Jazz Ensemble from the Old Town School of Folk Music plays Thursday, August 12, at 8:00 p.m. at the Blue Stem restaurant and martini bar. Music by Tadd Dameron, Lee Konitz, Joe Henderson, Chick Corea, Lionel Hampton, Wes Montgomery, Woody Shaw and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. I’m playing piano–I haven’t played with people for some 30 years, so this is an adventure.
Blue Stem
1935 West Irving Park Road
Chicago, IL 60613-2407
(773) 880-8470
Will report back on my experience–isn’t that what blogs are for.
This is the first performance work I ever created, while still a student at Brown University. It mystified my fellow students enough that they considered it “art.” Well, why not.
Bread Piece
Elements: A paper bag with the word “Red” painted in green on one side and the word “green” painted in red on the other side. A loaf of bread. A pair of scissors.
Performance begins with the bread and scissors in the bag. The performer walks around the room. To each person in the room, she gives a piece of bread which she cuts off with the scissors and piece of the bag which she tears off with her hands.
Paul Hertz, 1970
The piece was, as I recall, and exploration of symmetries and of the act of giving. The words are not the same as the colors. One cuts bread and breaks paper instead of breaking bread and cutting paper. One gives what is edible and what is inedible: meaning can be read into both. The bread was a homemade loaf, not sliced, that I baked myself.
Measure a cord into a number of equal units derived from the human body.
Extend the cord over the ground.
Record the positions of the cord.
Gather the cord together.
Paul Hertz, 1976.
My exposure to Fluxus through my ethnomusicology teacher Fred Lieberman was undoubtedly instrumental in the creation of this piece. First performed in El Pont d’Armentera, Spain, on September 11, 1976, by Paula del Cerro.
In this video, Paula del Cerro performs “Armentera Measure” in the mountains above El Pont d’Armentera, Spain. First, clouds measure the mountain, then Paula measures the mountain.
Cottonwood seeds have been blowing everywhere through our neighborhood over the last two weeks. I’ve heard that finches will make a meal of the cottonwoods catkins–we sure have a lot of house finches and a few goldfinches around. This pile accumulated on a windy day in a doorway set at a diagonal on the corner of a building at Belmont Avenue and Leavitt Street. Vortices of air were occasionally swirling the fluff around as I took pictures. Layers of fluff settled onto puddles and damp spots on the pavement.
The image was shot as a RAW file with a Nikon D300 and processed in Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS4 (in 16-bit Lab format). Enhancements were limited to improving contrast and sharpening details. Midtones were isolated and enhanced separately from dark and light tones. The histogram of the light tones was stretched (with the Curves adjustment) to provide a greater tonal range and a sense of greater detail to the pile of fluff.
One of a series of six still life images I recently uploaded to Flickr. Shot with a tripod and ambient light, with small aperture/long exposure for great depth of field. Some images in the set Some Lemons are high dynamic range (HDR) images created by compositing 3 to 5 bracketed exposures. This technique is usually employed for landscape, but I found it very interesting to employ for still life.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. (Douglas Adams). Or to paraphrase Stephen Sondheim: big failures have dignity but small failures are shameful. So to really FAILBIG, try the impossible. Dignity will thank you and posterity can fend for itself.
