives an sizzling performance. We watched both the Britsh and the American version last night. The British one supposedly had homosexual overtones that escaped the American style censorship but we didn’t spot the extra footage. Both were amazing.
Leave a comment
My parents took us down to Nick’s for dinner last night and the conversation eventually turned to the old days. My father, who grew up on Burlington Avenue over on the west side said there were two bakeries near his house on Brooks Avenue and another around the corner on Thurston. My mom talked about the ones near her place on Rosewood Terrace and lamented how now all we have is Wegmans where everything tastes the same. I was thinking about the Vergennes Laundry, a bakery in Vermont with an artfully presented small selection of incredible breads and pastries, so good it is almost worth driving to for a loaf.
This article in this morning’s paper has researchers concluding “The more ‘friends’ people have on Facebook the more likely they are to be stressed out and anxious”, according to a new study and “the negative effects of using the site outweighed the benefits it offers in terms of staying in touch with friends and family.” I like how they put ‘friends’ in small quotes. I have no idea who most of my ‘friends’ are and if I used Facebook as more than just a lark I would probably get stressed out too.
The other tech story I found interesting was about how blogs are getting less popular as everyone moves to fb.
4 Comments
Somehow Margaret Explosion wound up with a long running Friday Happy Hour slot at the Bug Jar. This was back when Casey ran the place and Bug Jar Bob booked the bands and arranged the lighting and Steve Brown took care of the business and grudgingly stood behind the bar on Fridays. Rolling Rocks were a buck a piece and Casey brought in vegetarian Indian food.
Pete LaBonne named the band and played bass. Jack Schaefer played guitar and a parade of people sat in. We called our first cd “Happy Hour” and that vibe is an essential part of our sound. Rick Simpson played a song from that cd on hi WRUR show last night and it struck us how much the band has changed.
In 1998, before the band started one Friday, I took photos of everyone at the Bug Jar on one of those evenings, everyone who would let me take a photo of them that is, and I printed them out for a show of Mug Shots that went up a few weeks later.
Danny Deutsch invited us to play a Happy Hour at 6 tonight and Bob Martin has rounded up a batch of videos to project on the front wall of the upstairs lounge there. The Abilene site says there’s free munchies and there’s no cover. Sounds like fun.
In the second set at Abilene last night Don Preston looked up from his keyboard, quickly scanned the slim crowd, and asked “What is this? Is this a beer hall or is it somebody’s house? He didn’t wait for a reply or hear Bill Jones mutter, “It’s a gay bar” but he chuckled to himself as he and Bunk Gardner dug into “Holiday in Berlin”.” It was such a treat to see these two old guys (they were old when they were in the Mothers) jump off the cover of The Mother’s 1968 album cover for “We’re Only In It For The Money” and come to life in 2011 in the paint-by-number room at Abilene . They sounded great as a sax/keyboards duo but Don kept turning on some pre-recorded drum tracks and they didn’t need them.
Between sets I told Bunk Gardner how Dave Mahoney and I returned to our little house while tripping to find someone had broken in and stolen our stereo with “Burnt Weeny Sandwich” still on the turntable. They left us the empty gatefold album to look at until we bought another copy. Bunk’s pictured in there but he didn’t seem too impressed by my story. I said, ‘You know. The one with ‘Little House I Used To Live In’ on it”.
Leave a comment
It seems miraculous that the chipmunks are out. We watched them pack their small caves with nuts in the Fall and now they’re out darting around on the piles of snow. We hadn’t seen any deer in weeks and we were speculating that they too were hunkered down in the cold but today we watched a group of eight up move across a hillside. There was a pileated woodpecker up in one of the trees too but we couldn’t spot it. Sounded like a jackhammer. We interrupted a hawk who was devouring this squirrel right in the middle of our path. On the way back the squirrel was gone.
Pete LaBonne has a song called “Code Of The Great Outdoors” with the refrain, “better out, better out, better out than in.” It’s on his “High Time” release, same album as “Punk Rock Dressing Room” and only seven bucks for the download!
Leave a comment
We approached Pete and Shelley’s mountain kingdom by sea on the Port Henry ferry that is temporarily replacing the Crown Point bridge which is currently being rebuilt. Lake Champlain separates the two states but there is a whole lot more at play. We spent some time looking at the New York mountains from the Vermont side and then the snow capped Vermont peaks from the New York side and we couldn’t quite put our finger on the difference in the two states. It is mostly perception but that is a lot.
There was so much snow up there we kept skiing into three feet of powder and getting so bogged down that we were tempted to take our skis off but we knew full well that would be the last anyone would see of us. We sat around the stove enough to learn what a condition called “Granny’s Tartan” is all about.
We came home without driving on the Northway or the New York State Thruway proving the adage that it is not the destination but the journey. We whizzed by a sign that read “Highway Hair Cuts”, hand painted in all caps. I pictured a brush cut with a flat top.
Rick Simpson played Pete LaBonne‘s “We Live Like Kings” on his radio show last week. I plan to request it this week.
Gary and Kathy come see Margaret Explosion quite a bit and they were telling us how much they like Vergennes. Gary called it “the smallest city in the US.” But the sign on the way into town read, “The Smallest City in Vermont.” All we knew about Vergennes was that Ted and Janet Williams used live in a museum there. They were the caretakers and Ted was the editor of the newspaper there, the oldest in the US until it folded. We asked around but couldn’t find the museum. We spotted a few posters for Chad and Jeremy who were playing that night at the Vergennes Opera House (which also doubles as the Vergennes Town Hall).
We had a delicious dinner at the Black Sheep Bistro. We couldn’t get in until eight at night because the place was booked. People drive down from Burlington to eat here and they are celebrating their tenth year so you know they are doing things right. The salads are incredibly crisp and distinctive. The walls are covered salon style with old drawings and prints. We sat near a Daumier. I had the vegetarian lasagna which had no pasta but held together like Mama Tacones.
The next morning we stopped in the Vergenes Laundry, a stylish bakery with white walls, steamy windows, rocket fuel espresso, wifi and some delicious bread. We drove up to Burlington and walked up and down the pedestrian friendly Church Street. Pretty idyllic up there overlooking Lake Champlain. They pipe soft classical music onto the street but this morning it was interrupted by some students cranking The Mothers’ “Trouble Coming Every Day.” It occurred to us that we had forgotten to feed the meter so we ran back to the car and got out of town.
1 Comment
When I catch myself bearing down on a painting I know I’m doomed. I will be trying to get a clunky part of the painting to look right and I’ll lose the whole when I think I have the part right. I wish I had the foresight to not go down that road again but I will. It is almost easier to start over but I don’t usually take the easy route and that is another paradox. “Painting is not supposed to be easy or everyone would do it.” That’s one of Fred Lipp’s quips.
Another curious observation is that my paintings look better up close when they were painted from afar. That is provided I like what I painted from afar. And conversely when I work up close and think it looks great, I step back and cringe. I’ve tried long handled brushes and painting at arms length. I’ve put the painting on the floor while painting standing up. These methods work but they are rather cumbersome. I’m convinced there is some sort of force field between me and the painting where all the problems lie and I know I’m better off to stay out of there.
1 Comment
You can stream “A Walk Into The Sea” from Netflix but it was so much more fun to see it last night with a crowd in the Little Theater’s big venue “Theater 1.” Rochester Contemporary sponsored the event, an unusually arty documentary about Andy Warhol’s lover, Danny Williams, a film maker who disappeared and the following discussion. The beautiful black and white footage in the movie is all Danny’s except for a bit of “Chelsea Girls” and it was all edited in camera. Some great raw footage of the Velvet Underground and the Factory crowd all wrapped in a “who was using who?” who done it.
1 Comment
Ten days left to get down to LDR and put your guess in for the number of beans in this jar.
It is not every day in this viral world that you get two drum videos being called to your attention. John Gilmore sent us the top ten drummers of all time according to Rolling Stone and then Brian Peterson sent us this one of a young kid kickin’ it to a Joan Jett anthem.
I’ve been going to the same dentist for many and I think he’s great. His son thinks he’s pretty cool too because he named his restaurant after his father. We had dinner there last night and I’m reporting in that Rocco’s has the best grilled octopus salad in the world or at least in Rochester where it is almost impossible to count the number of Italian restaurants.
1 Comment
We took any extra long ski through the fresh snow and up to the lake. It was cold, like ten degrees or something, so we went Muslim style in our Refrigerator hats. We barely got back in time to make it to painting class and we hadn’t eaten so we stopped at Palermo’s deli on Culver. They have $6 meals and we split one with roasted potatoes and a carrot/raison dish, an unbelievable deal. We sat the great big butcher block table and split a chocolate eclair for dessert.
After class we headed over to Abilene to drop off a few posters for the September 18th Margaret Explosion gig. We had a drink to celebrate Peggi’s birthday and chatted with Richie the bartender. For some reason he knows a lot of the same people we do but we hadn’t really connected until recently. Rochester works that way. He told us about the time he emptied the trash out and locked himself out of the bar. I think we had already heard that story but this one was better. He got someone from the gay bathhouse next door to help him out and by chance there was a guy sitting at the bar with us last night who was from out of town but staying in one of the seventy some rooms they have at the bath house with holes in the wall and all. He went out back to smoke between each drink and then started hitting on the two girls at the end of the bar. He told them where he staying and bought them each a drink. We were only good for one drink but could have talked to Richie a lot longer. We were just getting started.
Leave a comment
You can never tell what the cross skiing will be like until you get out there. The other day it was plenty cold and we had a few inches of new snow but the sun was shining and the snow was sticky. It was above freezing today, in fact it started raining while we were out there, but we moved along just fine. This has been the best winter we can remember for skiing.
Southtown Beverages is one cool spot. They had both of doors open today and a pretty steady flow of drive through traffic. Of course it is the day after the Super Bowl. We watched the big game over at my parents on big tv. My mom said the guy with the big black curly hair reminded her of Brad Fox. Brad lived at our house for a while a long time ago. Peggi and I were the only ones routing for Pittsburgh but neither of us really gave a hoot in fact Peggi spent most of the game loading up their Netflix queue on my father’s iPad.
We stopped in Old Navy and Peggi bought some jeans. It’s her birthday tomorrow. Happy Birthday Peggi! We stopped t pick up Chinese on the way home and I ordered Jalapeno Tofu and we each ordered fresh Spring Rolls. The total was was $21 and it seemed kinda cheap but when we got home we found out there was no Jalapeno Tufu in the bag. Something was lost in translation.
5 Comments
We got a personal invite from Heather Erwin so we started First Friday at her place. Met an up and coming photo journalist there and told him I thought photo journalism was getting better. This opinion is only based on the number of photos I’ve cut out of the newspaper lately.
We cut through the creepy leather store in Anderson Alley and stopped in the Bop Shop. I had tried to download Billy Bang’s newest, “A Prayer For Peace”, but it wasn’t in the iTunes store and I thought I’d pick up the cd here but they were sold out. Like any good record store Rick made a persuasive argument for picking up another cd, “Tara’s Song” by Ahmed Abullah who used to play trumpet with Sun Ra. His band does two beautiful versions of Ra tunes and a amazing cover of Ornette’s “Lonely Woman.”
Onward to Record Archive where Lucinda Storms showed some brand new luscious Valentines Day paintings. Stan Merrell was onstage playing a therimin. Alayna offered us Genny Bock Beer and we settled in for some free ranging conversation. Rick Simpson who had earlier tried to sell me a down jacket that he picked up at Eddie Bauer for forty bucks and was now trying to sell the coat to Jeff Spevak. Jeff’s dad had just died and he wrote a beautiful piece on him. Stan and Brian Williams tried to help me find the black and white mode on my new Nikon and I bought one of the Dick Storm’s appropriation t-shirts. He did a tempting Warhol VU banana one but I went for the bright green “Archive Rock Beer” shirt.
It was only fitting that Wendell Castle would be holding court when we got to Rochester Contemporary for the Makers/Mentors show featuring his work. Perhaps Rochester’s most successful artist, he has influenced a generation of woodworkers.
We were looking at the other makers’ armor art with Martha O’Connor when Martha exclaimed, “Of course!” It dawned on her that Nancy, Wendell’s wife, had certainly crafted these dwarf sized amour suits to hang in their “castle.”
We discussed going to Abilene for the Spampinato Brothers but had spotted a beautiful black and white snow scene painting on the First Friday website so we headed off to a place called the Living Room Cafe on Monroe Avenue. Perfect name! A small crowd was watching “Reality Bites” on a projection tv. The screen was pulled down over some of the paintings that we had come to see but this place was comfortable. We were offered a free cup of coffee and stuck around for the rest of the movie.
1 Comment
When you travel somewhere you experience that place intensely. You are stimulated by the new environment.
I’m reading this book on Philip Guston’s Roma paintings, paintings that I once thought slight, as if Guston could do slight and as if I am worthy to judge a Philip Guston. Guston got more sculptural in Italy in an direct, elementary way painting monuments and shaped shrubbery and looking at Morandi and the Italians.
Leave a comment
