...don't stop!

Can you name that song?

Majuscle

From Brad Walker's most recent issue of Majuscle. The issue is full of jokes that he tells in specific situations that often get no laughs.

Is Brad an old man in training?

More about Brad here.

Zippered Shut

I have a lot to say about death, funerals, interstate-mourning, and the loss of a matriarch, but I am waiting- Kim has been out of town since the 5th of July and I want to tell her first.

So, instead I'll post this picture of Charles and one of Chuck Close. The resemblance ushers forth the unheimlich.

Back Home, and Making Garlic and Oil Memory of Nana

Nana's Dresser, 3 July 12, 2006

Thanks for all the kind words and well wishes.

To see the first Nana's Dresser go here, to see the second one go here.

I'm headed to Connecticut for Nana's funeral. I'll be back Wednesday night.

So long.

October 8, 1912- July 6, 2006

Nobody knows what waits ahead
Beyond the earth and sky
Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

And there the work of my own hand
Be broken by and by
Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

Sometimes it finds me fast asleep
And wakes me where I lie
Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

Forget my sins upon the wind
My hobo soul will rise
Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

Lie-d Lie-d Lie
I'm not afraid to die

-Gillian Welch

What peaches and what penumbras!

My initial response to seeing William Christenberry in the paper on Sunday was: NOT AGAIN! HOW MANY FULL-PAGE ARTICLES IN THE NYTIMES DOES THIS GUY NEED? DOES ARTHUR O. SULZBERGER OWN A WHOLE SUITE OF THESE IMAGES AND HE'S ENSURING THAT HIS INVESTMENT CONTINUES TO ACCRUE VALUE? AREN'T THERE ANY OTHER PHOTOGRAPHERS BESIDES CHRISTENBERRY (AND NIXON) WHO MAKE EPISODIC WORK WORTH MENTIONING (AD NAUSEUM) IN THE NYTIMES???

And then this morning I sat down with my breakfast and read the article- hmm'ing and ahh'ing all the way through- not reading (or learning) anything new, but remembering the first time I heard/saw him speak about his work, and how for years all I wanted to do was go to Hale County and walk about like Walt Whitman in Allen Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California, summoning up the spirit of Walker Evans, and trying my best to avoid Christenberry seeing me ripping him off.

As Each Month Should End

National Accordion Awareness Month ends on a good (if overwhelmingly minor and skwaunky) note. I trust everyone has been vaccinated by this point, and that you'll all be oom-pa-pa'ing into July with a patriotic confidence that will ensure that no flags will be burned, and that for the rest of the year all tunes are in 2/4 time, and played in a major key.












But we accordionists are a bunch of bleary eyed romantics and we will forever live in June- -we'll walk in 3/4 time, settle for the occasional mention over the next 11 months, and practice hard so that next year we'll be as big as- as popular as- but better than, America's Soccer Team.








So, to end the month Kim received her accordion in the mail yesterday! She got in on Ebay from a fellow named Ignaz who lives in Germany. Hers is a circa 1960's Weltmeister with a rich, wobbly, and yes, skwaunky musette. Hopefully, by this time next year I'll be posting recordings of our duets, and inviting all of you to our new apartment for a dance party (accordion music only).

Death By Musette on the Radio

It's true, after 6pm, on the Global A Go-Go show hosted by Bill Lupoletti, tomorrow (Friday) on Richmond's independent (and absolutely amazing) radio station, WRIR.

Should you choose to do so, you can tune in via the internet.

I finally read the summer fiction issue of the New Yorker last week (well, everything except the fiction- I'm kind of anti New Yorker fiction- it's a long, not so interesting, story that involves my father saying: "Mike, people who have everything like to be depressed by the books they read- it makes them feel less guilty about their wealth"). The summer fiction issue's focus is war, and in it is an excerpt from Operation Homecoming- a writing program funded by the NEA that will be publishing a collection of poems, emails, and letters that have been exchanged between soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people at home. It's a heartwrenching, and heartbreaking collection and I couldn't help think about this guy while I read them. He's a part of the Dark Horse battalion- the same group of Marines that my sister's boyfriend belongs to.

Last Night's Party

Todd and I played first and I have never been so nervous- during our first song, Ca Gaze, I looked down at my hand thinking I would direct it to do what it was supposed to do but all I could do is marvel at the spasms it was experiencing. After the first few tunes I remembered that I could look to, and rely on, Todd to keep me on task and confident- as he often does.

As I often do, I set up my camera and took a picture every few minutes. Unfortunately, Chris Freeman is either too tall, doesn't play sitting, or I didn't think that his head might not be included in the frame. Regardless, Chris Freeman is an amazing songwriter and entertainer- I have never seen someone so happy to sing songs that are at once hilarious, intelligent, and biting. Send him an email and he'll send you a cd, free.

Jon Felton and Soulmobile played third. From the left: that's Adam on trombone, egg shaker, and trombone case (he's Naomi's nephew); next is Elizabeth on cello- like the others, friendly and warm, she understood my hesitancy to let a blanket of mine, made for me by a former student's mother, to go with them to Tennessee (in the end her understanding led me to give them the blanket); then there's Jon- a magnetic person and performer whom I've known for about eight years and whom I credit with having brought a public tenderness to the male population of Frostburg that didn't exist before he arrived- he's the captain of the Soulmobile and is an excellent, if sometimes reluctant driver; BJ is the multi-instrumentalist in the band- he plays nearly every instrument and plays them all very well- he sings, and is quick-witted, and as is rare, his quick wit is sweet rather than acid; Todd, another multi-instrumentalist who is in (at least) four bands these days- Todd is the person everyone calls when they need help- he could be a session musician and maybe that will happen someday; Lindsay plays the tambourine, the mandolin, has lots of piercings, and an insouciance that is betrayed by her beautiful, punk-rock soprano.

The night felt as much like an evening around the campfire as it looks.

Want One?

The CDs are made! Todd mixed the ten tracks and I've made a simple sleeve with cover art (above) and the titles of the songs on the back. The CDRs are even labeled. Those of you who remember Sadhu know that this isn't the first band I've been in that's had a CD, but this is the first time I've been able to record all of the accordion tunes I play on something other than a hand-held tape recorder, or answering machine. It's neat to be able to hear myself from another direction- playing an instrument is very different from listening to that instrument. On a couple of the tunes my bass lines really sound like a tuba! I love this as the tuba is the instrument I plan to learn after I learn the musical saw.

So, if you'd like a CD, send me an email with your address, and I will get to work on getting you one in the next couple weeks.

Also, as I mentioned the other day, Thursday night at our apartment Death By Musette, Chris Freeman and Jon Felton and His Soulmobile are playing. Starts at nine- bring something to chew or sip.

ALSO I have in the works some words about current exhibits in Richmond that I saw last week by: Alyssa Salomon, Ted Victoria, and Langdon Graves. I will post about these soon.

June isn't Over

Mama here is Amy Jo here. This picture is a good accompaniment to David Sedaris' story about his father desperately wishing that his children were musical and that if they were the family could resemble the Dave Brubeck quartet. I think the story is called "Papa Wasn't a Rolling Stone" and you can find it somewhere on the internet.

Land Speed Record

Tonight Todd and I recorded all of the Death by Musette tunes that we play together. We did this in record time (three hours) and hope to have a CD to give to our friends Jon Felton and His Soulmobile when they come through town next week. I've been playing these tunes for years and Todd is mighty quick when it comes to pumpin' nylon (and steel). Reno (Todd's cat) took a nap in my accordion case while we played.

The Soulmobile will be enroute to Tennessee to play at a festival organized by their friends the Psalters and they, along with Chris Freeman, Todd, and myself are going to play music next Thursday evening. You are invited, bring something to eat- it's going to be a mighty sleepover.

Just Visiting

I took this one.Kim took this one.

A couple of weeks ago Kim and I spent some time with my 4x5, George's lens, and some very out-of-date Polaroid film. Is there anything to make you think that the picture of me isn't from the early 70's? There aren't any plants, and there isn't an ashtray at my feet....but other than that? Kim in her simplicity embraces the zeitgeist whereas I'm afraid I look like I just got in from mowing the lawn.

Early Morning Activity

I like making and photographing piles- it's really kind of embarrassing but I'm going to post these words and risk all the assumptions about my maturity, my id, and my relationship with not only the toilet but also my mommy. Plus, why would I bother making a pile if I didn't plan to share it?

I was at my Nana's apartment this weekend taking care of her while my mom was enjoying some much needed respite from her duties as health advocate and care giver for Concetta Sturniolo.











Nana was diagnosed with cancer last November and at that time had the tumor (on her bladder) cauterized to slow down the onset of the cancer. In the past few weeks the tumor has been acting up again and she had to have it cauterized again, as well as have a neprastomy because the tumor is blocking her ureter and she isn't able to urinate.








Having a neprastomy involves an incision being made in the patient's side and a stint (or drainage tube) being inserted into the kidney so urine can run directly from the kidney into a bag that is attached to the leg. Coincidentally, having had this procedure likens my Nana's situation to my Pop's- Pop had had colon cancer in the 70's and spent nearly 30 years with a bag attached to his body. In a way, I think my Nana feels closer to my Pop now - it's almost like there is a small part of her that is accepting her fate a little more easily because she knew that having a bag was something Pop had experienced, and this makes her feel a little closer to her best friend who died four years ago.





On Saturday my cousins Christina and Michelle, and Michelle's husband Stanley visited from CT and NYC (respectively) and when asked how she was doing upon their arrival Nana said (with a wry look, a lowered brow, and out the corner of her mouth): "I stink on ice!"









Nana has always had a great sense of humor- it's dark and hilarious and she's not shy about letting a person know how she feels. She and I always spend some amount of time talking about how she might best go about jumping off the balcony of her apartment.











When my Pop got really sick in 1997 I became his caregiver for a while- I did everything- I bathed him, I fed him, I changed the bag. I did, saw and experienced things that inverted my ideas of what it was to be a grandchild. I wasn't asking of him, he was asking of me, and all of a sudden, with his big hands in mine, trimming his toenails or cutting his hair I realized that suddenly I was an adult. That happened again this weekend.

Yo! Big Ass Radiating Meta-Clique

Styling: Paul Thulin

Something other than a polka?

From Bamako, Mali Seydou Keita opened a photo studio in 1948 after having stumbled on picture making while working making furniture. His became the most important studio in Bamako and his work is generally viewed as being illustrative of the coming change (independence) of Malinese culture, and indicative of a photographic sophistication most non Africans didn't think existed.

Read more here, see more here.

Blog post format ripped off from both Concientious and Meet Me in Ataxia, Baby!, two excellent photo-centric blogs.

Roy Bertelli

The wonderful Kim Wolfe, future accordionist and keyboard (QWERTY) wiz was searching about for 'cordeans and came across Roy Bertelli, a man after my own heart. Not only is he an accomplished player but he has also reserved a burial plot for his accordions in front of Abraham Lincoln's grave in Oakwood cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. Word is that he is often found sitting atop his memorial playing tunes and greeting the many visitors (to Lincoln's grave, not his).

Pictures and info from a website by a programming couple in Seattle who went on a trip to all of the states whose names begin or end with the letter "i".

Go here for more (includes an excellent excerpt from a travel guide that describes Bertelli's soon-to-be instrument tomb).

Tefuukin

Jenny Wilson!

This is my friend, former bandmate, and the focus of a fanclub that I started a bunch of years ago (actually, it was only a bunch of t-shirts that said "The Jenny Wilson Fanclub", but what is written becomes truth, at least after 7 years, right?). The band was called Sadhu and we were anything but a group of ascetics- we were better described by the quote (by our post-Jenny drummer Robert, wearing a nicotine patch): "this isn't a band this is a cancer cluster". Jenny was our drummer until she moved to the West coast to be with her boyfriend (hence the need for the t-shirt). That's my first accordion she's looking at... adoringly(?) I doubt it, but I did catch her at a moment when she seemed to be glancing in the direction of that old, wheezy, honking beast.

As Promised

This is Art Van Damme. He's a jazz acordionist and if you want to read about him and his fancy shirts, go here.

Shigeo Kawashima 3

Kawashima's sculpture is complete!

The opening is tonight 6-8pm at Visarts, hope to see you there.

It's National Accordion Month!

In honor of the month, the instrument that I play, and to all those squeezing before and after me, I'll be posting a number of accordion related pictures over the next week or two.

This picture is of Amy Jo Sawyer- a player I know little (or nothing rather) about but I think she may have been related to the Sociable Sawyers. You'll have to wait and see who they are.

Accordionists (a certain type- the type that establish things like the National Accordion Awareness (?) Month and endlessly cite all the pop stars who play the accordion as proof that it's not the domain of dorkdom) in the US are overwhelmingly concerned with righting the image of the accordionist in this culture. In the rest of the world the accordion is a staple of most cultures and isn't derided the way it is here.

If only we could hear the beautiful Amy Jo play for us today!

Max

This snap is of Max- one of the two beautiful sons my good friends Robin and Paula call their own. He's dressed up for his birthday party, and seeing his picture makes me think of a few things:

1. I'm glad that my friends have decided to have children- I know some very incredible people and the thought of them raising small humans to be big ones is promising-this makes me happy, and I feel a sense of the history that I am a part of- it even makes me feel a little hopeful (I swore off the word hope- along with a vegetarian diet and cuffed jeans- at the start of the 21st century but some things die hard).
2. I've also been thinking a lot about the words community and fellowship. Can you have fellowship without community? Do you need community for fellowship? I think Robin (or one of you other smart readers) may have something to say about these two words, these two ideas.
3. For years I was either Dracula or Darth Vader for Halloween and when I found my Dad's Back in Black cassette tape and I first heard Hell's Bells everything just fell into place. Later years would usher forth an unbridled penchant for such theatrics as those put forth by Motley Crue, The Misfits (and all the other Danzig projects), all the way to Nick Cave (my apologies).
4. Why didn't I ever think to dress up for my birthday?
5. Those are the whitest feet I've ever seen!

And finally, for good measure, here's a picture of Robin and me from way back in 1996. The pic was taken at a hotel in DC when a group of us went to see/hear Billy Bragg. That's the first time I ever heard Smoke- a band that fits perfectly into the aforemntioned list of the dark and dreary.

That's Stephen coughing, and Susan standing as still as she could.

Shigeo Kawashima 2

Pictured clockwise from bottom left: Pic 1- Kawashima, Tina, Miguel, Julie, and David Williams. David is making a documentary of Kawashima's residency Pic 2- Kat (she taught Kawashima the pickle question), David Williams (see the tripod legs?) Tina, and Christopher

In spite of all the laughing and asking me whether he could "tickle my pickle" (Kawashima knows very little vernacular English, but he came to Richmond ready to deliver a list of mildly offensive "jokes" that he had learned during his last residency in California- I'm proud to say that we Richmonders have taken up the responsibility of carrying on this tradition and he'll leave here armed to offend whoever he meets next) Kawashima and assistants are just about finished with the sculpture. I think by the end of today they will have cleaned all of the exposed parts of the bamboo, vacuumed it, and vacuumed the knots so that they'll stick straight out from the sculpture (Kawashima says that in Japan this type of knot is called a "man knot", he claims to not be joking but I'm not sure any of us believe him).

Shigeo Kawashima

Where am I? Where have I been? In the past week I've driven to Philadelphia, NYC, and Connecticut. In the name of art handling and exhibiting I've been to an artist's studio in Philly, the houses and apartments of incredibly wealthy collectors in all three places, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the Northeast (Greenwich) and one of the poorest (West Philly).

Half of the reason for the trip was to pick up a few sculptures by Shigeo Kawashima, an independent bamboo artist from Kanagawa, Japan who is at Visarts until June 2 making a site specific bamboo sculpture. The following pictures are from a stop motion video I'm making of the creation of the piece. Following these pics (and my words) is the press release from the Visarts website.




We ordered 2 dozen 20' bamboo poles from a bamboo forest/farm in Dudley, Georgia. Here they are in the warehouse space at Visarts where Kawashima and his assistants did the first stage of the work (I have been one of them off and on but mostly I have been running to the store, making sure he has what he needs, cleaning up, etc.). Kawashima cut the ends off all the poles, the assistants (including me for this part) washed the poles, then Kawashima began splitting the poles into eighth's and the assistants cleaned the strips of the interior node pieces with what looked to me like bamboo shanks.











After the bamboo was cut into hundreds of (approx. 1.5") strips Kawashima began weaving them together to make what appears (for now) to look like a smiling queen-size futon. The piece is approx. 15' long and the strips of bamboo are joined with black zip ties.












After about half of the strips were woven together the piece was moved into the gallery and Kawashima will complete it there. After all the bamboo is woven Kawashima will use black yarn and tie thousands of knots all over the piece.


The exhibit opens this Friday at 6pm and will remain on view until mid-July.

Press Release:

At the invitation of the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, sculptor Shigeo Kawashima arrives in mid-May from his home in Kanagawa, Japan, to spend three weeks at the center as a resident artist. Intricately weaving strips of fresh-cut bamboo, Kawashima will construct a monumental sculpture that he has conceived specifically for the VACR's galleries. The exhibition also includes a selection of Kawashima's small-scale maquettes, for which he has become internationally known.

Kawashima's residency follows the VACR's 2004 exhibition, Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Arts, which introduced his work along with that of 30 other Japanese artists to audiences in central Virginia. His exhibition is also the sixth installment of On Site / Artists' Projects. This annual series supports the creation of site-specific works that stretch traditional boundaries and expectations, giving both artist and audience new challenges and opportunities for interaction.

Although Kawashima's early training was tradition-based, he later pursued a path as an independent artist instead of joining a professional craft-arts organization. Born in 1958 in Tokyo, he was in his twenties when he began teaching at the Beppu Occupational School. Because of his youth, his students did not take him seriously until he challenged them to a competition to see who could split bamboo the fastest and most accurately.

According to Robert Coffland, a specialist on Japanese bamboo arts and director of the TAI Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kawashima's sense of artistic experimentation was inspired by Shono Shounsai, Japan's first Living National Treasure in the bamboo arts, who was a major advocate of the sculptural possibilities of bamboo. "Kawashima's creativity and his deftness at mastering new techniques," Coffland notes, "have established his reputation as a leader in the next wave of bamboo sculptors."

In the 1990s, Kawashima began making large-scale bamboo sculptures in natural and urban settings. Characterized by graceful curvilinear forms and dramatic surfaces, these unprecedented works have led to several recent site commissions in this country. Over the last decade, his small sculptures have entered more than 30 collections throughout Japan, Europe, and the United States, including the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, and have been included in a dozen shows featuring new work by emerging contemporary artists.

Morsey Horsey

Death by Musette is the Horsey Orchestra again for Horsey's Two Hour Variety Hour. It's tonight, can you make it?

Friday 8pm ADA Gallery

Engineering Conflict

Painting and sculpture still have the power to make people intemperately angry, as former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's outrage over Chris Ofili's distinctive ways with elephant dung and canvas vividly demonstrated not so long ago. But after a century or more of twisting the bourgeoisie by the tail, the cultural shock tactics of visual artists are subject to the inevitability of diminishing returns...

From a New York Times Magazine article about the power of architecture by Deyan Sudjic.

Read the rest here.