I remember riding my bike in the city and some kid saying, “Take a picture. It’ll last longer”. I was ten or so and I must have been starring at him. I thought of that incident today when I was making beans and rice. Peggi said, “That looks nice”, so I took a photo.
It’s really just the recipe right of the can or at least it used to be on the can before Goya reworked the label. It was called “Cuban Rice and Beans”. If I remember it right it calls for sauteing garlic, onions and pepper (I used jalapenos from our garden) in a little bit of olive oil and then adding black beans out of the can along with some oregano, roasted peppers (I used a small jar of these) and a few teaspoons of vinegar. We made Basmati brown rice and served the beans over it. There’s enough left over for tomorrow.
Peggi Fournier of Personal Effects performing live Scorgie’s in Rochester, New York
The weekend zipped by and I never found time to paint so I’m thinking of taking Columbus Day off (just like the mail man) and getting some painting in then. I also want to fix the leak in our skylight if I can. It’s supposed to be warm again. It was almost eighty today but we spent most of the day down at the pool fixing the leak in our our pump.
Personal Effects was asked to play the Scorgies Reunion on Friday, November 21st at the German House in Rochester. We got our first rehearsal in last week and we dug up a bunch of old songs to teach Ken Frank (the newest PE bass player) and relearn ourselves. Most of the songs were fast! I found this slow one to try next week.
The water temperature in the neighborhood pool was down in the fifties so we decided to close the pool this weekend. As current presidents we made the call and emailed our neighbors to be down at the pool at 9:30 this morning. We took the diving board off and put it in the pump house. We threw some Algaecide in the water and put the cover on. We put the chairs and tables in a pile and covered them with a tarp and then drained the pump.
We were basically done and I was ready to go back home at 10:30 and have some breakfast but Jared was itching to get going on a project that we said we would do in the fall. Next thing you know I was swinging a sledgehammer at the sidewalk so we could repair a leak in the hose that ran back to the pipe. We took about ten trips back to the house pick up tools and Peggi, Jared and I drove to Home Depot to pick up some concrete and plastic plumbing parts. We stuck the parts together and had to come to clean up in time be out at Alice and Julio’s for dinner at six.
Each year Earl Carsorla comes home with his dad for the Jewish holidays and we get together at Maureen’s house to watch his tapes from the last Burning Man thing. I thought it was pretty funny that someone torched the man early last year but Earl and his buddies were kind of upset with that. This seems like the kind of event Dave Mahoney would like, lots of sun, young, healthy hippy type, girls/women and some nudity. I went to Woodstock with Dave and Earl’s footage had me thinking of Dave. I can only handle so much of the Mad Max, covered in sand, voyeurism and then I want go do something but I like hang out in Maureen’s kitchen or check in with my blog in her computer room.
Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric in Rochester New York
Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby were about a half hour late showing up for their gig at the atrium in Village Gate. It seems the shows usually start mercilessly on time at this venue so we were happy to be the same schedule as Eric. And it was Eric were here to see. Our friends and neighbors, Rick and Monica, were here too but it was Amy Rigby who got them out of the house. It was funny to see the folky/singer/songwriter crowd mixing with the punky/oddball crowd. And these guys pulled it off.
Eric wanted to be home and who can blame him. They live in the south of France. They started with an anthemic call to “Keep driving until the wheels fall off”. These two are clearly in love so one of the lines was, “When we’re driving together, at least we’re a little closer to home”.
But Eric was most entertaining between songs when he just ran away at the mouth. They had played in Canada the night before and he told the crowd, “Canadians are the most unvulgar people I have met in my life. You people, on the other hand, look quite vulgar to me”. Matt, who records most shows for the Bob Shop, had his black mannequin head with binaural mics set up down front and Eric said he like to thank the head for showing up tonight. They had been in San Francisco and Chris Wilson from the Flaming Groovies came out to see them and told Eric that Cyril Jordan was a fan of Eric’s. He was quite blown away by this.
Amy is Eric’s biggest fan and she laughed heartily at all his nonsense. She sang some great songs as well like the one with the refrain, “Last night I was dancing with Joey Ramone”. I played drums for a while with another couple, Mary and Jon (Gary), and Amy reminded Peggi and me of Mary.
Eric and Amy rocked fine without drums and certainly didn’t need the cheesy little drum machine they used on a couple songs. They tore it up on “Kilbourn Road”, “Take The Cash K.A.S.H.” and “Whole Wide World”. They played for over two hours and seemed to be having a ball. Amy said this had been the best crowd of their tour and I was there when Tom Kohn paid them their measly 400 bucks. Not that Tom made and money. All is not right with this world.
Brian Peterson sends out a photo a day (almost) to those on his mailing list. I love this one. I’ve cropped it here but you can click on it and see the whole thing. It’s really beautiful.
Speaking of beautiful. I have have fallen in love with another painter’s work. Her name is Mary Heilmann and I had never heard of her until the article in this Sunday’s paper. Peggi read it aloud to me while I was driving back from the mountains and I couldn’t wait toget home to just look at the pictures for a while. There is a slide show that goes along with the article. Now I’m looking for a slot to drive down to New York to see her show at the New Museum.
I’ve been chasing down a tiny little leak in our roof for the last few years. It is somewhere near our skylight and I have dabbed black roof cement everywhere up there. It is headed into the seventies this week so I’m thinking of getting up on the roof this afternoon and going at it again so that the stuff melts and seals this thing. These sorts of projects are more fun than web work these days.
As presidents of the neighborhood pool, we scheduled a pool closing get together for Saturday. Peggi sent out an email blast to the street and so far three households say they can’t make it. Why would anyone want to be president? In our case it is a rotating obligation but what is compelling Obama and McCain to do this? McCain wants to be Commander in Chief and I’m not sure why Obama is in this race but I am routing for him. I’m thinking of leaving painting class early so I can catch the action in tonight’s so called debate.
Who came up with this bogus format anyway? The hall is full of undecided voters and they get to ask the questions. Why should we care what anyone who has not been able to pick between these two yet thinks? I know that sounds kind of elitist. Giuliani threw out huge slabs of red meat to the crowd at the GOP convention. How about they pass out tomatoes and we decide which candidate to throw the stuff at? That’s not elitist.
Our next door neighbor, Leo, put this wood splitter together. It is a Heathkit like the stereo systems that early hobbyists built. Peggi’s dad was one of those. He put their first amplifier together in the fifties. My college roommate’s father, Harmon Hoy, built one too and his son, Steve, brought it to school with him. One of the first things Steve said to me was, “Mind if I put one of these stereo speakers on your desk?” I had been gearing up to study in college because I never did that in high school and that question and it’s implications pretty much put an end to that effort.
I borrowed the wood splitter this morning to work on the wood we pulled up from behind our neighbors house when a few trees blew over. I only got through a few pieces when a bolt broke on the handle that drives the shaft and wood toward the blade. I bought a new bolt but we will have find someone to weld the piece fitting on the end of the new bolt. I’m thinkin of giving Sparky a call tomorrow.
Peggi made dinner with the grilled vegetables and pasta recipe from this morning’s paper and it was sensational. We have a Netflix double header of “I Walk With A Zombie” and “The Body Snatcher” for after painting.
We spent the weekend in what some people are now calling New York’s Tech Valley“. The area stretches from Montreal to New York City and there we were equidistant from the two cities in the middle of a dead zone. That means no cell towers, no cable, no wifi and where we were, no land lines for phones.
Getting off the grid is exhilarating. I brought some old newspapers but they are out of reach here as well except for the an old issue of the El Paso Times that came in a box as wrapping for some framing that Shelley had ordered for her stick pictures. I was thinking how how cool it would be to be able to get a subscription to a variety pack of newspapers so that one day you would receive a newspaper from Tennessee and the next day it might be from Los Angeles or El Paso instead of Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle everyday. I had a paper route for five years and developed a newspaper fix that I have never been able to shake. This may not seem as exciting an idea to most people as it it does to me.
We missed Mike Allen and his brother Lou at Mez this weekend. Mike was the lead singer for a bands in high school and I remember his brother being a great drummer. I was looking forward to hearing them do jazz standards.
On the way back into town we stopped in to say hi to Peggi’s mom. She had the Bills game on and they were losing. She tried calling her friend, Alice, to see if she wanted to join her in the dining room for dinner but she dialed Alice’s phone number on the tv remote and I watched as the channel changed to every station in Alice’s phone number.
Shelley Valachovic opening at LORAC in Glens Falls New York
We took a leisurely, leaf peeping drive through the Adirondacks to Pete and Shelley’s place near Crown Point. The color was amazing. We lost track of time. Peggi thought she saw snow but it may have been a white cloud in front of one of the high peaks. We stayed too long at Cabin Fever in Star Lake, talking to Irene Baurschmidt’s husband. He was telling us that he used to do “set up” for the Invictas and he was going to do it again for them at an upcoming gig at RIT.
We were going to hook up with Pete and Shelley and drive down to her opening in Glens Falls but we were about an hour late. They were pulling out when we pulled in and we passed each other and then both turned around and then passed each other the second time. We didn’t even see them the second time and we weren’t sure that they had seen us the first time so drove on trying to catch up with them but we never did. We were right on time for the opening and Pete and Shelley showed up about a half hour later.
Shelley’s work is beautiful and we met a lot of their friends and neighbors that we have only heard about until now. We made dinner out of the little egg salad sandwiches. We were happy to that Glens Falls has a minor resurgence going on with a lot of transplanted New Yorkers settleing down here. On the Northway heading back up to Pete and Shelley place we tuned in Toronto’s “Friday Night Bandstand” on AM 740. This is a real radio show with a dj playing obscure singles and b sides along with the old familiar stuff. We only recognized about every other song or so and we were there in the first place.
Just like the Soccer Moms and Joe Sixpacks, we were really looking forward to the debate tonight and it sort of disappointed. The bar had been lowered so far that Sarah won by not completely blowing it. And when you think about Dick Cheney, Palin did look pretty vice presidential. I have a pretty good track record of picking the losing limbo dancer and I hope I’m wrong this time.
How do you go about drawing in a cornfield at this scale? The articles say it took the farmer eight hours to mow his corn field in this Palin pattern but how do they work on this huge scale? Does someone project an image on the field? I might want to do some big crime faces.
Sometimes its easier to find a site with Google even when you know the domain name. And then there are always the diversions. I found the Korean Pop Wars and just added this Popwar “Word Beanie” to my wish list all on the way to my blog.
Monica emailed me from the Memorial Art Gallery today. She needs the Marlene Dumas books back that I borrowed. Excellent timing because “Measuring Your Own Grave”, the Marlene Dumas book from her upcoming MOMA retrospective, just showed up from B&N online.
A bird flew into our kitchen window this morning while I was having coffee. It’s lying upside down on our deck. I have to get out there and give it a proper burial. I promise not to photograph it. I never got around selling my 3 mega pixel Kodak when I bought the 5 megapixel Sony that I had until I bought my new little Nikon so I gave it to Pete and Shelley when they were here last. They sent a photo of a mouse that they caught in a trap. I probably won’t post that either but I wanted to acknowledge receipt of it. It’s nice to know they are using the camera. It all happens with solar power up where they are.
I brought this painting into class tonight for a show that our class is having in the gallery down at the Workshop but while in class I addressed some problems on a different painting and then decided to leave that one there for the show. My father takes this painting class with me and his neighbor teaches a watercolor class at the Workshop. This neighbor/teacher was telling my father that he does a demonstration in every class and the people love it. My father said he told the neighbor that Fred has never done a demonstration in class the the whole time he has been there. He is just not that kind of teacher.
But Fred may have overheard this conversation because one of the first things he did tonight was say, “May I have attention for a few minutes?”. He went on to say, I see a lot of you are working from a photograph and I just wanted to say that there is a misconception out there about photography. People feel that photos don’t lie and of course they do. Photos haven’t been sorted out unless they were taken by a really good photographer, someone who made decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. And if it is a really good photo that you are working from, all the decisions have already been made for you. It is already done. And why would you want to repeat what you already know? You need to get at the reason you were attracted to the photo in the first place.
To do a good painting you need to be stimulated. You need to solve problems. You need to try things to see what works and what doesn’t. The fun part is the hard part. It is a bit masochistic. This is pretty much what Fred said and it was a pretty dramatic demonstration.
I, on the other hand, am attracted to and work from really bad photos, mugshots from the newspaper as of late, but this applies directly to my process. I am just starting to learn that just because some dude has a neck or two ears or two same size eyes or whatever, I don’t have to paint everything that is in the photo the way it is in the photo. I used to try to reproduce the bad photo and I found this hard and frustrating. Making decisions on what to paint and what not to is not any easier but it is less like beating your head against a wall.
We had to do a Mapquest search to locate Greece Athena High School. We rarley get over to the west side of the city and we were looking for the Performing Arts Center, the same place where Bush gave his sales pitch for Social Security privatization. The whole town is red but we were trying to forget about politics for the afternoon and enjoy the opera.
The Barber of Seville has some pretty familiar music in it. The barber’s name is Figaro and we can all sing that. I heard a Queen cover in the overture too. I was sitting in the back while Peggi attended to her mom in the bathroom. I was there for most of the first act until an usher came in and told me that my wife was looking for me. As I suspected, we would now be heading back to her mom’s apartment so that she could get cleaned up. They never saw any of the opera. I’m down in the computer room on a Windows machine. We plan to head out again, this time to Mario’s, my mother-in-law’s favorite Italian restaurant.
Paul and Fran Dodd jumping in a quarry in Bloomington Indiana
I think it was the summer between my brother Fran’s junior and senior year in high school when my parent’s had had enough. They asked if Peggi and I would take Fran for the summer. We said yes and they drove him out to Bloomington and dropped him off.
He got a part time maintenance job at Peddler’s, the woman’s clothing store that Steve Hoy’s sister ran. I was finishing concrete for a construction company and Peggi was working as a dental assistant. Dave Mahoney was working in the dorms and he lived down the street from us. We all spent a lot of time at the nearby quarries. We didn’t usually wear bathing suits but we did when my parents came back out to pick him up. My father took this shot. You can tell which one of us was more of a rebel rouser by the body language in this shot.
Like everyone else, the chipmunks are slowing down this time of year. Whether they are too fat and complacent from the the bountiful summer or just getting sleepy in preparation for winter hibernation, they are piling up at our door. And our cat, Ornette, is responsible for the slaughter. I guess he thinks he is doing a good thing, bringing them up to the door, like he’s doing his share to put bread on the table. At most he puts puncture wounds in their necks and only occasionally will he eat some of the head. I’ve seen some chipmunks get up and take off after this treatment. It’s kinda gross. Today there were three of them. I keep a shovel by the door to scoop them up and then I toss them out back in the woods.
Margaret Explosion at Little Theater Cafe in Rochester, New York
John Gilmore brought a Wegman’s precooked chicken over for dinner last night. We had a salad and some salsa waiting for him but the salsa was too hot for John. We gobbled it all down and raced off to the Little for our last Margaret Explosion gig until November. We’ll use our down time next month to rehearse for the Scorgies Reunion gig. Haven’t touched most of that Personal Effects material in twenty years.
Bob Martin was out of town last night so we played with Jack Schaefer. We got through the night without doing any songs and that is usually a sign that there will be some magic on the recording. Paul Brandwein was there to hear the band and marvel at his art on the walls. We had just seen him at the Billy Bang show on Monday. Mick Sarubbi was there with his mono recording rig set up. That’s his mic in the foreground of this shot. Here’s our recording of one of the tunes from last night. We’ll have to A/B it to Mick’s.
Back home we checked out the photos that John Gilmore took at the Little while iTunes shuffled away in the background. Patsy Cline’s “Does Your Heart Beat For Me?” leveled me for some reason. Does that old stuff really sound better? Is there such a thing as progress or just passage? Like Irene (Palermo) Baurschmidt told me at our reunion, “We’re getting old, Paul”.
Dreamland Faces ignores these issues and plays timeless music. They’ll be playing saw & accordions tomorrow night while Jenn Libby projects some films at the Visual Studies Workshop – 8PM. Pick up a copy of their new BROWN HORN instrumental record while you’re there. I will be entertaining my mother-in-law.
I used the 25 dollar B&N gift certificate that the class gave me for being on the reunion committee to order the Marlene Dumas book, “Measuring Your Own Grave”. The book is a companion piece to her upcoming show at MOMA. She is my favorite living artist.
There was a new guy in our painting class last night doing these abstract, big bang sort of paintings. He is also a fly fisherman so he and our painting teacher, Fred Lipp, spent a good deal of time talking abut locations and lures. I was thinking they ought to come over and catch a few of the flys in our house. We had the doors open round here while we gave them two coats of fresh paint and collected a few. I had one wake me up by insisting on landing on my nose.
Fred was relentless last night as well he should be. “What is this?”, he exclaims as he reaches for his grey paper to cover the offending “neck” in my case. “It looks like a tree stump”. My father, who is set up right next to me, gets as merciless an assault. In his case Fred covered half the painting and told him, “There’s your painting”. He was left with a beautiful Maine lighthouse. My father said, “Hey. I pay for this class”. You get what you pay for and we have it no other way.
Fred has a beautiful watercolor on display in the faculty show at the workshop right now. It’s called “Moving On Out…” Why wasn’t he chosen for the upstate biennial that’s currently on display in the MAG? There is no good answer.
We finished a new sheet music cover today for Tony Stortini. This piece is called “Deep Feelings”. Jack Handy comes imediately to mind. How many design firms are still doing sheet music covers these days? Tony is on a creative roll. We already did art for “Hearts of Gold” which he wrote for his daughter and “Tippy Tap Joe” which was dedicatedf to his brother, Nunzio. Peggi stuck Nunzio’s head on tap dancer that she found online.
It is not just a coincidence that we finished painting our house yesterday and that painting class starts up again today (see class listing below). My painting arm is in good shape, my mind is well rested and I am ready to apply myself to this most engaging discipline.
Don’t let the “Advanced” part of the description scare you. Sign up if you if you’d like to be a better painter. Fred Lipp is the best.
ADVANCED PAINTING – Creative Workshop – Memorial Art Gallery Ten Tuesdays, 6:30–9:30 pm, September 23–November 25 [taught by Fred Lipp] This studio is a place of camaraderie, concentration and honesty mentored by highly respected painter and teacher Fred Lipp. Your work will be carefully seen, reviewed, and nudged along, as you’re challenged to consider what you’re creating, why and (most importantly) how the painting works and can work better. Painters work in a variety of styles, manners and media. Register early as this class fills quickly.
