Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
I love these tin type portraits that Nicholas Kundrant is showing at Richard Margolis’s Studio this month. The tiny gallery was packed on Friday night. Was every young person that Kundrant photographed there? This one was my favorite. Hard to tell what era the subject is from or when the image was made.
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I sat down to write this entry and find the devil has posted we’re going “BACK TO PLASTIC,” promising to sign an executive order to end the paper straw inititive. I feel like we’re living on the front page of the Onion but we will not let this spoil Peggi’s birthday.
We have a big, big match to watch. Real Madrid with the best stars money can buy vs. Atletico Madrid, the scrappy crosstown rivals. Only one post separates the the two teams at the top of the table. Peggi will be wearing the red Atletico jersey. And after the match we have dinner plans at Tapas 147.
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Every year, before awards night, we put a mini push on tracking down some of the Oscar nominated films. We saw “Eno” and “A Complete Unknown” in the theater. The “Eno” film was exhilarating and should win all the awards. A Complete Unknown was really fun but gone before we got home. I was all wrong about “The Apprentice.” I thought it was going to revolve around his reality tv series, something we never saw in day, but it turns out Trump is the apprentice to a really slimy Roy Cohn, expertly played by Jeremy Strong. He deserves something for going that low. The movie though couldn’t quite capture the devil.
“Emilia Pérez” was pretty far fetched and sort of touching but I can’t imagine why it got all those nominations before the controversy. Demi Moore’s apartment in the “The Substance” was so boring it was distracting. The sci-fi concept was kind of cool in the beginning but it descended into hideous special effects territory.
The two cousins in “A Real Pain” were obnoxious. I found it hard to believe they were the main characters. The Chopin music was obnoxious. The best scene in the whole movie was when the Polish guy told them not to put their remembrance stones on the old lady’s doorstep.
We loved “100 Years of Solitude” but I guess that doesn’t qualify. But why wasn’t “Janet Planet” nominated? We loved that one. Still want to catch up with “The Brutalist,” “Conclave” and “Nosferatu.” Still wide open to recomendations.
*Rich commented on this post and recommended “The Girl With The Needle” and “Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat.” I had forgotten all about “Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat. We watched that one twice and loved it. Crazy amount history that they would like to wipe from the record and a sensational soundtrack. Max Roach. Nina Simone! Louie Armstrong “La Vie En Rose!”
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I have a stack of big pads in the basement filled with ads, newspaper and magazine pages, posters etc. from the late 80’s, early 90’s. I had to move them this afternoon to find way we no longer able t stream to our downstairs speakers. I came across a couple of large Tom Irish (real name – wow) postcards that drew me in. I don’t remember where I picked them up. I looked Tom up online and found he’s from Springville, New York. I had to look that up too – just south of Buffalo. He describes himself as a “visual artist whose style is outsider/folk art, and if you don’t like it, don’t look at it.” He was drafted on his 19th birthday to serve in Vietnam and he recorded his combat experience in a diary of sketches. I would love to see that. I may have to track him down.
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When I cross-posted the image in my last post to IG Joe Barrett commented, “Oh man, I miss real winter.” That’s what he gets for moving away. I miss real winter too but this one works. Peggi and I were part of a group text with our neighbors that turned from the Grammys to “how are you holding up in this deep, dark winter.” We let it go back and forth and then piped in with a note that announced “we are loving the season.” That reminds me, we should check in with Brad.
My brother, Fran was loving this winter too until he got his snowmobile stuck and compressed a disc in his back trying to get the machine out of a drift. He had driven up to Old Forge in the Adirondacks where he rented a room and then drove his sled over to Tug Hill at the eastern end of Lake Ontario where they had had 260 inches of snow this season, the most in the lower 48. He spent the night in the Utica hospital. My brother, Tim, drove up and brought him home.
When I stopped out to see Fran a compressor was making a racket in his garage but I couldn’t find Fran. He was down in his basement with car parts from his Camaro covering every surface of the room. He has taken the car completely apart in order to restore it. I expected to find him in bed but this is how he rolls.
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I remember my father driving along Horseshoe Road on in our family car. It was magical then and has lost none of its charm. It is closed to car traffic now but you will still find pieces of metal hard rails on some of the curves. We walk it in the summer and we skied it today. The road really goes nowhere. It starts on Lakeshore Boulevard along Lake Ontario and it comes back out pretty much where it started. It exists for the ride.
Dog Mom doesn’t care what I think or how I feel but for almost a decade now we have been laughing at Trump’s antics. The guy is entertaining to his fans and his detractors. We watched his news conference today after the helicopter/plane crash and he asked for “a moment of silence for the victims” and then said “thank you” when the moment passed, as if it had been for him. He went on to blame the crash on DEI. With a new outrage everyday it is a perverse to keep laughing but a coping mechanism nonetheless.
Greed was good in the eighties but it was just getting started. Trump has so much money he is untouchable. He will trip up though and Thomas Friedman may have pinpointed Trump’s achilles heel. The beautiful coal and drill baby drill talk is head in the sand even if you don’t give one hoot about the environment but as a business model it is embarrassing. China is going eat our lunch.
Two thirds of Americans want to see major change in our political system. How about we roll back the Citizens United decision so the CEO’s can’t buy the office and then change the way Congress is elected to “proportional representation” like they have Europe. The US is only one four democracies in the world (US, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leon) to have this no compromise, winner take all system. That leaves a lot of good ideas on the sidelines.
2 CommentsFour of the nineteen Margaret Explosion/Invisible Idiot songs now have visuals. This one for Sparky’s Shed was a snap. I collected photos of Sparky, our neighbor for twenty six years, and threw the choice ones into iMovie. I organized them thematically and faded to black under the credits. Sparky tells his own story.
It is funny how we went from being aghast at everything he said – the junk all over his yard, the way he didn’t keep up his property – to being friends. Sparky never changed. We did. He was one of the most colorful people we have ever met.
Leave a commentI don’t know what took me so long to put this “Beach Fires” video together. The clip is one take, there is no editing, and it is as old as the song that I shot the footage for. We were at a Fourth of July party at Mark and Cheryl’s house on Edgemere Drive along Lake Ontario. Mark is in the video and there is kid buried in the sand with only his above above ground, something I didn’t notice until today. After twenty-seven years this is the third video from Margaret Explosion’s “Invisible Idiot” release. The other two are attached below. I’m thinking Sparky’s Shed” has to be the next video from the cd.
At last week’s Skylark gig we gave away copies of our Invisible Idiot cd, released some twenty-seven years ago. Pete Monacelli took the cd home and wrote this verse in response.
What’s In the shadows
What melody
Love
The shadows
Be
Comforted by shadow
Sounds
Shadows silence
Faint sounds
Shadows
Dark is light
Escape
To freedom
Kids still play hockey on frozen lakes. The world is not completely upside down yet. We skied up to the lake, the big lake, the one they used to call Lake Ontario but in the spirit of Manifest Destiny we have renamed “Lake New York.” We have just a few more days of below freezing temperatures and we’re going to enjoy every bit of it.
Leave a commentWithout officially joining Spotify I made this playlist for Madison a few weeks back. I choose fifty 45s from the two stacks that were next to our turntable (in current rotation) and I was able find clean copies of all of them on Spotify. I put a custom cover on the playlist and figured out how to order it although I kind of like random. I was surprised how easy and fun it is to assemble. Algorithms providing plenty of distraction with a minimal amount of advertising.
Today I reassembled my Apple Music playlist, “Stop The World,” on Spotify. I shared the link with Madison again because I learned her parents were married in a Moose Lodge. The band I was in Indiana played all the social clubs (Elks, Eagles, Eagles, Moose, American Legion, VFW) as well as coon hunts. I knew nothing about country back then but I grew to love the classic cryin’ in yer beer stuff. That band, the On Fours, played most of these songs.
The hat certainly threatened to upstage the affair but the bombast when the big guy made his entrance made it clear Round 2 has begun. The “Drill Baby Drill” refrain landed particularly hard after Peggi’s sister almost lost her home in the California fires. But the chorus from my title made us laugh out loud. It was perfect day for cross-country skiing.
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Pete Monacelli, reporting live from the Skylark Lounge, wrote these verses while listening to the band last night.
Last is first
Less is gain
Out is in
Life in abundance
Beginning to end
All are one
Tomorrow is today
Loss is gain
All awake internal dance
Light of life
Wake up
Today is tomorrow
Alive
Conversation
Inspiration
Wake up
To reality
Light is silent
Light is sound
Intense
Hope
Always comes
Back in time
Grooving Primitive
Alive
Inimitablealive
The bottom almost fell out of the middle of our opening song but we managed to rescue it.
Margaret Explosion could very well be a shoegaze band. Far from an early nineties thing, our nephew, Eli, says the genre is bigger than ever. Apparently it all started with Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. Eli is writing a book about shoegaze. We fed him band names trying to get a handle on who qualifies. Were The Feelies shoe gaze?
“Not quite, not enough distortion and reverb. But a band like Galaxie 500, who I guess are similar to the Feelies in some ways, are proto-shoegaze for the dreamy etherality of their vocals/guitar parts.” Damon, Galaxie 500’s drummer, told him that “they were always confused about their association with shoegaze, since shoegaze didn’t really start to take shape until 1990, by which point Galaxie 500 were about to break up.” Eli said you can definitely hear Dean’s ethereal vocals in many shoegaze bands, and the sunset-like atmosphere in their music has a kinship with shoegaze titans like Slowdive.
We mentioned “In One,” a Rochester band that called themselves “shoegaze.” Peggi and I did the 45 cover for them back in the day (1993.) I couldn’t find anything about them online even though the guitar player, John DePuy, is still active with Hinkley so I ripped the seven minute, yellow vinyl, small hole 45 and put it online here.
Just a few weeks back Peggi and I were taking turns reading aloud The New Yorker article about Spotify. This morning we listened to Eli’s recent Endless Scroll podcast and found him interviewing Liz Pelly who wrote the book about Spotify that The New Yorker kept referencing.
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Margaret Explosion plays Skylark Lounge on Thursday, somewhere other than the Little Theatre Café, and it will be Phil Marshall’s last show with the band – until he fills in as substitute that is. We will miss him and we plan to do our best to make this performance a fitting send-off. With the five dollar cover, we also plan to offer free copies of the band’s first cd, recorded with the first lineup under the name “Invisible Idiot” because Margaret Explosion was performing with a different lineup by the time we got into the studio (our living room.)
We’ve been assembling copies of the Invisible Idiot cd all week so despite being twenty-seven years old we’re calling it a re-release. We had the cds printed at DiscMakers and we had the covers printed locally by an engraver, Paul Klem. You should be able to spot the blind-embossed “Invisible Idiot” title at the top of the front panel but it takes some work and is probably easier for a blind person to read. We fold along the score lines, glue the two flaps and weigh the covers down under a stack of books while the adhesive dries.
Back When City was a newspaper they reviewed the cd as follows.
by Chuck Cuminale — City Newspaper
Invisible Idiot — Outta Sight, Outta Mind
Invisible idiot is a first cousin of the Margaret Explosion, an otherworldly lounge band that, from October 1996 through June 1998, played an esoteric weekly Friday night happy hour at the Bug Jar. The ethereal soundtrack they provided cast an often eerie, slow motion effect on the just-out-of-work crowd’s revelries. The group’s improvised minor key melodies bathed the room in a melancholy glow, suggesting old 8-millimeter home movies, and blurring the lines between experience and reminiscence.
The music on Outta Sight, Outta Mind was made by many of the same musicians. Mostly recorded in six sessions during March and April 1997 in Paul Dodd and Peggi Fournier’s living room, the pieces collected on Outta Sight capture much of the same mood as their Margaret counterparts. A feeling of calm detachment pervades the disc along with a dreaminess that brings to mind Personal Effects’ (Fournier and Dodd were the forces behind that beloved Rochester band) gorgeous classic Don’t Wake Me.” Not every dream is a good dream, though, and I am pretty sure I heard a stifled cry or two coming from that soprano sax, and maybe an exhortation from old Father Time to keep things moving. Outta Sight, Outta Mind is a brilliant soundtrack, for whatever movie happens to come along.
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Maybe it’s a good thing that the Memorial Art Gallery did not do a catalog for their current “Drawing As Discovery” show. It got us over there three times and each time we found new favorites. I probably photographed a quarter of the 120 pieces. I’ve been visiting there since you entered by going up the big steps in the front of the old section and this is the best show they have ever mounted. And to think that all of these pieces are in their collection. Works on paper are fragile so they will be put to bed when the show closes today.
“I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.” Ed Ruscha
It will be a long time before we see 8 graphic Kara Walker drawings, Lyonel Feininger, Auguste Rodin, Burchfield, Picasso, Sol LeWitt, Goya, Rembrandt, Daumier, Delacroix, Tiepolo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Tamayo, David Hockney, Léger, and Morandi in the same space.
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We are planning to visit Peggi’s sister in LA this winter and right now we’ve got our fingers crossed that her home will still be standing. The Palisades Fire has moved one big step towards her and it is only 11% contained. She has already evacuated. We were thinking about her this morning as we strolled the beach up here on the North Coast.
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“You do portraits. Why don’t you have a piece in this show.” I can’t remember who asked me that when we walked into Studio 402. It seems they have an annual self-portrait show. That would be a lot of self portraits if you submitted a piece each year. I participated once with an abstract piece. And I was big on anonymous portraits for a while.
I found the piece above the most interesting in this year’s show. No idea who he is but I feel I got to know him through this piece better than I did the others. It is striking, first of all, in color and posture. I found myself staring into his eyes the way he appears to be staring back at us. And I like seeing the struggle to get volume into the plane – the side of the head coming forward. It stands out among the academic portraits. I like the bold signature and the cross worn on the outside of his shirt. Are those three crosses in his signature?
Over at RoCo for the Members Show, the second time for us, I settled on this piece as my favorite. Although I wish the two figures had just a little more room and the black frame was not so strong an element. I had to look up goldpoint. Minor quibbles. I love the drawing.
Unique Fair paints like an old master and I love his show up now at the Little Theatre Café. It was just a few months back when I posted a photo of his paintings that were on display at RoCo.
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I’d like to bring our cd poster to every gig but that would be rude to the rotating artists. The band barely fits in the photo above and the photographer would need an even wider lens to get us all in tonight when Jack brings his bass clarinet. Then again Melissa may not be able to find a sitter.
We and people in a dozen cities across the country watched the same version of the Eno movie last night. The one hundred year old theatre with the brand new sound system was packed. I’m pretty certain I saw yesterday’s date in the code that scrolled across the screen in one of the montage segues. Our version of the film opened with Eno previewing a loop on a monitor. He apparently was in his home studio, a brightly lit room with Albers like art on the white wall behind him. His work area, monitors and white Apple keyboard were impossibly clean and orderly but Eno was warm and immediately engaging. He had us laughing with his first story.
The film is compiled from a pot of over five hundred hours of potential material, some shot for the film, of course, and clips from performances and sessions with all the bands he worked with. Material is still being added to the database today. The pieces of the film are arranged by an algorithm created with guidance from the director, Gary Hustwit. We learned that this very Enoesque concept was the director’s idea and it was born out of desperation as Eno had made it clear he was not interested in one person presenting a profile of someone (him.)
The film is energizing. It feels so fresh you don’t want it to end. The clips cut across time and space and yet hold together perfectly. Eno is full of so many ideas and this presentation makes them all sound like fun. The movie is something like a joyride and I can’t wait to see a different version.
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