Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
When we lived in the City we got in the habit of walking to the corner to Carrol’s bar for a corned beef sandwich and pint on Saint Patty’s Day. They had bag pipe players and the Pogues on the juke box. The closest Irish bar to our new local is Shamrock Jacks. To get there we walk through the woods and through a neighborhood of funky Bloomington style houses and then down Culver toward the lake. This was a sort of ominous message to read on the way to a bar.
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The ground is dry and the woods are pretty bare so we were able to do some exploring today. I think we were on a deer path. I took a short movie. Found a few Budweiser beer cans on the way home and ran into a neighbor who was out smoking a cigar. He had his own theory as to who has been doing all the drinking. He thinks his neighbor is pounding them on the way home and hiding the evidence from his wife by chucking them out the window of his car.
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We picked up Peggi’s mom and brought her over for dinner. This is a big adventure for her these days. I marinated some chicken and Peggi roasted brussels sprouts. Peggi made tapioca pudding for dessert and we watched Rene Fleming sing with the Metropolitan Opera on PBS while we ate. We discussed the origins of Tapioca, speculating that it might have come from China or Japan or maybe Korea, becoming popular during the Martin Deny, Tiki torch days. I asked Peggi’s mom if she remembered having it as a kid and she said she didn’t. She thought it might be an Irish thing. On the way home she informed us that she really doesn’t have any sense of direction any more.
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Olga took the afternoon off to help Doug Rice prepare for the opening of his funky new performance space, MuCCC. She called from the place, an old Baptist church, to make sure we were coming. We were still working and hadn’t thought about the evening yet. Then John Gilmore called and wondered what was up so we made plans to go to the opening with him. When John got here he found us out in the road helping our neighbor with his garden tractor. First time out this year and he had two flat tires.
John needed batteries for his new camera so first stop was Walgreens. Peggi and I stayed in the car and switched the radio station. Jamie’s Crying came on and we cranked it. All may not be right with the world but Van Halen still sounds good.
We stopped at a light and an egg yolk yellow Hummer was facing us. I know they’re hogs and all that but they are one cool lookin’, bad ass, military grade auto.
We passed the Playground Tavern and Simple Truth Ministries and it occured to me that everything is all right with the world from the back seat of John Gilmore’s car.
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The art changes monthly at the Little Cafe and this month it is the employees who have the spotlight. I particularly liked these photos by one of the projectionists, Alan Charlesworth. Four kind of big guys just standing there in various settings.
Speaking of big guys, we took my parents out to Tony D’s for dinner tonight. We were celebrating my father’s birthday and I tried making reservations but they would only take them for parties of six or more. So we showed up and hung around the bar for about forty five minutes watching sports bloopers. We had a delicious calamari salad and greens and beans and my father picked a surprising spicy set of ingredients for goat cheese pizza. They were cranking the soul music in here. Good Times, Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Atomic Dog and Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing all sounded great but it was almost impossible to hear each other and on the way home I noticed my mom was hoarse.
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Some pretty good sized pieces of wood landed on our porch this morning and woke us up. It’s warm but it seemed too windy to walk in the woods without helmets so we stayed on the street. Peggi had the foresight to bring two plastic bags and we filled them both., one with deposit returns (mostly Budweiser products) and the other with plastic recyclables (mostly flask sized vodka bottles).
Rich Stim wrote that he liked it when I discussed my technical problems so here goes. I have two subtle spots on every picture I take with my Nikon P5100. A friend, Corrine, has 5100 too and she just had her lens replaced to correct the same problem. Mine is still under warranty but I am trying to decide whether the spots are bad enough to have to live without the camera for three weeks. The last camera I had was a Sony DSC V1 and it started eating my cards so that is sitting by the door on the way to the trash. Before that I had a Kodak 4800 and I was going to put that on eBay but it is probably worthless now. I was trying to determine if I could use it for the three weeks of downtime so I opened the first photo we took with it back in 2000 (above). It does have a 2×3 aspect ratio and I dig that.
Last week we recorded our Margaret Explosion gig with three new recorders that Bob Martin borrowed from Sound Source. They were a Korg MR1, a Tascam DR1 and a Tascam DR7. The Korg had some amazing stereo imaging but the DR1 sounded the most natural and the best to us. They all have built in mics and run on batteries. Tonight we are checking out a Zoom H-4N that Bob has picked up from the House of Guitars. It has a built in stereo mic and two mic inputs with phantom power so it records four tracks. Sounds amazing on paper.
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Fred Lipp, my painting teacher, has been trying to make me more aware of the different forms on the two sides of a head when the face is even slightly turned. Most of my recent paintings are mugshots and the photos I paint from were taken pretty much straight on but there is usually something I can pick up to make the structure more interesting. I working on that.
And then along come this painting of a horse by a fifth grader currently on view at the Shweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn. This girl made the dead-on sing.
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It is so beautiful this time of year when the snow disappears and the ground is a dusty brown. The trees without leaves are grey and the trunks turn black if it rains. Big trees take on Egon Schiele like expressions. We had little yellow flowers blooming out back last week before the snow melted. I did a Google search for first yellow flower in New York and I think I have identified them as Winter Aconite Eranthis hyemalis. With a little more rain most things will be green before we know it.
I came back with three new signs for the Signs Section and the one above is my favorite. On our way down to New York we got off the Thruway in Waterloo and drove through Auburn toward Skaneateles. We stopped for a bit in front of this sign because it required some thought to determine which way to turn. I am visually oriented and I really wanted to turn right for Auburn. I’m guessing the prisoners who make these signs for the state are only allowed to “justify” their type. It would be a lot easier to read if they could flush left or right.
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One too many bar mitzvahs.
It was smooth sailing through the Poconos and on to Route 280 but then it all went wrong. We zoomed by our exit and saw signs for Newark so we got off and tried to turn around. We got back on but it was the wrong highway and we found ourselves heading north on I-95. The Manhatten skyline was receding behind us. We paid a toll and did a u-turn back through the Oranges and into Montclair just in time to drop our bags off at Dale (New Math) and Myrna’s (Human Switchboard) and get to the temple for a run though of the Hebrew chants. Except the cantor canceled the rehearsal because of a personal conflict so we returned to Dale’s and watched a black and white “Man From Uncle” show..
We did the service without rehearsal so I was on the Bima looking for the groove with a guitar player and the chanting cantor. Two kids were making their bar mitzvah today and there were about three hundred people here. The stained glass looked like it had been designed by a madman but my drum sounded great in the room. The young cantor was attending to her boisterous child while she waited for her partner to show up and she encouraged me to not be shy. She MC’d and juggled her parental duties while effortlessly leading us in ancient sounding songs like “Ma Tovu”, “Adon Olam”, “Kiibud Av Vahem” and “Tav L”hodot”.
The regular service ended and the bar mitzvah portion started. Our nephew offered a few possibilities for the meaning of the name of their temple as his bar mitzvah project. It translates as “Eternal Flame” and he made a good argument for taking on the responsibility of keeping it alight.
His parents got up and told a few stories about their son. I kept thinking of the scene in King of Comedy” where Rupert Pupkin listens to his grade school teacher toast him. Overall the ceremony was lackluster and fidgety with bursts of meaningfulnes. The party afterward was a blast. The kids had fun and we had fun watching the kids. My family chipped in to buy our nephew a Kindle.
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Norman Rockwell painting
When I was growing up there was nothing but Catholics in my family but then my parents jumped ship and switched us to public schools and we really took advantage of the freedom. There were six of us before my youngest sister came along and I remember the thrill of entertaining “pagan” names for her. “Amy” won out and there was certainly no Saint Amy then. There may be now that the last pope named more saints than all others combined.
Two of my cousins became nuns, my aunt became a Jehovah’s Witness, Amy married into a Jewish family, Peggi’s sister did too and one of my brothers converted to Judaism. His oldest son had his bar mitzvah a few years ago. His youngest, shown in the middle above becomes a bar mitzvah tomorrow. This happens automatically upon turning 13 years old. No ceremony is needed but since the 15th century it became customary to mark the occasion by whooping it up. Further adventures into the melting pot have me playing my djembe behind Hebrew chanting at the Temple.
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Orphan painting for the Memory Project
My painting show from the Little is all boxed up and today I took down my painting show at the Genesee Center for the Arts. So it’s time to move on and an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate what it is that I spend so much time painting. I am enjoying this process and considering wild alternatives like en plen air and abstraction.
In the meantime I was asked to paint a portrait for the Memory Projct. They sent me a photo of this kid, an orphan somewhere, and I did a few versions. The kid kid gets the painting. The one in the middle looks the most like him so I’m sending that off. Now what?
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Jeff and Mary Kaye gave us an Amaryllis plant before they went to Mexico. It had just barley broken ground before they left. We put it in the center of our table and now, six weeks later or so, there are six huge flowers in bloomand two more on the way. I wasn’t sure how to spell Amaryllis so took a stab at it in Google and found a time lapse movie of what we saw but set to a Liz Phair song. Peggi isn’t awake yet so I watched this without the sound.
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Latest “Crime Face painting. Painted from photo on Crimestoppers page of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
Rome Celli did his annual client appreciation night at the Little Theatre tonight so we had our choice of five movies. We chose “Slumdog Millionaire, “Nixon & Frost” and “The Wrestler” in that order thinking it might be crowded and we might need aback up plan. We got into Slumdog and it was kinda predicable and corny but we really enjoyed it.
Rome had cookies and coffee for everyone after the movie and we ran into a couple we sort of know. They asked how I liked the movie and I said “I loved it”. (Peggi was in the bathroom). They said they were shocked at how bad it was. I said “Really? It wasn’t great but I liked it”. Then it became clear to to me by something they said that they were really affected by how bad the situation was for the kids in India. Peggi came back from the bathroom and said, “Wasn’t that a great movie?” These people were almost crying.
Across the room I saw a woman come in who, the last time I saw her, had asked me why I painted these people who had caused some much trouble in our community. I did not really want to have another discussion with her.
My painting teacher, Fred Lipp, went down to New York to see the Marlene Dumas show at the Modern. About half my class saw that show. Fred bought he book and brought it into class and my father said “I think Marlene is a disturbed individual” (based on her subject matter).
I am beginning to question whether I too spend too much time looking at the dark side. I already knew there was some incredible poverty in India. I thought that was a pretty light movie. And that Bollywood dance number certainly had nothing on “West Side Story”. I told Kathy Palokoff that I was going to start painting babies and she said, “Please don’t”.
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“Science Fiction” by Ornette Coleman is one of my favorite album and I was thinking about this record last week when Bob Martin posted his top 25 lps on his Facebook page. We named our cat Ornette after seeing Coleman in NYC in 1998. I read in Jeff Spevak’s D&C blog that local trumpet star Paul Smoker and some of his Nazareth College students would perform interpretations of Ornette’s avant-garde classic album, Science Fiction on Sunday afternoon.
I got the lp out this morning so I could look at the liner notes and then I played a few of the tracks from our iTunes library. In Robert (Bob at the time) Palmer’s liner notes he says “Ornette’s music grabs you inside before you understand it intellectually.” That’s certainly how it got me and I still don’t understand it intellectually. He also says “To play this music, you have to step out of the mold your teachers taught you.” But this teacher is Paul Smoker!
So I made arrangements for Peggi to drop me off at the Atrium on the way out to her mom’s place. I sat down next to Greg Bell from “Jazz Rochester” as Paul Smoker introduced the lineup. There was only one Ornette piece in there, “Happy House”, and Paul told the crowd that they would be doing all Ornette later in the month at Nazareth. I had heard that there was a lot of inaccuracies and untruths in the blogospere but didn’t believe it until now. The band sounded great but I gave up some prime painting time to be here and Ornette is one of the few people I would do that for.
There was a discussion panel after the set and Paul Smoker said they would talk about, “Why we do what we do. Why do we keep beating our heads against the wall despite cultural indifference?” I had to leave to meet Peggi out front.
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“Irondequoit ain’t just pretty. It’s my home.” Apologies to Bat McGrath and his “Naples” song. Bat was just in town for a house concert and we watched a few songs at the D&C’s website.
One of the prettiest sites in town these days is the town’s infrastructure installation over on 590. These things have been here all winter while construction on the four new traffic circles has been on halt. There are probably a hundred or so of these things over there of all shapes and sizes. I wonder if they are still going to call it 590.
There are a number of Irondequoit legends. One of them is about how the Kodak executives over in the Oakridge Drive area voted down the final leg of an expressway loop that would have crossed the northern edge of the town connecting the end of 590 with the northern end of 390 in Greece. I always thought it was pretty cool that 590, an expressway, dead ended at Marge’s. In fact we did a song about it on our Planetarium release.
I’ve been looking at these concrete structures all winter waiting for a sort of warm, hazy day to photograph them. They look particularly good with some snow around them but snow and sun make impossible to get the rich grays in these thing. I want to thank who ever is responsible for the installation. I’m not sure how long the show is running.
I was on my bike. In fact it’s visible in this photo. The only reason I am mentioning this is because of what happened on my way home. I came up behind three teenage girls who were walking home. One of them had bright red orange hair and it was course like Raggedy Ann’s. I didn’t want to get caught looking at them so I darted off the road down the embankment. Just as I did this I noticed the girls looking at me. My bike crumbled beneath me in the mud and I went over the handlebars. I tried to get up quickly but my handle bars were at an angle and my basket was all bent up. I hit my thigh on that post above the front wheel. It must have looked hilarious and I’m laughing as I type this even though my thigh hurts.
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I was thinking of that Picasso painting, “Three Musicians“.
The Clarisa Room is no more but the old Shep’s Paradise is open as “Clarissa’s” and it is still a great sounding room for jazz. We were there last night for the open jam hosted by 1968 RL Thomas graduate, Mike Allen, aka “A King Of Soul”. These three horn players, probably Eastman School of Music students, were waiting to play “Love For Sale”. This is one comfortable bar and it was midnight before we knew it.
We were talking about Gap Mangione last night because the bass player from his big band was sitting in. Conversation turned to the Buffalo plane crash and the Chuck Mangione players that died there. We hadn’t heard from Gap in a while but he called today to request some changes to his web site. We did another quote today for a web site. We have a few out there. We could be busy again if all goes well
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Found some more cans near a turn in the road on Hoffman today. We brought them home.
Spent a good part of the day trying to develop this template with vertical centering. I manage to get it working but I created a page that had no scroll bars in any browser. With Joe Tunis’s help, I got the scroolbars back but then lost the centering.
I say “I” but all I have done is search the web for help in executing this design. I wrote about this project a few days ago and Martin Edic sent me a link to a blog that had a great piece on vertical centering with css.
“I get high with a little help from my friends”.
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We were in the house last night for “Hat Night” with Watkins and the Rapiers at the Little Theater. Sue was was taking the official band photo while I butted in to grab this shot. It was also Haiku night and band members were on a role with pieces based on the celebrity paintings that are currently on view.
I had an appointment at the Hair Zoo this morning to discuss their web site. Stan the Man recommended us and I hope it works out. I parked right next to a Cadillac Escalade near a big sign that said “Walk In”. I tried walking in the front door and it was locked so I went around back. There was a guy there cleaning the windows. When he left, he turned to the people in the waiting room and said “I have feeling someone in this room is going to win the lottery today”. I guess you would have to play it to win it and I don’t even know where to go to buy those things. And how do you know if you win. Is that stuff in the paper? I probably should have gone out and bought a ticket.
We had received a couple of calls urging us to vote “yes” on the proposal to move the senior living facility on Pinegrove to the empty plaza across from Bishop Kearney. Hard to believe they would hold a special election on this but I guess it is a hot button issue. We went over to vote as a hoot and were surprised at how crowded t was. There were Irondequoit cops directing traffic in and out of the Town Hall. In class tonight Peggi’s yoga teacher, Jefferey, said we should have voted “No”.
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I ran out of spray fixative, that nasty crap that you coat a charcoal drawing with so that it doesn’t smear. And it was Sunday and Rochester Art Supply is closed so I started calling around. Staples put me on hold for about ten minutes and Home Depot had never heard of the stuff. The bay bridge at the end of Culver is open in the winter so Webster was an option. Peggi wanted to look at some fabric so we headed out to Jo-Ann Fabrics.
We drove along the lake and turned up Baker Road toward the village. Most of Webster has been swallowed up with housing tracks and they are sprinkled between old farm houses so it makes them all the more depressing. There are still some open spaces and we spotted one on our left. There was someone out in a field struggling with a huge kite. I pulled over and we watched while this guy get the big red kite off the ground. And then he took off but never left the ground. He was wearing cross country skis and a helmet just in case. He traveled the length of this field in less than a minute.
Turns out we were looking at the Gosnell Big Woods Preserve, a 163 acre woods with oak, hickory and hemlock trees that are 350 years old. If we get some more snow we plan to head out here to ski the trails. I think we can manage without the wind propullsion.
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The Ethnic Heritage ensemble showed up about 9:30 for an 8pm gig tonight at the Bop Shop Atrium. They were coming from Toronto and they got hung up at the border but the crowd stuck around. The band sauntered in like they weren’t even late and opened with a trance/chant tune on thumb piano with the lyrics, “Pharoah Sanders”. When we last saw these guys at the Jazz Fest in 2005, they did a similar piece called “Ornette Coleman”. All three played beautiul percussion at various times. Corey Wilkes, who also plays trumpet with the Art Ensemble, is an amazing player. Tom Kohn should have a great recording of this show.
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