I thought “The Artist” was about an artist. And I thought it was going to be silent, like really silent, without any musical accompaniment. I imagined listening to people squirming in their seats but I was happily wrong on all accounts. I should accept the fact that actors are artists and I do but it’s not he first thing I think of when someone talks about art.

Maureen Outlaw took this photo last night and emailed it to me from class. I work on these charcoal drawings at arms length and hold them up to a mirror to get an overview while scrubbing away with my eraser. I’ve noticed that I spend more time drawing with the eraser than I do making marks with the charcoal stick. I stuck them up on the wall at class while I addressed Fred Lipp’s criticism and moved across the room to get another perspective. Some work better in your face. This camera phone photo is yet another vantage point and they are all informative. Fred told me they look “tough”, adding, “That’s a compliment.” They could be a lot tougher.

I loved “The Artist” and how it kept playing with the vantage points of filmmaking, the movie within the movie and the movie being projected in front of us which we were made more keenly aware of because of the absence of dialog. The theater was packed and I was aware of the oversized people crammed in the seats ahead of us. Skip Bataglia’s “Car Crash Opera”, a seven minute animated short which ran before the movie was sensational. In class a fellow student Craig said told my father, who is also in the class, that he looked like the librarian in “Hugo.” So that has been added to our queue.

The atmosphere and service at Joe Bean Roasters on University Avenue are laid back which is something I didn’t expect considering their product. They are artisan roasters and craft brewers. You can choose from about ten different preparations but we chose the single pour method and watched as our barista weighed the beans on a drug dealer’s scale, ground them and slipped the grounds into a single serving sized paper cone while the water boils on a burner in hands reach of the seats at the bar. The glass pots of fresh brew are placed, Japanese style, on a small board alongside a ceramic cup which we were able to fill three times while we chatted with Mike, the owner. The place feels a bit like the opium den Robert DeNiro visited in “Once Upon a Time in America.”

Grand Avenue, Leighton Avenue, Bowman Street, Upper and Lower East Main Street and Lamont Place. Sonja Livingston glanced at the list of streets that surrounded our old house in the city. I had jotted them down as I read her book, “Ghostbread“, and Peggi had opened it to that same blank page in the front of the book in order to have Sonja sign our copy. It is interesting to me that so much of her bleak and beautiful memoir took place on the streets of our old neighborhood.

Sonja had a packed house at the downtown library on Super Bowl Sunday. Standing room only. Her husband, painter Jim Mott, manned the merchandise table and sold every copy of the book they brought. We’ve given copies of her book to a few people as gifts and we learned from the question/comment session that many others had done the same. The book is that moving.

Sonja read from “Ghostbread” but she read too fast. Even though the chapters are short I wanted her to linger over them and so I could savor their beauty. She had many in the crowd tell her how much this book meant to them, some were people who grew up with her, and it was all quite emotional. There were publishing and craft-like questions from other writers which Sonja handled with charming efficiency and I was thinking, “Can’t you see? This woman is a natural.” But what do I know. I can’t even spell. She said she hoped we realize that people in poverty are just like you and me in every other way.

First Friday’s art crawl is sometimes rewarding and sometimes not but it is always entertaining. When the art fails to engage the conversation always picks up the slack. We ducked in and out of art spaces on three floors of the Hungerford Building staying the longest in Brian Peterson’s studio looking at his assemblages the shortest at Heather Erwin’s space where some sort of reading was going on to a packed house. We heard she had been temporarily locked out of Facebook for some controversial posting about her show. Doesn’t fb know Heather is keeping them in business in this town? The RIT show at the R gallery on College Avenue was interesting in that the student work looked better than the faculty work in most cases. And over at RoCo it was nice to see that Robert Marx had sold approximately $20,000 worth of paintings. Rochester likes his work for reasons that I don’t quite understand.

Artists talks are not for the faint of heart. We bravely attended one at the new I-Square gallery last night where four artists talked about their work and so much more. It was exhilarating. Richard Harvey talked mostly of process but his is multifaceted and interesting. Wendy Menzie started making art after primal therapy in the 70′s. She quoted Philip Larken, “Your mom and dad fuck you up. They don’t mean to but they do” and spoke of her journey back to the child inside. Ed Buscemi stressed the importance of improvisation and relayed a dream he had thirty years ago where people were moving by him on a conveyor belt and he jumped on and tried to shake the people but he couldn’t bring them out of their trance. It seems to be his modus operandi. He is fond of asking “Are you kidding me?” in an animated fashion and he admitted to being hooked on conspiracy therories. Todd Beers discussed his breakthrough painting which is on view until tomorrow and told a beautiful story of his encounter with a dove on the fire escape he was sleeping on. He dimmed the lights and wowed us with his poetry. Harvey, Menzie and Buscemi all studied with Robert Marx who has his own opening tonight at Rochester Contemporary. He is featured in their Makers Mentors show.

We scurried downtown for the Ossia show at Kilbourn Hall but missed the opening toy piano number. We caught “I Can’t Concentrate” by the Brooklyn band, Zs, a mathematically challenging, post jazz, brutal-chamber piece. And then were blown away (again) by Ossia’s performance of Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together.” From the liner notes – “The work consists of a bass line accompanied by a series of instructions which can be realized by any group of instruments. With each performer acting as composer, the work allows for a variety of performance outcomes and is essentially an experiment in compositional anarchy.” A vocalist read a letter from Sam Melville-in prison in 1970 for series of radical bombings in Manhattan where no one was hurt-to his brother on top of the music. The twenty minute piece was trance-like and hallucinatory like a deep dream.

Whenever I catch a glimpse of myself while walking by a building with reflective glass I’m always taken aback by how bent over I look. And we were really slumped over yesterday as we climbed the big hill up to the Cornell campus in Ithaca.

The guard at the Johnson Museum yesterday was downright chatty. We were admiring Giacometti’s “Walking Man II (L’Homme qui marche II)” when he offered that this piece was the most expensive one in the collection, worth over a hundred million in fact. I said, “You better make sure no one walks into it and he said “Someone already did.” “A women backed into it while she was taking a photo.” He showed us a slight crack in one of the legs setting the alarm off as he pointed to it. I had just seen a sign that said “No Photos” so I asked if it was ok to take photos and said it was ok to photograph the permanent collection but not the work on loan or the work that is usually in storage but temporarily on display. I really wanted a photo of the Otto Dix etching called “Self Portrait with Cigarette” (also in MoMA collection) but that was off limits so I took one of Walking Man and got the Otto Dix print in the background.

After painting class last night the talk centered around critical thinking and the lack of it. I was trying to imagine any other kind of thinking.

My drawing above was characterized as “academic” and I would agree with that. Adequate but not particularly expressive. I set out to do some rather quick sketches on craft paper and realized that quick or not the same criteria applies to any piece. The effort must work as a whole so the focus is the same.

We always have a January thaw but this is ridiculous. We finally get a few inches of sow and now it’s 50 degrees and sunny, too messy to walk or ski in the woods so we headed off toward the bay. This house with the “Let It Snow” banner in the window expressed our sentiments exactly.

My aunt is in hospice and my father was thinking it would be nice to get someone up there to play some music for her. Of course we suggested Phil Marshall, a music therapist and genuine top shelf musician. My aunt is going to suggest a few songs and I’m certain it will be great.

Years back we did a “My Funeral“print version of the Refrigerator I remember thinking about a few songs that I would like to her at my own funeral and of course that doesn’t make any sense at all because I will be in a little can at that point. Peggi Lee “Is That All There Is?”, George Jones “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game”, Eric Dolphy’s “Serene or maybe James Brown’s “Night Train.” I’m pretty sure no one would want to hear the long version of Sun Ra’s “Space Is The Place.”

When my brother’s father in law died the funeral home had his body in a closed cassket and they wheeled him into a room where we were all sitting and they played Sinatra’s “My Way” over the little speakers mounted in the ceiling without any introduction or set up and it was a very strange experience. He was a lot more fun than that. So there are a lot details to work out if you want pull off something like this. It has to be done in a party atmosphere for starters.

To protect his thrown King Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in Bethlehem when he heard that Jesus was born. Like most of the episodes in the bible it is highly unlikely that this ever happened but it makes a good story and the Catholic church put these stories, most of them borrowed from mythology, to good use in an effort to win converts, keep the converted and illustrate their moral superiority. These innocents were the first martyrs. There is no one more revered in the church than a martyr. Of course when times got tough the Catholic Inquisitors resorted to “Convert or Die” methods themselves.

I used to know most of these bible (new testament included) stories but they all got jumbled up with age. These days I only set foot in church for funerals or when I’m drawn into an ancient cathedral in Spain. But I’m thankful for all the heady times in Catholic school where they struggled to convince me of the most absurd dogmas (virgin birth, resurection). The experience was formative and I look back fondly on most of it. Thankfully the church used it’s money to hire the best artists in history to illustrate their myths so I have a deep appreciation of religious art, a lot of it Spanish from the golden age (Siglo de Oro).

Last night after dinner we were showed our Spain photos to my parents. Both my father and I called our digital photos “slides” when I brought them up on our tv. Kodak did that to us. When the stone carvings, above, on the Nativity side of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, came up Peggi and I speculated aloud on what was being depicted. I thought maybe it was an archangel protecting the babies but my father thought for a bit and correctly identified it as the “Massacre of the Innocents”. So I can’t blame age for not remembering this. It was really my bad study habits.