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.
There were only four people in Peggi’s yoga class last night. Maybe it was the weather or maybe it had something to do with Jeffery, the yoga teacher, going on a cruise for a few weeks. There were seven people in my painting class but that’s everyone who signed up for the winter session. It’s the slow time of year and that’s the way we like it.
We dropped my father off after class and Peggi and I went downtown to Danny’s Ball at Abilene. The Eastman 10, who were arrested for playing in the streets on election night, did a rousing version of “God Bless America” and the packed house went nuts. We had our long sleeve Obama t-shirts on.
Doctor Burns has his own Joesph Cornell in his office in Rochester, NY
“Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing”. Philip Guston told it like it is.
It’s physically tough too. I sprained my ankle a few weeks ago running down the stairs with a painting in my arms. And for months I’ve been watching this dry red patch between my thumb and forefinger get more and more irritated. It’s on the hand I hold my palette with. In the last week I noticed a funky odor when I brought my hand near my nose. I googled “skin oder” and found all sorts of skin cancer links and stories about animals becoming aware of their owner’s cancer before doctors. So I called my doctor and he got me right in.
He had a Joesph Cornell like box on his wall and I took a shot of it. I explained that my palette used to be painted white but I have worn the paint off over the years. My doctor prescribed a low level topical steroid ointment. He said it was probably a reaction to the chemicals in the plywood and suggested that I give my palette a new coat of paint. I thanked him and gave him a post card for my painting show.
Our nephew, Eli, had a school assignment to do a “Job Shadow” thing and he chose 4D Advertising to work with. He came over today and we had a number of typical projects lined up for him. I showed him a php page that we were working on that would call on an include for the navigation bar. I was trying to explain the concept and I asked him if he had a website. He took me to a FreeWeb site that he and his brothers had put up to feature their Legos Movies. His site was way cooler.
We had him sort receipts for about twenty minutes in preparation for our tax filing. And then I had him scan a notebook of Pete LaBonne’s Fish drawings for the Refrigerator. They have been sitting around since last winter. Eli cleaned up the scans in Photoshop, saved them for web and then uploaded the files. I helped him construct pages in Dreamweaver to display the drawings and we posted them. He put a “fish” link on the front of the Refrigerator so other people can find them.
I interviewed Eli before he left and he typed in these responses.
Eli, how was your day at 4D?
It was great!
What did you learn?
I learned how to add pictures online using dreamweaver.
Do you think you would like to do this kind of work when you are a little older?
Maybe..
I had to sign some paperwork while his mom stood by and I noticed the only
instruction he was given was “Be sure to dress and behave appropriately”. Eli had a black t-shirt that said “The Hives” on.
Our friend and neighbor, Rick Simpson, let us borrow “Stax/Volt Revue – Live in Norway” dvd. We watched it on the coldest night of the year (so far) and we couldn’t sit still. This is one amazing performance from openers, Booker T and the MGs, to Otis Redding. We loved Booker T on organ and Al Jackson on drums and Duck Dunn was a locomotive on bass. The same band backed all six artists on this tour. This show started hot and got hotter until it was almost out of control. Only the great Sam and Dave could take it down a few notches with “If Something Is Wrong With My Baby” and reach the high point of the show.
We had a nice dinner with Peggi’s mom last night and then the three of us headed off to Mercury Opera’s production of Puccini’s “Tosca”. It is sort of a love triangle where everybody dies. Peggi’s mom told us that much before dinner.
Peggi hung the handicapped tag on the rear view mirror and inched up to the front door of the Eastman Theater to drop off her mom. A car darted in front of us and a woman jumped out and told Peggi that we had just run a red light. It was probably green when started going through the intersection because we were only doing about three miles per hour. This opera crowd is tough.
I slipped my camera out in the first act, made sure the flash was off, all the while keeping the camera against my body and I held the camera under my chin for a few shots. The guy sitting next to me leaned over and said, “That’s very distracting”. I couldn’t tell what he said so I said, “What?” He said, “That’s very distracting”. He had an Australian accent and he looked a bit like Russell Crow so I put my camera in my lap.
The opening scene with an artist, his lover and and an escaped political prisoner all in a church had real potential but it was coming off cute. The sets were beautiful and creatively lit. The three main characters had great voices and strong stage presence.
Opera used to be public entertainment. Someone has stripped the entertainment from these sung plays. The focus is on the trained voices and opera people know the code for signaling their approval of the craft. But what about bringing this play to life so the audience can take their minds off their mink coats and manners?
And they should not have those stupid translations up above the stage. They are like the tags in an art gallery that tell you what your looking at or what the artist had for breakfast. Either everyone should learn Italian or the the opera should be sung in English.
