Saint Francis in Sprng Valley in the Winter, Rochester, NY
Saint Francis of Assisi may have taken a vow of poverty but he seems to be diggin’ his Russian style hat, his mink wrap and whatever that small white animal is in his hands. We pass this redwood chainsaw sculpture over near where the bulldozer guy came through the woods.
The one foot or so of fresh snow is enough of a cushion for us to try the big bobsled like run at Durand so we headed over there on our skis. Peggi said, “We haven’t seen the mayor yet this year,” just as we spotted the man child with an air mattress mounted to a big plastic sled with small British and American flags on the back end and a radar gun mounted to the front end. He had just cracked open a can of Labatt’s Blue and he told us he had reached a speed of 18 miles an hour on his last run. He said he was thinking about getting a “helmet cam”.
Spring Valley view from the top of the ridge, winter 2010
Bitter cold and lots of snow – just the way we like it. The cold part keeps the snow in top notch condition. We skied up to the top of the ridge in Spring Valley and stood up there for a few minutes in silence.
I called Apple today because why not? One of my machines is still under warranty and it was acting up. Hanging up, actually, and they had me unplug the computer and all peripherals and then restart which resets my System Management Controller. I plugged everything back in and it worked – for a while. I had a hunch it was my USB hub because it would disconnect my external drives every once in a while. So I called Apple back asked if it was OK to plug a hub into my keyboard which then goes USB to the computer and they confirmed that that was my problem. The technician also told me to go into my User/Library and dump my “Caches” folder. “Drag the whole thing to the trash.” They suggested that I do that once a moth to speed up the performance of my machine.
Peggi and Olga taking a kumquat break near Lake Ontario.
I first became aware of kumquats while watching a WC Fields’ (“It’s a Gift“) with Joe Barrett when we were kids. Kumquats don’t grow around here but they are plentiful in Wegmans right now. We skiied for a few hours and took a kumguat break up at the lake. I love these things but I suspect they are bad for my teeth. Although maybe I don’t have to worry so much about my teeth anymore now that you can grow new ones. Joel sent me this link. We stopped in to visit our neighbor today and he was lamenting how all his friends are gone. We’ve heard this rap from him many times but this time he coupled it with how he never smoked or drank or used any stimulants like coffee or tea. We could really see the drawbacks of a healthy lifestyle.
We walked through the woods with our neighbors, Rick and Monica, and their dogs. We came out on the gold course and spotted this guy swinging at a dayglo orange ball. The temperature dropped overnight and we got about ten inches of snow so today we skied up to the lake with Olga. We hooked up with Brian Williams later on and I helped him with his computer. He had the same problem my father had with his iPhoto library getting too big for his computer only Brian’s problem was with his iTunes folder getting too big his computer. I wish I could find someone to help me with my php/mysql problems.
The Democrat & Chronicle’s Jack Garner reviewed our new cd over the weekend.
MARGARET EXPLOSION: LIVE DIVE. Rochester’s most unique band offers a new collection of live tracks, recorded over four years at various local venues. ME is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea (and what sort of artist would ever want to be?). They play spacey, floating dreamscapes with smart improvisational skill, carefully listening to each other as they move forward with their own slices of mercurial, musical mood. I’m reminded of some of the Scandinavian free jazz one would hear on ECM Records over the years. Most of the tracks are relatively abstract. One cut, though, offers what surely must be the most offbeat ode to a deceased artist. Who would have thought they’d create a tune called “Sleep Michael Jackson?” — Jack Garner
Our nephew sent us a postcard from Marfa Texas. The card is a color polaroid glued to a piece of cardboard, a shot he took of a building there with a sign on it that read “Sun Ra Building.” The note on the back was typed (with a typewriter). He is decidedly “old school” and I am jealous. Maybe it’s just a y2kX reaction.
Roberta Smith had a great article in Friday’s NY Times Weekend Arts section, entitled “Time, the Infinite Storyteller“, encouraging New Year’s readers to “take refuge in art.” She more or less suggested wandering in the Met and letting the works of art mark the old and formulate the new. She started with works created in 1353 BC and finished by talking about painting. It “is also good for exploring all-too-real forms of psychic time, as in Philip Guston’s aptly titled “Stationary Figure” of 1973. It shows said figure in bed, prostrate — paralyzed really — with a bad case of night sweats or racing thoughts: wide awake, he smokes and stares, at the clock, the bare light bulb, the black sky visible through his window.”
Ken brought his big bass to the Little on Wednesday and it sounded amazing. I fully expected Pete LaBonne to surprise us and show up at the gig even though he emailed that it was too cold in the mountains to leave. The place was packed and the band sounded good as a foursome. Jeanne Perri was there with Trish from the LDR. They brought us a a bottle of a Caravella that Jeanne said was the rage in Italy. It was in a bag that lit up so we displayed it on Peggi’s amp.
I stacked the iTunes deck for New Year’s Eve with Pete LaBonne and Dreamland Faces but it was almost too loud to hear the stereo. The kids kept telling me to turn it up so I cranked it and some guests went in the the other room to escape. I had a separate list ready for when people started dancing and I may have switched to that prematurely. Chris Schepp asked me if I had any music by white guys? I put on Marvin Gaye’s “A Funky Space Reincarnation.” John, Maureen’s friend, told me he had “a perfect palette” and I was trying to imagine what that meant. Someone brought “Blue Moon” beer and I didn’t even get the connection until today. We had more beer left over after the party than when we started. I found two double A batteries in our compost and we had ten empty quart bottles of seltzer when we were done. George Jones’ “Once You’ve Had The Best” came on about three o’clock and Brian Williams shouted “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This.”
I carry a camera with me most of the time. Well, all of the time, actually, except when I’m swimming or sleeping. And so I come home with a lot of photos but I throw most of them out and keep the good ones. I have a big photo library. I keep minis on my iPod and I’m thinking about going “pro” at Flikr so I can see them full screen at other locations.
My father, on the other hand, goes out to shoot photos, mostly birds and moss and barns. He brings home 200 photos at a time and he keeps them all. I thought I was bad but he has manage to fill his computer’s hard disc to the breaking point. I had him sort his hard drive by file size and 90% of it is in his iPhoto library.
So I ordered an external hard drive (one Terabyte for $79 from Buy.com) and found this link on Apple’s site that explains how you tell iPhoto where the library is once you move it out of the “Pictures” folder. You can’t do this in the “Preferences” like you do in iTunes when your music is on an external drive. You basically have to confuse iPhotos by moving the Library and then starting the app with “Option” key down so you can tell it where the photos are.
There is something spooky about that “iPhoto Library” folder. Unlike other folders, you can’t open this one. And yet there are 180 gigs worth of photos in there. I do like the application though. the way it keeps your photos in the original camera format and yet you can adjust the color, crop, straighten, add tags, publish to Flickr etc. The slide shows look great. I would much rather look at a photo on a monitor than print it out. It amazes me that Kodak is still in business.
New Years day is supposed to be near 40 degrees and rainy but the skiing conditions right now are excellent. We skied into the park, around the ponds and up the lake. I took a few photos. I’ll put one up here when I get back home.
My favorite part of Christmas was watching our nephews play “Guitar Hero” while our nieces danced on the furniture. Kids and the avatars bring new life to old songs like “Play That Funky Music” (White Boy) and the Queen/Bowie “Under Pressure”. And I really dug the chick on drums. I was talking to Frank DeBlase at the Bop Shop Christmas party and he told me it’s hard to do if you know how to play guitar.
Chris Schepp used to have a band called “The Floating Anvils”. It figures there was a real heavy metal band named “Anvil”. “The Story of Anvil” worked its way to the top of our Netflix list. I can’t remember who recommended it. Maybe Rich? The movie is almost too real. It gets uncomfortable but we hung in there because Anvil are such sweet guys.
The band was hoppin’ on Wednesday night at the Little and we made the double bonus. We sold six cds and won some new fans. Mike Allen took me out to his car at break time to play some new arrangements of songs he plans to perform. He had recorded keyboard and tone generator bass lines. They were snippets but the essential parts of the songs and here he was singing live over those instrumental parts while in the drivers seat, head back and eyes closed. He did a jazzy version of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ and merged it with a blues tune so the lyric veered into a guy catching his woman (Mommy) making it with another guy. I was knocked out.
John Gilmore made a copy of the Dylan Christmas album for us. I’m afraid Bob has gone soft in the head because the playing and arrangements are so stock they put a spotlight on the Bard’s croak. His “Who Stole the Kishka” version of “Must Be Santa” is the only decent track. I read a review of “The Jazz Loft Project” somewhere and ordered it for Christmas. I dove into it this morning and love it. In the mood, I was playing a Charlie Parker lp that Roy Sowers loaned us and Peggi’s mom asked, “Is this Christmas music?” Peggi said “Yes” without flinching.
Vic & Irv’s t-shirt advertising remodeling plans that never happened.
We used the Barnes & Noble gift card that our investment advisor gave us to buy the “I Slept With Joey Ramone” book for Duane for Christmas. A virtual regift. And then walked over to the big Wegmans to buy some Chinese take to eat with Peggi’s mom. When we got to her apartment she was watching Anthony Bourdain. I had never seen the show but Peggi told me that her mom had a wild crush on him. He went to Baltimore, Detroit and Buffalo last night and I really liked the show. It was a lot of fun to eat to.
I know he was just in Rochester but if he comes back he should do a segment down at Vic & Irv’s. Our friend Duane got in town today and he helped us shoot some photos of John Gilmore’s paintings and then we went down to the lake for dinner. Vic & Irv’s is every bit as colorful and good as any of the places Bourdain stopped in last night. The chef was wearing shorts and a t-shirt advertising their remodeling plans the never happened. I asked if I good get a photo if it.
Bobby Henrie and the Goners doing their Christmas show at Abilene in Rochester, NY
Winter is just getting started and yet the days will get longer and the sun will start to move higher in the sky tomorrow. The “pagan” solstice is reason enough to celebrate but then the early Christians had to glom on their agenda and now it seems like the whole US economy is depending on the Santa Claus crap. Although they deserve it the Catholics resent the Christmas toy invasion. I offer my favorite Christmas story as proof. My first grade teacher, a nun at Saint John’s on Humboldt Street, asked for a show of hands on “How many kids still believe in Santa Claus?”
Dancing to Bobbie Henry and the Goners at their Christmas show on Saturday night at Abilene was a perfect holiday celebration. That would have been enough but gluttony calls. Better loosen your seat belt.
A lot of whacky things seem to happen in Greece, a western suburb of Rochester. Bush visited the ideal community when he was trying to privatize Social Security. The former police chief is on trial and a couple of cops were busted for forced sex. Roderick Scott of Baneberry Way shot a 17 year old kid while he was trying to break into a neighbor’s truck. The kid was drunk and high and Scott claims he was “coming at me” so he shot him with his “legally permitted” pistol in self defense. Why didn’t he just stay in the house until the cops came?
We checked the paper this morning to find out if the “Bulldozer Guy” was convicted and he was but then we got stuck on this Greece story. We even listened to the 911 tapes. The story sort of got under our skin because when we were threatened by Jagger AGAIN, on our walk, it crossed both our minds that we could blow the dog away in self defense if we had a legally permitted weapon.
A few years back I was having a discussion with Mike Deming and he said, “Oh yeah, you’re the ‘half full’ guy”. And I usually am so I didn’t argue. I spotted these coffee cups in a gallery in Williamsburg last weekend and recalled that quip. I had always heard the “half full, half empty” part but didn’t know there more to it.
Back on the street, our host, Duane, pointed to some of the newly painted bike lanes there and he told us a bit about Mayor Bloomberg buying some votes by having the lanes removed before the election so the Hasidic community didn’t have to look at scantily clad women as they rode through there neighborhood. It all sounded whacked but it’s a real story.
I road my bike to the post office this afternoon in fifteen degree weather and because the sidewalks are snow packed I stayed on the road. It gets crazy where Culver meets the Expressway. I’m thinking of painting some bike lanes over there when the weather breaks.
You know that Pete LaBonne song where the guy fine tunes a radio station until it goes off the air? I spent a good bit of the day today in a dentist’s chair listening to an all Christmas satellite radio station. I don’t think I heard a single song with auto tune and yet it seems the entire top forty has been auto tuned.
And another thing. I made some hummus yesterday with a big can of Goya chick peas and a regular size can of Goya kidney beans. Peggi was working on these tables for a client and she called me into the other room while the hummus was pureeing.
The food processor started making a really loud grinding noise and we both looked at each other and at the same thinking “WTF?”. I went back out to the kitchen and it stopped. I pictured a frozen jalapéno from our garden temporarily stuck under one of the blades.
Tonight when we returned from our Margaret Explosion gig we both dove into the hummus and Peggi hit a hard nugget of something. She spit it out and it looked like wood. The hummus tasted funny too and I was thinking it was because I used too much garlic. We threw it away. I guess I could go back to Wegman’s with it but I wonder what Rich Stim would advise.
Not that type of hangover, more like the way you feel after a really long walk. Renewed yet sluggish. And that’s probably why they say, “Great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
Wandering in and out of galleries in Chelsea on Saturday alters your perception of everything. You start by just looking at the art, some great and some dreadful. There are so many galleries in this five or six block area that after a while you lose track of whether the art is on the walls or behind the desks where the gallery attendants sit with Apple monitors or in gallery goers themselves or out on the sidewalk or in the halls of a warehouse where you are desperately trying to find a bathroom.
Duane had parked his car under a tree in Brooklyn (imagine that) and apparently pigeons like that tree so his car was covered with bird do do when we woke up. Fortunately he lives around the corner from Hollywood Lube & Wash, a 24 hour joint, so we took the car over and had them give it a bath. Chores attended to, we walked to the Ft. Hamilton subway stop and rode into lower Manhattan to gallery hop in Chelsea.
We spotted Bill Viola’s name on the door of a building on 26th Street and popped into a series of dark rooms filled with his l”Bodies of Light” videos. Our next stop was the David Hockney show of big bold paintings at Pace Wildenstein on 25th Street. There was a quote from Hockney on the wall that read, “I have taken to thinking of these recent canvases as figure paintings . . . you, the viewer, are the figure in them. If I was the figure in these paintings I would leave.
We continued to wander and found all sorts of fun stuff like the Warhol Polaroids of sports figures and a beautiful Bruce Davidson photo show. Before leaving Rochester, Brian Peterson had recommended a show by “Wallace Berman”, a friend of his Brian’s from his San Francisco days, so we tracked that show down. As luck would have it John Zorn, who had recorded a sound track to Berman’s 8 mm films was performing live in the gallery with Trevor Dunn bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums. The loose limbed Wollensen played with Bill Frisell at last years Jazz Fest. The film was projected on one of the gallery’s walls and the band set up facing the wall so they could play to the film. NY’s first couple, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, were seated in the front row.
We stopped at a green grocers on the way back and picked up a few things for as Duane termed it a “more hippy than Chinese” vegetable dish at Duane’s table and watched Duane’s and Howard Thompson‘s Suicide footage from Detich Galley in 02/02/02.
“Untitled” by Philip Guston from Small Panels show at McKee Gallery
We got out of town ahead just ahead of the other day and drove to my brother’s place in Montclair, New Jersey. We kept his kids up way too late, talking and listening to Christmas records from his vinyl collection. We had breakfast with the kids, who were already late for school, and said goodbye to my brother as he raced off to work. The last thing he said was, “I left part of the paper here for you”. So I dove into the Friday’s Fine Arts section and spotted a Philip Guston painting with a review by Roberta Smith of a show at Midtown’s McKee Gallery. We instantly had an agenda for our New York trip.
We found our way to Brooklyn and parked the car for the weekend near Duane’s apartment. More coffee and the F train to midtown Manhattan for this eye popping show. Philip Guston is my favorite artist and these small panels blew me away. This was a sensational show. Only four of these pieces were for sale. You could pick up all four for 1.3 million.
Even the Metropolitan Museum could not top that show but Robert Frank’s “The Americans” was pretty incredible. The prints were so much richer than the old book I bought at Light Impressions when they upstairs in Midtown Plaza. It was like seeing these by now familiar photos for the first time. We had an eggplant sandwich and a corn muffin at the museum café and then Duane and Peggi went up to see the “Velazquez Rediscovered” show while I wandered off to the Roman art section and to photograph some busts. I can’t get over how contemporary these heads look, like people you know or wish you knew, even though they were sculpted around the time of Christ.
Duane is the perfect NYC guide. He wears an orange hat and Peggi and I just shut off our navigational instincts and gawk and follow the hat and try not to walk into a light pole or something. We took a couple of trains back to Brooklyn and hung out for bit in pad before heading back out to the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg for an art opening. It was a “Multiples and Editions” show and the curator was a friend of Duanes. The thirty five artists all had small, very reasonably priced (for the holidays) art in every nook and cranny of the two funky rooms. Duane bought a pocket sized “Kodak Guide to Photographing Your Dog“.
After the opening we went next door to the Flying Cow, a saloon style Argentinean restaurant. We shared octopus salad and then a beet salad, a bottle of Spanish Rioja and two vegetarian dishes called, “Shangrila”. I spoiled a perfect meal by trying a Morcilla sausage appetizer. I’m a sucker for those Spanish delicacies. The bartender played the whole “Between The Buttons” record and then some Neil Young. We complimented him on the way out.
Martian with her painting “Memories of Home 2” at High Falls Gallery
At the same time Peggi and i were dodging Bleu Cease’s camera at the RoCo Members Show opening last Friday we heard this woman this women ask Bleu if he would take a picture of her in front of her painting. Of course the gallery director obliged. We ran into this same woman on Sunday when we stopped in at the “Upside Down” show at the High Falls Gallery in downtown Rochester. The director, Sally Wood Winslow, introduced me to her when I told Sally that I liked her painting.
The woman uses the name Martian and she took me out in the hall, away from Sally, Peggi and her mom, and she told me a story about how she first became aware of art. Her dad was looking at a magazine that had a feature on Andy Warhol’s soup cans. She said she remembered him ranting about how dumb those people were. “Those people?” I sort of asked. “White people” she said. And I spun out thinking about this.
I used to hitchhike to work at my uncle’s grocery store and I met all these guys from East Rochester. They were a little bit hoodier than the guys in my high school and some already had cars. After work they liked to drive around and drink beer. The drinking age was 18 but we knew spots where you could walk in and buy a six at sixteen, no questions asked. And sometimes we just slipped beer out the back door of the store and hid it near the trash. We’d sit in a car on dead end roads or in the park and listen to the radio. On weekends we head over to Panorama Bowl for the teen dances and then these guys would drop me off at home.
We were always looking for places to dump the empties because we didn’t want to get caught with open containers. I remember one of the guys saying, “just thrown them on the lawn of a nice looking house and the people will pick them up in the morning.” It was so much fun being young and stupid, tossing beer bottles out the window as we careened down a street with the radio cranked.
I’m reminded of those days every time we find Bud cans along the road on Hoffman. Last week somebody dumped this big tire down there. The photo doesn’t offer much evidence of scale but it is at least five feet high.
When my grandfather first came to Rochester he found a job in a shoe factory on Elton Street where Bernie Lehman’s studio and Four Walls Gallery are. Shoes, not just “Made in America” but made in Rochester. i’ve been buying my shoes at Marshalls or Target and they are usually under $50. When they wear out it doesn’t even cross mind to have them repaired or resoled. I take it all these brown paper bag packages are waiting to be picked up so it looks like Sofia’s Shoe Service is weathering the storm.
I came in here with a leather jacket. Not a black biker thing but a cream colored dandy like leather jacket. Peggi’s father bought it on one of his foreign business trips and we never saw him wear it. I inherited it. It zips up on the wrong side like some women’s clothing does. I get compliments on it all the time. In fact Sue Rogers complimented me and I told her how I had wrecked it and she she suggested Sofia’s. I love it in here. I love Dave Kelly’s DA and the black hair and smile on the short woman behind the counter. Dave told me it cost about $35 to repair it and he said he didn’t think it was worth it because the leather was so dry. Thirty five dollars seemed like a steal so I had him go for it.
