Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
It was sixty something today but we still have a few pockets of snow and I’m happy about that. If there is one thing that really bothers me it is when Spring comes roaring in like a lion. Winter is a test of of metal and we fail the test if we give up on it. It makes us stronger when we give in to it and it makes Spring all the more dramatic when it unveils itself. Besides I like the minimalist palette of grey brown with small touches of color.
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This female turkey must be in a state and it probably has something to do with mating. We usually see turkeys in packs in the woods but this one was in our back yard this morning when we woke up and she wandered around our yard all day. She stopped stopped in front of our window and gave us this mighty display.
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Cuong Vu Trio performs their own music tonight in a free concert at Kilbourn Hall. They have been in town for a week while Cuong Vu has been teaching a workshop on creativity. Last night they played six compositions by Eastman students in the brand new performance space Hatch Recital Hall. This is clearly the best sounding room in the city. And “clearly” is a good word for the way you hear sound in this space.
The room is small, 200 or so seats, and it was designed as a “box within a box” so none of the walls come in contact with the rest of the building. The room is live sounding but without added reverb and as natural sounding a space as I have ever heard. It’s nothing like the dead studio spaces of the past. If a band has it’s act together an engineer could put two mics here and be done and the producer would be out of a job.
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“The Guy With The Tie.” We used to use him for copywriting a long time ago. Anne Esse. She’s a great designer and we’ve worked on many projects with her. CompUSA. They’re long out of business. Telesis. Dan Brumley used to work there before he moved to France. We worked on an industrial at Telesis with David Rose. I just saw him the other night at a house concert. Peter Pappas Shadow Match. I have no idea what that was. Bristol Boarding is still making custom cases. We did a brochure for them last year. They’re in the old HH Sullivan building.on Culver. Spectrum Color Lab. Wow. What did they do? Something to do with high end color transparencies. Innovative Type. I think they set type before everyone with a computer could set type. LefThumb Productions. I think Pauli did a film with one of our songs.
Those cards all would up on the top of the heap when I finished a job I had been trying to get to for ages. That is going digital with our contacts and addresses. It took me way less time than I thought because so many of the cards in our Rolodex are from extinct businesses.
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Ossia, the student-run new music performance group at the Eastman School of Music, held their last concert of the 2010-11 season last night in Kilbourn Hall. They performed Philip Glass’s “String Quartet No. 2: Company” and it stopped time. I have no idea how long it was but it wasn’t long enough. I had my eyes closed picturing the clouds in “Koyaanisqatsi” and then it stopped abruptly. My favorite piece of the evening though was “Marsias” for oboe and eight glass goblets by the Mexican born composer, Mario Lavista. The perfect fifth tones from the water filled glasses represented the “celestial” world of Apollo and the desperately melodic oboe stood for “the poet’s eternal search for perfect, precise expression”.
Lavista taught at Indiana University and currently teaches here at the Eastman. I visited his web site this morning and learned “He likes machines with hiccups and spiders with missing legs, looks at Paul Klee’s Notebooks everyday, hasn’t grown much since he reached adulthood at age 14, and tries to use the same set of ears to listen to Bach, Radiohead, or Ligeti.”
Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theater tonight without program notes or a score. Listen to Pit by Magaret Explosion.
My friend Brad, also a drummer, usually has a good drummer joke when we talk but I haven’t heard any in while. We watched a Nilsson documentary a while back and I really enjoyed it. I was not a fan but I am now. Too bad he’s dead. I thought our friend and neighbor Rick would have some of his records on vinyl but the only one he had was “Sandman.” It’s a very odd record with song titles like “Jesus Christ You’re Tall,” “How To Write A Song,” “The Flying Saucer Song,” “Hear’s Why I Didn’t Go To Work Today,” and “I’ll Take A Tango.” The first lines of that last song are “Deep down in my soul I hate rock and roll. And I don’t like the way that them drummers beat on them drums. They always hum along, out of tune.” That hit home for me.
Oh well, there is always painting. There must be some good painter jokes? We saw a show of Richard Butler’s (lead singer in the Psychedelic Furs) paintings in Chelsea on Saturday. I really liked this portrait.
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A note written on the back of a business card next to a full pot of coffee read “Out for bagels, Be back soon.” I hadn’t even finished my PopWars entry when Duane returned with a brown bag full. He got on his computer in the back room and told me I had some of the best typos on my blog. I had written “we opened the widow” in that morning’s post. I can’t spell and I depend on spellcheck so I often use the wrong word because, hey, it doesn’t have a red line under it.
We are not members of MoMA so we had to wait until Sunday to see the “German Expressionism”show when it opened to the public. The museum’s staff staged a dramatic presentation of these powerful, graphic works, mostly prints but some paintings, mounted on grey walls interspersed with deep red, yellow green and mustard sections with the usually offending curator’s notes on colors to match the walls. These details are important in a show with 250 mostly small, mostly black and white works on paper. They come off with a bang.
Otto Dix’s “The War” etchings filled a red wall with updated versions of Goya’s “Disasters of War.” Max Beckman’s 1917 painting, “Descent From The Cross” uses Christ’s crucifixion as a metaphor for war. Kathie Kollowitz’s heart wrenching woodcuts from her series called “War” stand as a timeless display of the emotional costs of war. If they were as powerful as they look we would all learn something from them before heading off to war. None of this work is as grizzly as I’ve made it out to be. Nolde, Egon and Kirchner, all giants of German Expressionism, have a masterly ability to cut to the chase.
We had looked a the “MoMA Abstract Expressionism” iPad app so many times I felt as though we had already seen the show but nothing can prepare you for the impact of these monumental paintings in the flesh. Kline, Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Pollack, Gottlieb and Guston transformed the art world in the last century and their impact is still being felt.
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The Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch is described as notoriously theatrical. That’s him slumped over in the photo above. We didn’t know a thing bout him until we stumbled on the opening a show of his paintings in Chelsea and we were just in time to catch a string quintet, Quintetto Nitsch, performing with Herman. A controversial painter and performance artist, he has staged crucifixions and has been arrested many times, his work plays with religious rituals and our violent tendencies. His canvases looked blood soaked even if they weren’t and created a rich, dark mood with the long sustained drones. We were offered soup after the performance but moved on.
Wandering from one gallery to the next in Chelsea is like putting your iPod on shuffle. It is an experience full of surprises and unexpected juxtapositions and it alters your perception. After immersion in or just glimpses of fifty or so galleries you are open to even the trash piles in the street as art.
Back at Duane’s pad in Brooklyn we opened the window, New York style, to the twenty degree weather. Peggi cued up mxrich videos of Angel Corpus Christi and we streamed half of Fellini’s “8 1/2” before sleeping like babies.
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Rick Simpson came to the door at 7:45 with our two papers. We had arranged to have him bring us to the train station and you’d think we would have been the ones to be in a hurry but Rick said, “Let’s get cracking’.” Rick dropped us off at the train station before we had a chance to finish our coffee so it was an especially dreamy ride across along the Erie Canal and then down the Hudson into the city where we hooked up with our nephew Andrew who’s going to Columbia Law School.
We met at the Gagosian Gallery uptown on Madison Avenue near 77th where where they were showing five sensational paintings by the Russian Avant-garde Suprematist master, Kazmir Malevich. Andrew said he had done a paper on Malevich during his undergraduate days at Penn and had coincidentally finished the assignment in Rochester while visiting.
How does this business model work for Gagosian? Free admission to their gallery on three floors in a high rent district where none of the work is for sale? I’m guessing he represents some of the other artists in the show, “Malevich and the American Legacy”. Maybe Ellsworth Kelly or Richard Serra? Two beautiful black and white pieces by Kelly paid tribute to the master here as did work by Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Ed Ruscha reinforcing how powerful the Malevich pieces are still one hundred years after they were created.
We watched a guy pick lint off his black jacket as he stood in front of a Dan Flavin black light piece.
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I can’t be the only one who is tempted to take a photo of this concrete structure every time we walk by it. It’s on the western shore of Eastman Lake in Durand Eastman Park. The trail along this side of the lake is a bird lover’s paradise and we often spot birders with binoculars and long lens cameras hanging off their necks but in the dead of winter it is usually only us.
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Entering the Finger Lakes Exhibition is harder than doing the work that you are entering. The judges make choices based on viewing your jpeg and color shifts between monitors are a concern, not to mention potentially bigger issues like scale. And what if your piece is a photo installation? Try submitting a whole show in a file under one meg.
View images from “Subterranean Surrogates.”
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Cars used to look a lot cooler than they do now.
We are at war in Libya. Just like that. Good thing we have an all volunteer army.
A friend who lived down the street was in Viet Nam dropping Agent Orange out of a helicopter on anything that moved when my mom made a peace flag. She sewed it! It was a white cloth peace sign on a sky blue piece of material. I remember it being beautiful. We flew it on the flag pole out in front of our house and my friend’s mom got all bent out of shape about it. I remember her calling our house and screaming over the phone while my mom made a rational appeal to her. “Surely you want peace too”, I remember her saying, but the argument continued. This neighbor thought it was flat out wrong to fly that kind of thing while her son was fighting for our country. He was only in the army because he flunked out of Bonaventure and got drafted.
I was so proud of my mom but the thing is a lot of people felt like her and it was a bit of a mystery when the flag was stolen a few weeks later. “Who stole the peace flag?” became the family’s obsession as we weighed the suspicion level of each neighbor. We found out months later that it was the younger brother of the guy who was in Viet Nam. I’ll bet the guys over there were real happy there were people back home working against peace.
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Neil Young must have gone crazy with this super moon thing. He recorded his most recent record on a full moon and people say he plans key moments in his life around full moons. Peggi has woken me up to look at the moon before and she was excited about this “Super Moon.” She put her coat on around sunset and said, “I’m headed down to the beach to watch the moon come up.” That got me away from the computer for a bit and I went down to Durand Eastman with her. It was about 35 degrees as the sun went down and it soon felt colder. We were getting ready to bail when the most dramatic huge moon popped up over the beach houses in Sea Breeze. This thing was spectacular!
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This Witch-hazel, along the road leading into Durand Eastman Park, is in full bloom now. Your nose detects it before your eyes but it but it is not as fragrant as the winter Witch-hazel which bloomed, like a miracle, up in the park in February. Still to come is the Witch-hazel that will blossom to much less fanfare in our back yard in the Fall. They remind me of Geri McCormick’s paintings.
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It was perfect day for the boiling of the beef. Or for an intervention but that’s another story. I wish I had my camera. Nikon had me send the camera back at my expense to fix a lens cover that wouldn’t spring fully open and then told me the replacement part is on backorder! Grrr. If I had the camera I could have pryed the lens cover open to make a movie of our walk through the woods and then the funky little neighborhood of Bloomington style houses (one was for sale for $87,000- just askin’), down Culver Road past the bowling alley and Mastrella’s where we saw the short Elvis impersonator, by the New York Store where we saw new bicycles made in Queens in the window, by the barking dog in front a house with a beautiful view of the lake to Shamrock Jack’s for a sandwich and a pint.
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I left these three drawings at the Creative Workshop tonight. I did them last night for a drawing show that the Workshop is mounting in the next few weeks. No guarantee that they will accept them of course but they were fun to do.
Duane emailed a link to a Neil Young live recording from Carnegie Hall 1970. I downloaded it but haven’t listened to it yet. Our friend and neighbor, Rick, had coincidentally just lent us two British magazines with Neil Young features. Each had a cd of various artists doing Neil Young covers, a tricky proposition that hardly ever works when you’re crazy about the original.
I liked this quote from Neil, saying “I’ve been too concerned lately with moving on so I leave a lot of unfinished and unreleased stuff.” It struck me because it dovetailed so nicely with this quote from Picasso that was in Friday’s NYTs. “I’ve reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”
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Our car still sports an “Obama” sticker and we parked right next to this guy at the post office today. Politics is a rough business and we don’t have any guns so I guess this guy wins. Our car mechanic listens to Rush and our sticker still gets him all riled up. We had a repairman over here the other day and the first thing he said when we opened the door was, “So how’s Obama working out for you now?” Would it be less controversial if we had a McCain/Palin sticker? I guess most people keep their voting preferences private.
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I can picture falling forward as well as springing back so this “Spring Forward, Fall Back” thing has always been hard for me to envision. I might just set my watch forward tonight and get a jump on things so it doesn’t feel like we really lose that precious hour.
We spotted a few crocuses out in our neighbor’s yard and these yellow flowers are out in our back yard. The geese are overhead, flying north and carrying on their own conversation. I found nine golf balls where the snow was as we crossed the golf course today. And we found these beer cans in the the usual spot on Hoffman Road. We were ready for the cans. Peggi had two Wegmans bags in her pocket and we filled them both. We continue to speculate wildly about who it might be that drinks these 24 ounce cans and then chucks them habitually in the same spot. It’s been going on for a few years now and kids would have grown out this kind of thing. Maybe a neighbor or someone who comes down here to drink beer and look at the wildlife.
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I was really taken by these demonstrative plants as we skied around them in the Adirondack Mountains. I kept stopping in the fridig weather to pull my camera out of my pocket and photograph different clusters. They were all expressive, like they were singing opera or something. We had seen them earlier in the winter at Pete and Shelley’s and Shelley told us what they were but we couldn’t remember. We tried looking it up in Shelley’s book but we couldn’t find it because Shelley had drawn it in bloom not in it’s naked winter state. I sent this photo to Shelley and she identified the plant as Hobblebush. Hail the Hobblebush!
I ordered an expresso at the Little last night but Bill told me their machine was still out for repair. In fact, he said the machine was unrepairable and they had a new one on order. He was hoping to have it in by next Wednesday when Margaret Explosion returns. The first set last night felt unfocused but things gelled in the second and the songs swirled around their target. Maybe it was the Sirius “Chill” channel they were playing in the Café during the break.
I was in charge of the car radio on the way home and we stumbled on to “Dig This” (perfect name) on WITR. I wish they wouldn’t call it “witter. The Maestro mixes jazz, funk & hip-hop) on Wednesday nights from 9-11 and he posts his set lists and shows as mp3s on DigThisRadio. Last night’s show was “Extra Jazzy” and featured Ahmad Jamal, Miles, Digable Planets and The Roots.
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In painting class tonight our teacher, Fred, was talking about how expensive oil paints are now. He was speculating that turpentine is now a “hazardous material” and it costs extra to transport things like that. He was saying you can’t even buy commercial oil paint anymore. It’s illegal in California and “as California goes, so goes the nation.” It’s all acrylic or water based enamel now. A tube of paint is thirty bucks or so.
I got the conversation going because I said I was going back to oils after this batch of paintings. I’ve been using kids’ tempera paint and I’m getting tired of how it acts when I try to rework an area. You kind of reactivate what’s below and it gets messy.
Whenever Peggi’s sister was in town visiting her mom she would ask us what freeway she takes to get from wherever to wherever. I’m the wrong one to ask because I’ve lived here so long I just follow my nose and I can’t keep the 490, 390, 590 thing straight. I remember Route 47 doing pretty much the same thing. Anyway, the point is there are no “freeways” in New York. California has freeways. We have expressways and a thruway. So what were they thinking when when they put up this new sign on 590 North where that highway peters out and leads into the four traffic circles?
I don’t really think of MX-80 Sound as a California band but they’ve been there for about thirty years, long enough for vocalist, Rich Stim, to reinvent himself as video king, “MXRICH”. I love his his newest, done for an Angel Corpus Christi instrumental track.
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