Ontario Beach is thawing. We watched big chunks of ice break off and float away. I was almost like being in Antarctica.
We have been doing a mini Altman fest in our living room. We added most of his movies, in chronological order, to our NetFlix cue and last night it was Mash’s turn. This wild movie is nonstop action without hardly anything happening. The tv show did not do it justice and there is no way that it could. It’s only worth noting because the movie is a near masterpiece.
The moon was almost full last night and it lit up the snow. Peggi watched as the moon dropped into view and then disappeared below our bedroom window view. I was snoring and missed the whole thing. She said it was beautiful.
Today was beautiful and I was ide awake for it. The sun is quite a bit higher in the sky and it felt warm at 31 degrees.
Pegasus Early Music performance with Julianne Baird in Rochester, NY
Our neighbors, Rick and Monica, had their second house concert last night. This one featured an alt country-like band from Austin with a lead singer named Lisa. Rick asked me to record the show so I set up some mics. The drummer recognized me from a long time ago. He played with a band called the Stripminers and we shared a couple of bills when I was playing with Personal Effects.
It was nice crowd and intermission was fun. The kitchen became the epicenter. Walter Ketcham was holding court and there was all sorts of interesting food to sample. Karen Miltner made some toasted almonds with Chinese Five Spice and they tasted just like the ones Peggi makes at Christmas. That’s because Karen is the food critic for the local paper and Peggi got the recipe from one of her columns.
Karen was talking about the restaurant in the old Fabrics and Findings building and someone said they served tapas there. I piped in that they were probably big portions and not like the tapas you get in Spain. I said, “Someone should just do regular sized tapas here”, and Karen said, “Small portions won’t work in this town”. So that was the end of that conversation.
Jeff and Mary Kaye are in Mexico for a few weeks so they gave us their tickets to the Pegasus Early Music Series. Today’s concert took place at the Rochester Academy of Medicine on East Avenue. It was sold out so the “Music Room” in this old mansion was full. Julianne Baird, a soprano who the New York Times calls a “national artistic treasure” was the featured artist. Our favorite piece was one called “O Golgatha (Passio Marcum)”. It was dark, mournful, Passion of Christ thing written by Richard Keiser around 1700 and it almost sounded like a Spanish saeta.
They had much more interesting names for their songs back then. We heard songs with titles like “Bid The Virtures, Come Ye Sons of Art”, “Music for a While”, and “Seek not to Know”.
John Gilmore at Paul Dodd Crime Faces Opening in Rochester, NY
Openings are the perfect opportunity to mark time and move on. What am I doing painting these anonymous mugshots from the newspaper when I have such colorful friends?
My opening was supposed to run from 7 to 9 and it went til 11. It was fun. The ginger snaps that Peggi made were a big hit. Someone told me they went really good with beer. I had really interesting conversations with Alice, my mom, Skip Bataglia, Jan Marshall, Peggi, Fred Lipp, Geri, Julie, Elizabeth Agate, and Elaine Heveron. I had a conversation with Beth Brown that fell apart. The one I had with Janet Williams was my favorite. She was standing in front of the close quartered wall of eight, where you could stand no more than four feet away from these guys, and she told me, “I wouldn’t mind being accosted by any of these people.”
I set the alarm in order to meet Peter Monticelli at 8AM at the Little in time to take my other show down before the next one got hung. This required a stop at Starbucks on the way. Once I was awake I remembered how nice the light is in the morning. I ‘m not talking like a painter or anything. I mean it was pretty out.
This is the first painting I’ve done since taking in the Marlene Dumas show at MoMA last week. My show at the Little is up for one more day. It comes down tomorrow so for one night only, both it and the second half of this last batch of “Crime Face Paintings” is up at the two locations. The second half opens tonight at the Printing and Book Arts Center in the old firehouse on Monroe Avenue. I put the best light in the house on this painting when I hung it over there.
Today is the first friday of the First Friday series of openings this year. Small galleries, scattered all over the city, have openings tonight. So if you are out and about , stop in at the Book Arts Center for “Crime Face Paintings Pt. ll”. Peggi made spicy little ginger snaps (from Shelley’s recipe) for the occasion and dj Sam Patch will provide the music.
02.06.09 – 03.04.09 Printing and Book Arts Center 713 Monroe Avenue
Opening Reception on Friday 02.06.09 7pm – 9pm
DJ Sam Patch will provide music
Mike Allen stopped by with a 1966 recording of his band, The Realm, from a Fine Recording Studios 45 rpm. Mike’s vocal was as soulful back then as he is today. He was wearing his A.K.O.S. (A King Of Soul) hat as we spoke. He threw a couple of live songs on the cd from a later band, Lake Road, playing live at the Dictionary in Webster in 1968. Mike sounds incredibly soulful at 16.
He noticed Peggi’s mom’s walker in our office and we explained that we were planning to take it back beacuse one of the handles broke. He took a look at it and directed us through the repair. We lost an Allen wrench on our camoflauged carpet during the operation but Mike eventually found it.
Peggi helped me hang the second half of my Crime Face Paintings at the Printing and Book Arts Center in the old firehouse on Monroe Avenue. She gave a twenty foot high wall a fresh coat of white paint. This is an awkward space with old printing equipment scattered throughout the room but the paintings look pretty good. Still want to fool with the lights some more before the opening on Friday. Mitch Cohen, who runs this place, has a nice sound system but there’s no jack for my iPod so I might have to truck something over there.
We finished hanging in time to stop in at the Little for the last few songs of AMP (Alex, Mick, Peter). They sounded great. Jan Cuminale was there. She went out to her car to get a gift that she was going to drop of around Christmas, before she hurt her knee. It was two tree ornaments of of cross country skiers. The arm on the woman was broken off but they look just like Peggi and I in our cross country dreams, all smilely in space age blue and white outfits. We love them. Might find a place for them year round.
I need to provide beverages for my opening Part II on Friday and I was thinking that Genny beer would go perfectly with the Crime Faces. I checked the price at Wegmans and then went next door to Walgreens. I found out they didn’t carry alcohol so I headed down the road to Walmart. They were so busy that I couldn’t find an empty shopping cart other than ones that had a little car attached to it for your kid to ride in. The beer section was about a mile back and they didn’t carry Genny.
Peggi’s birthday is coming up so I thought I would look for a book. I wandered around the oversized store until it dawned on me that books and Walmart don’t exactly go together. I found an English speaking clerk and she directed me to the book section with BestSellers (about seven of the top ten) and romance novels. Wegmans supermarket has more books than Walmart.
I took a photo of the logo on the way out. Is this a new logo for these guys? I don’t get here very often. It occured to me that Wegmans, Walgreens and Walmart all have the same logo now.
Vincent Gallo from Buffalo ’66 in NYC subway liquor ad
Somebody told me you’re not supposed to take photos in New York City’s subways but I do it anyway. Hey, I’m from out of town. Peggi and I really liked Buffalo “66 with Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Anjelica Huston, Mickey Rourke and Buffalo’s own Vincent Gallo (on right above). We made a mental note to put this on our Netflix list.
Women reading in front of Pipilotti Rist videoinstallation at MoMA
The survey of Marlene Dumas’s work at MoMA was an absolute sensation. I loved it! You have until February 16th to see it for yourself. I was like a kid in a giant candy store as we moved through the show. I didn’t want to make decisions on the work because I didn’t want to leave it. I kept going back to rooms I had already seen so the show wouldn’t come to an end.
I hardly ever take the headsets or those talking stick voice-over things around with me in a gallery. They distract and annoy me. But I caught a sample when I was standing too close to someone and it was Dumas’ voice on the thing. Peggi asked in the museum store if they had the narration on a cd and the clerk told her it was a free download at the iTunes store. I plan to do a personal tour with Marlene and the book back at home.
The Modern has a series entitled, “Artist’s Choice” where they invite artists to curate a show. The artist picks work from the museum’s collection that he or she likes. I could easily have spent the rest of my MoMA time with the Dumas show but Scott McCarney had recommended this so we had to do it. The Brazilian photographer, Vik Muniz, arranged his show in a linear pattern along the walls of two rooms. None of the work had identification tags although some of it was easily recognizable like Duchamp’s snow shovel, Picasso’s cardboard guitar and Joesph Buey’s wool suit. We snaked along with the crowd as if we were on a moving sidewalk. Each piece was related to the previous and the next and we were completely absorbed in the dialog when we heard a loud crash behind us followed by a woman’s voice shouting, “Jesus Christ!”
We instinctively moved toward the action. A guard was picking up the Plexiglas case that housed a work we had just studied. It was one of the more irreverent pieces in the show, a wrinkled up piece of paper by Martin Creed called, “Work #301 and it was part of a rock, paper, scissors combo that Muniz had arranged. An older couple stood by sheepishly, the man who knocked the case over with his bag and the woman who chose that opportunity to publicly berate her husband.
Peggi and I were with Duane Sherwood and we had hooked up with my brother, Mark, at the museum. The four of us were studying the case, which was now cracked, and marveling at the new location of the wad of paper. It was up against the side of the case and you could see a little gob of clear glue in the center of the bottom panel where the paper used to sit.
A women guard behind us let her frustrations out by repeating to all those nearby, “People have to watch where they’re going. It could have been worse. He could have tripped over that rock down there (she pointed to another work in the show that sat on the floor). People have to watch where they’re going.”
The chief security guard came briskly around the corner with a walkie-talkie in is hand. He was sporting a really bad hair piece and it became the center of attention for us. He studied the crumpled up piece of paper and said, “Jesus Christ!”
This theater of the absurd completely overshadowed the show. I don’t even remember finishing it.
We got on the F train in Brooklyn at Fort Hamilton and headed for the Modern in Manhattan. We were sitting at the front of the first car. This line brings you above ground for a few stops before going down under the East River. A very short man with a camouflaged hat got on and started singing a beautiful folk song in Spanish. I gave him a dollar. At the next stop a guy in a trench coat got on with a styrofoam cup that he was rattling. I tried not to look at him.
A women burst through the door right behind him and loudly addressed the passengers, “OK people. I will try to be brief. My husband has abused me, humiliated me. . . etc.” She kept walking to the other end of the car and we tried to tune her out but she worked her way back to us with her hand out, repeating, “Anybody have a kind heart? Anybody have a kind heart?” She said this like it didn’t have a question mark. Next on was a woman with missing front teeth. She was dragging a big black trash bag. She leaned against the pole in front of us and began singing, “I believe the children are the future”.
The distance between stops as the train goes under the river is longer than that between most stops so this train is a magnet for buskers. Duane, our NYC friend and guide, told us he has seen guys bring a whole drum set in, set it up and bang out a hip hop tune. They get of on the other side, cross over and ride back all day long.
Thanks to Boo Poulin, I know how to pronounce Marlene Dumas’s name. I have watched this video five times now in preparation for the Dumas show at the Modern. I can hardly wait.
Jaffe sitting in with Margaret Explosion at he Little Theater in Rochester, NY
I brought my tripod to the Little Theater last to take a few shots of my painting show before it closes. I found a note tucked up under one of then that read, “Sorry, but this is some of the most unappealing “artwork” I have ever seen”. I was happy to see they were able to get under someone’s skin.
Jaffe sat in with Margaret Explosion for the fourth week in a row. He emailed us this morning to say that he thought “we got to a special place last night”. We found another note in the tip jar at he end of the night. It read, “I.O.U. We accidentally came out without any cash tonight. We saw you on WXXI’s On Stage and really enjoyed your sound. We’ll pick up a cd at your next gig.”
CSS for vertically centered content without using tables
I have been obsessing over this project of building a webpage that could serve as a template for whole portions of a website. I want to do it without tables. I would like a header of a fixed height to stay at the top and a footer to stay stuck to the bottom and both of them would be php includes so I can update the whole thing in one document. And in between that I would like to float the content, centered horizontally and vertically, no matter what the actual height of the content is or how big the browser window is.
Susan B. Anthony Frederick Douglas bridge behind Broad Street bridge over the Genesee River in Rochester, NY
We had lunch at the Convention Center downtown while Kathy Palokoff from Customericty was being nominated for a prestigious Athena Award. She faced some really stiff competition from other women including the honorable Maggie Brooks.
There is a beautiful veiw here of the two tiered Broad Street Bridge crossing the Genesse River. The Erie Canal at one time flowed across the river through the lower portion of this bridge. Or maybe it flowed through on the top level. I’m not not really sure about this. It was diveret and now crosses the river in Genesee Valley Park near the UofR. Behind the Broad Street bridge you can see the top of the new suspenion bridge, the one some people cal the Susan B. Anthony Frederick Douglas Bridge.
We used to sing this song in grade school. Do New York kids still sing this?
“Sum ll Series”, Gloria Ortiz-Hernandez drawing at MAG “Leaded” show
Peggi’s mom gave us a subscription to Smithsonion Magazine and January’s issue had a great article on the Metropolitan’s Van Gogh “Night Vision show. The author tells how Van Gogh, the best drawer ever, was kicked out of an early drawing class and he quotes Van Gogh telling a friend, “I aim to paint with such expressive force that people will say, I have no technique.”
Turning from abstraction to storytelling, the work Philip Guston created in the last ten years of his life was roundly criticized as being clumsy, crude, artless, cartoony, affected and klutzy”. Guston is quoted as saying, “I got sick and tired of all the purity.”
Musa Mayer, writing in her memoir of her father, recaps a talk Philip gave to a group of students at the University of Minnesota in 1978. He ended his talk with the following remark. “Isaac Babel gave a lovely ironic speech to the Soviet Writer’s Union and ended his talk with the following remark, ‘The party and the government have given us everything, but they have deprived us of one privilage. A very important privilege, comrades, has been taken away from you. That of writing badly’.”
Margaret Explosion at the Memorial Art Gallery opening for”Leaded”
Ken and Peggi spent the longest time discussing whether the tree that was positioned between them was real or fake.
I took this shot with the timer while we were setting up in “The Pavillion” of the Memorial Art Gallery for the opening of “Leaded”, a drawing show featuring ten artists. I was expecting a lot more drawing but the work was all executed with lead.
The contract called for Margaret Explosion to pay five, fifty minute, sets starting at 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10, the first two hours where for the patrons. We made up songs most of the night only covering three or four of our own in the last set. The band sounded really good in here and we are really happy the MAG invited us to their party.
Jeff Munson dropped off an Amaryllis plant for us this morning. Peggi added it to her centerpiece on our table.We helped him set up Skype for his trip to Mexico. He also gave me a beautiful shot of the “84 Lumber” sign out on Scottsville Road. I plan to add that to the sign section someday.
I spent most of the day in the basement painting. I was geared up to start a new painting and it hit me (again) how it is always a new beginning. Something never done before unless you are determined to repeat your same mistakes. Learning to see and identify your mistakes as such allows you have that redundant new beginning.
But how long does it take to learn Fred Lipp’s proceedural rules? Look at the painting as a whole at every stage and do the fucking worst first.
Irondequoit Bay is winter playground once it freezes over. We got out on the ice and talked to a few of the fisherman. They were pulling fish out of their holes but they were all pretty small. We watched a group of kids play hockey on a rink they had cleared for themselves. I remember doing that in that same spot when I was a kid. And at the other end of the bay we saw motorcycles were racing around in circles. There’s plenty of funky places to eat down here too. I would recomend Vic & Irv’s, Shamrock Jack’s or Nick’s Seabeeze Inn.
Robin Jon promo photo on the wall at Sound Source in Rochester NY
There are a lot of options in town for buying new band equipment but when you want to keep your vintage equipment going there is no better spot than Sound Source (“We Make Hearing Loss Affordable”).
One of the best things about a trip to Sound Source is that it is another opportunity to look at old promo shots for local bands like Wilmer Alexander and The Dukes and The Quirks and the the lounge duo, Robin Jon. Rob and Jon just happen to be the owners of this place so you take updated photos of these guys in the flesh if you can get the two of them together. They keep Rob in the back with his head lamp and soldering gun. Rob is likely to to offer you a fudgsicle or show you one of his new squishy toys. Jon manages the front end and takes care of the money.
Rob fixed Peggi’s sax pickup while we waited all the while triggering crying baby noises with something on his desk. He started talking about the Sound Source web site, which is in a sorry state, and wondered if he could learn how to post stuff to it on his own. We told him we would help with this effort. Rob’s father worked at Kodak and he took 3-D photos of Rob’s band during his his high school days. Rob has shown us these on a few occaisions and they are mind blowing. I’m wondering if there is any java script for displaying these on their new web site.
