Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
My father likes to say he “can’t talk without a pencil” and it is pretty much true. Armed with a pencil he talks better than anyone I know. He knocked this painting off in our last class and it knocks me out. It’s a sketch of the orchard in front of the Stone Tolan House on East Avenue and it was done from a sketch in one of his many sketch books.
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These are not Anne Havens’ colors but they could be. Peggi and I bought this piece years ago at a Pyramid Art Center show and I photographed it tonight in very low light. It hangs over our washing machine in the basement in the laundry slash band room. I love this piece and I was immediately attracted to it. Still am and don’t know why but that is the fun of it. I still don’t know who won the game of tic tac toe. It’s almost like I don’t want to know. It is too nicely drawn to look at what it depicts. And I love the beaker!
We were very fortunate to have Anne try out her “I’m moving to Florida routine” with us at the recent RoCo opening. It was delightful. She explained that she just gets so depressed in the dark winter months that she doesn’t want to do it anymore. She told us she only wears black here but wears white in Florida and she said it like she wasn’t ashamed to admit it. She told us she “is thinking of changing her name to Annie.”
We are very happy for her.
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click photo for Maira Kalman’s advice
We bought copies of Maira Kalman’s “The Principles of Uncertainty” as a Christmas gift for Peggi’s sister and for our friend and neighbor, Monica. We don’t own it our selves but it seemed like a good gift idea. I followed Kalman’s blog on the NYT’s website and loved it. So why should we pass up a free lecture by her at RIT? We couldn’t think of any reason.
It is always cold and windy on that damn campus. They designed it that way. It and the giant sprawling mall give Henrietta a bad name. No amount of wind is going to blow that Albert Paley down though. We sat next to our siter-in-law. She teaches a design class out there and had told her student to come but she only saw three of them there.
The person who introduced Maira said that she and her late husband ran the influential design company, M&Co. I never connected those dots before. Maira Kalman said her mom is the centerpiece of everything she does. She explained that her mom simply allowed her to daydream and never pushed her in any sort of practical career direction. She recently illustrated a new edition of Strunk’s The Elements of Style and she projected slides of that work from her MacBook while she told funny stories like how she’d marry Lincoln in a nanosecond.
The Memorial Art Galley has a show of her work (play) opening on May 2nd so she will probably be back in town for that.
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Remember when state license plates were distinctive? Remember when cars didn’t all look alike? I was following these guys yesterday as they cruised down Culver. I never get tired of this drive. I’m guessing this car is a 1968 but I could be way off.
I ripped some old vinyl over the weekend. Screamin Gypsy Bandits from Bloomington, Indiana, Sun Ra Italian pressings on Horo that never came out on cd and a live Archie Schep from Germany (I borrowed these from Tom Kohn) and Dr. John The Night Tripper lp, Gris-gris, that I heard in Rick Simpson’s basement and just had to have. And then Brad Fox called a while back singing a song from an lp that we used to listen to. I recognized the tune as being from a Keith Jarrett/Jan Garbarek lp called “Belonging” so I ripped that for him. And then I thought I would might as well make a digital copy of the Hi-Techs singles.
When I took the shot above I was headed to the Eastman Theater to pick Peggi and her mom up at the opera. I was listening to WPXY and kept the station on as we cruised back down Culver to our house. We were all singing along to something that had the refrain of “You’re a womanizer, womanizer, baby”,”You spin my head right round when you go down” and “you’re hot when you’re cold and you’re in when you’re out”. Top Forty is a little raunchier than the Invictas “The Hump” was in the mid sixties but it’s still based on the same catchy melody/riff/rhythm thing.
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Detail from “A Lot Besides” by Ricky Sears at Rochester Contemporary. Click photo for full shot.
RoCo’s new show opened last night with “In Between”, paintings and sculpture by Brooklyn based artists Malin Abrahamsson and Ricky Sears. Bleu Cease, RoCo’s director, introduced us to both artists last night and we had a nice chat about their work. Malin said she felt as though Rochester was a third contributor to the show because their reaction to the city was right there on the walls.
I’m not sure if i ever would have determined that this work was based on Rochester if I didn’t read the blurb in the small round room that was stuck to the wall above a delightful book that the the two artists had put together as worked on this show. Malin’s paintings were done on canvas and Ricky’s were done on glass, old window panes in fact, and they are quite beautiful.
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Peggi had a few problems with her hard drive and before we ran the disc utility we confirmed that we had back-ups of everything. She found a bunch of photos from a few years back and we got sidetracked looking at them. The one above is of the main part of house getting redone by us before we moved in. We scraped the stalactite like textured ceiling off and we repainted and pretty much reworked the whole place. I love the way it looked back then (click the photo for full effect) and I’m wondering if we can go back there. It was such a blur at the time but it It looks like an art installation now. I’m glad I photographed it. Then again, I photograph just about everything.
Today started like most with a cold call from India. They wanted to talk to us about graphic design or something. I have very little patience for these guys and hung up on him. Next call was from a sweet sounding woman who wondered if we did the the little programs that they pass out at funerals. Despite the rotten economy I turned her down. I’m wondering if a listed phone number is still a good idea for a business.
Last week we did a quote for lawn care company. They wanted a logos for their trucks and business cards etc. I love doing logos but these guys had four letters in their name and they wanted graphics in each of the letters. I told them I didn’t think that was a good idea but I couldn’t talk them out of it. So we gave them a quote and never heard back. We do have work so I’m not worried yet. If it does get bad I’l hear one of these Indian guys out.
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I only have a few days left with the “Matisse Portraits” book that I checked out of the downtown library. I’m going to have to remove all the bookmarks and give it up. It is so jam packed with sensational drawings that it took me a few weeks before I could even read the copy. Peggi has been page turning Ann Rule’s “Every Breadth You Take” while I stare at drawings until I fall asleep.
Now that I have been able to get to some of the text I’m finding that Matisse is as articulate with words as he is with the brush. In an essay for the catalog for a collection of his work entitled “Exactitude Is Not Truth” (a Delacroix saying)he wrote,
“Among these drawings, which I have chosen with the greatest of care for this exhibition, are four drawings-portraits perhaps—done from my face as seen in a mirror. I should particularly like to call them to the visitors’ attention.
These drawings sum up, in my opinion, observations that I have made for many years about the charactcr of drawing, a character that does not depcnd on forms being copied exactly as they are in nature or on the patient assembling of exact details, but on the profound feeling of the artist before the objects that he has chosen, on which his attention is focussed, and whose spirit he has penetrated.”
It kills me how much volume Matisse gets in these line drawings. He devoted his life to careful observation of nature and dilligent hard work in order to make drawings look this easy.
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This probably happens every year but if you’re not in the woods when it happens – you know what they say about hearing trees fall out there. At first glance we thought it might be sap pouring out of the trees, maybe even maple syrup, but these weren’t maple trees and the foam wasn’t sticky. Our friends, Pete and Shelley, spend a good bit of March “syrupping down” so it can’t just bubble out of the trees.
Leave a commentWe put together a few cdrs of old Personal Effects records for Steve Lipincott and he sent us a short stack of things to listen to. It was a really tough call as to what to pop in first. We went with Miles Davis Nonet Boston ’72. Amazing three dimensional sound with Mtume Forman playing percussion in one channel, Badal Roy in the other and Pete Cosey’s wah wah guitar out there.
I’m looking at Miles Davis Quintet, Stockholm, playing “Bitches Brew” material or Captain Beefheart “Spotlight Kid Sessions” next.
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We often take a path through the woods that dumps us out on the golf course. We cross one of the fairways and head back in to the woods on one of the trails in the park. The last few days we noticed a bunch of birders gathered around the south end of Durand Lake. We wouldn’t know a rare bird from a local one so we didn’t think much of it. Yesterday we walked down that way and saw a lot of bare wood glistening in the distance. When we got closer we realized that these people were watching a beaver build a dam. These guys can really chew some wood. It looks like a micro-burst has come through here with all the debris strew about. His dam tough is water tight. There is about a foot difference in water levels on the two sides.
We didn’t see the beaver though so we made a point of going back today to look for him but no sign of him. You would think he would right there gorging on the trapped fish. I’m wondering if maybe the park people arrested the guy and took him somewhere.
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Steve Lippincott who runs the EarCandy Archive in Portland is doing a profile of Rochester bands in the eighties so I spent some time this weekend putting together cd versions of a few of Personal Effect’s old albums for him. We did a compilation in November for the Scorgies reunion but that was just a smattering of songs from the various vinyl releases.
Bob Martin carved out the perfect bass boast eq curve for the songs from “90 Days in the Planetarium” lp and I wanted to use it on the whole cd but I couldn’t fine the settings in CuBase. I called Bob and he had me set up an AIM account so he could take control of my computer from his house. While we were on the phone I watched as he searched my computer for the old files and set me up through iChat.
Joe Sorriero emailed us and asked if we wanted to do gig with Nod at the Bug Jar. It sounded like fun so I replied without much thought and then mentioned the gig to Peggi. She read the email and pointed out that Joe was asking “Personal Effects” to play. I didn’t catch that. I thought he was asking “Margaret Explosion” to play with them since we had recently played together together at Abilene. I guess we could handle it.
I digitized all our cds and and I rely on the mp3 tags for liner notes but this song that Peggi and I have fallen in love with was only marked “nod4”. So I dug out all the cds and spot checked the songs trying to identify this thing. I finally determined it is from their most recent cd entitled, “Tree Stuff & Lightning”. I think Chris Schepp gave me a copy of it before it was released so never got the right tags. Peggi wants the lyrics to this so I thought I would post it here and see what happens.
“World Still Wants You” by Nod from “Tree Stuff & Lightning”.
Ossia, the Eastman School of Music’s student run, new music ensemble had their last event of the season on Friday night at Kilbourn Hall. You can’t beat this free admission ticket to wide open, experimental soundscapes. The pieces by five different composers on last night’s bill were as varied as you can imagine and hold out boundless promise for new music performed by classically trained musicians.
The second half of the program was devoted to the third, second and first place winners of Ossia’s International Composition Prize. I liked the third place, “die nacht war kalt” by Daniel Tacke the best. The piece with soprano voice, clarinet, cello and piano reached new heights of sparse and used the air in the arrangement to sculpt an environment where our heartbeats slowed and our minds opened wide.
One of the earlier pieces on the program by Luigi Nono called for a piano player to accompany a prerecorded piano track which was played on a laptop through speakers set up behind the piano. I found it tedious but it demonstrated the wide gulf between live sound in a good hall, and the acoustics Kilbourn are as good as it gets, and a state of the art recording.
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In a sure sign of Spring they have put the flags up on Durand’s golf course. Beer and golf are really made for each other. We came home with a ball that we picked up as we crossed the course and a can that we found along the road.
I did the math. These big cans of Budweiser are equivalent of two 12 ounce cans. And they are not the sort of thing that comes in six packs or cases. In fact the only way you can buy these giant cans is singularly (or in groups of single cans). Beer sold singularly in a 24 ounce can is marketed to people who are not taking it home for later. And once you open a can you pretty much have to drink the whole thing. So that leaves two types of beer buyers. Kids, who we first thought were responsible for tossing all these empties on one of our hiking routes, fit this profile but so does an alcoholic who doesn’t want to bring the beer home to his wife or get caught with it in his car. The later is our neighbor’s theory and he told us who he suspects.
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Deer are perfectly camouflaged in this gray brown landscape but something got a hold of one in the woods last night. We came across clumps of deer hair still attached to hunks of skin. And further up the path we saw some shit that didn’t look like it came from a dog or a deer shit because that looks like chocolate covered coffee beans and it wasn’t from a turkey because that looks like little blobs of dark pudding. We watched a coyote slink across an opening the other day and we were wondering if they might bother the deer. Our cat is not camouflaged (unless it’s snowing) and I hope they stay away from her.
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Dave Liebman played sax on Miles Davis’s “On the Corner”, “Big Fun”, “Dark Magus”, and “Get Up With It”, my favorite Miles stuff. The guy is amazing. He’s been here twice at the Jazz Fest. We saw both shows at Montage last year and we bought his DVD. Last night he played at the Bop Shop in what was billed as a “classic organ trio setting”. Paul Smoker, Bill Dobbins and all the local jazz celebrities were out.
Phil Haynes, who we have heard a few times with Paul Smoker, played drums and Steve Adams played a Hammond B3. They played all standards and opened with “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes”. Dave was playing a wooden flute, The organ player held on extremely long fuzzy note and the drums sounded beautiful. Phil Haynes plays with his bare hands, he scratches the top surface of his cymbals with the butt end of his sticks and looks like he is conducting the music with his facial expressions and whole body. He plays “Ayotte” drums with wooden rims and they are the best sounding drums I have ever heard. They sounded especially nice in this bass player less setting.
Dave played one song that Doris Day had popularized and when someone snickered as he introduced it Dave said, “Don’t undercut Doris. She was right there with Sly back in the day.” we weren’t sure if we heard him right so after the show Peggi and I asked him after the show if said’ “Sly”. He said, Oh yeah. She was right there, hanging with Sly, doing LSD, the whole trip.
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I met Monica this morning out by the mailboxes as I was grabbing the soon-to-be-extinct newspaper and she was heading off to work. She rolled down her window and said “Isn’t this a beautiful day?” Before I could say “yes” she continued, “I say that to people and they say, ‘Yeah, but it’s cold’ “.
I’ve talked before about the beautiful color of everything this time of year. Only a few early flowers are up and the buds have not popped on the trees and it has hardly rained in a while so there is very little green.
At first it bugged me that the town left these cones and black plastic here all winter. But I’m realizing that I am attracted to these construction sites at the same time as I am repulsed by the need to constantly mess with nature. In this case a housing project that the town allowed to go forward not only leveled the woods but altered the drainage and overloaded this low lying area so that it is now a certified wetland. They spent most of last Fall raising the level of this road so it will stay above water in the Spring. Just a little further up Hoffman Road from here is where we find most of the big Bud cans.
Anyway the cones look great against our gray brown world and I’m savoring it. I’m starting to think that these people at the Town are more creative than I give them credit for being. I’ve also noticed that I’ve been looking at the stuff in Home Depot like it’s all art supplies. I think they even sell these cones.
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Paul Dodd “Crime Face 46” detail. Click photo for full painting.
I was preparing an online submission of a group of paintings to a show and I was trying to chose which paintings to feature as details. Naturally I turned to Peggi for her expert opinion. I had a few guys open on my monitor and she said. “Well I have already told you which one I like the best”. And of course it is the one I have featured up top but I hadn’t shot it yet. So I set up my Lowel lights tonight and shot her and few others.
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On a beautiful Sunday afternoon we watched the gallery assistant pull the shades at Rochester Contemporary so we could see the PowerPoint display on LA’s cornfield project. L.A.-based writer artist and curator Janet Owen Driggs from the Metabolic Studio, a charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation, discussed our roles as industrial eaters and the new art movement toward not bullying nature. Her slides took us from Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes to Robert Smithson’s beautiful earth art to the political ramifications of public fruit. Janet used to paint but has turned her energy toward Edible Estates and Fallen Fruit and Islands of LA.
We stopped at Home Depot on the way home and bought a bunch of seeds for the garden.
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Two of our nephews each had horn solos in their band concert at Brighton Middle School so we had to be there. Their younger brother plays horn too and the three of them have a band called “Rubber Chicken”. The band concert was great but the Science Fair going on upstairs was something else. Both nephews had exhibits. The youngest demonstrated a method for collecting static electricity. The oldest determined which method worked best for getting gum off your show. Burning it off, freezing it so it cracks off and squirting DW40 on the shoe were all explored and the DW40 worked best.
Other kids examined which sandwich bags would keep bread from molding longer and which cleaning product got the dirt off their gym socks. For some reason three separate kids examined colored candles to see which one burns the fastest. Probably because they got to play with fire. One kid studied toilet paper and declred “37 per cent of the people in the US use Wegman’s brand. but our favorite was the experiment to determine whether plants grew faster with loud music , soft music or no music. The kid declared that soft music was the best but the graph that he produced showed that the plant exposed to loud music grew the fastest. That was a good part of the fun, shooting holes in their “controlled studies ” and reading their “conclusions”.
Last night we watched Let The Right One, a really cool Scandinavian movie about kids the same age as our nephews except these kids were vampires.
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I had a meeting today with a client at his office. He showed me his logo and then explained that it is not intended to be an oval. His flat panel monitor was distorting everything he looks at by a long shot, even the picture of his son that used as his wallpaper. He asked me if I could remedy the situation so there I was duking it out with his clunky Windows pc.
This afternoon my father sent me this Word doc that he had spent most of the day on. It was given to him by a pc user and he added a bunch of stuff and sent it back but the guy wasn’t able to open the file. All I had to do add the “.doc” suffix to the file name and send it back. You’d think a Windows machine would recognize a Word doc.
A friend of ours programs data bases for web sites and he laughingly told us that he just stopped previewing his sites in Explorer. He said the people who use that program are idiots and he doesn’t care about them. I was reading a bad review of Explorer 8 today and they had a link to stats that showed two thirds of all web users use IE. That’s a lot of idiots. The economy would get a real sot in the arm if all web developers could quit wasting time with IE workarounds.
I was reading about the new system for the iPhone and Touch and an app for them that will allow users to see other users on the same network and exchange virtual business and it reminded me that we haven’t done new business cards since we moved. We have been using the “we just moved” excuse for four years now. We had some business cards printed online for a client they came out great. They offer rounded corners too. So I spent some time today playing with the 4D Advertising logo. I love coming up with logos and haven’t done one in a while.
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