This is a small painting I made back in 2006. It’s oil on canvas with some rough and tumble textural bits happening.
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Is there a doctor in the house?
Your Daily Dose tonight features Mike Ryba and Bobby Pivan on Chemnitzer concertinas and comes complete with the closest thing to concertina acrobatics I’ve ever seen.
Here’s the Doctor’s Oberek.
Shadow in the Garden
I was going through some photos today and found this one…Shadow out in the garden hunting.
Shack Nasty
Here’s an old painting I’ve been thinking about. I believe I made it in 1995 or 1996 and I exhibited it in the exhibition c. 1996. I remember painting it like it was yesterday. Funny how some of them resonate with you right away and never seem to quit. This picture is called Shack Nasty. I painted it with oil paint and spray enamel on canvas. It’s about six feet wide.
Slowly Moving North
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My brother emailed the other day to say that morels were spotted in late February in Georgia and Alabama. Serious morel freaks track the progress as each week these tasty mushrooms appear farther and farther north.
Sometime more or less in the middle of May they will appear here in Southern Ontario.
Morel hunting is serious business. And, morel hunters are very serious about protecting their spots. I don’t know if it’s true but rumour has it my brother Salvelinas tosses camo-netting over his car so nobody will notice where he parked. The same rumour has it that he has been known to sweep away car tracks at the places he turns into his favourite morel spots. He will deny this of course. Salvelinas actually took me to a spot once that was so secret I had to drive blind-folded. How I didn’t crash into anything, I don’t know.
It will be most interesting to see what the feeble winter we’ve had does to the timing and quantity of morels in our area. I’m a cup-half-full kind of guy so I’m banking on a good season that will happen more or less at the usual time.
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The New Math
This is the time a year when calculations start. Pundits are calculating when the Leafs will be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. They fooled some folks along the way this year by winning some games, but now they’re back to true form. In a time honoured Leaf tradition, they’ve trashed the coach. There. That’s better. The team still isn’t going to make the playoffs but it feels a bit better firing someone. In the NHL, it seems only the really really bad teams don’t make the playoffs. There’s lots of room for the good teams and the mediocre ones. You have to hand it to the Leafs though. They’re managed to stretch a rebuilding program for half a century. Well done.
Young Memphis
I was looking at some old photos this morning and came across a couple beauties…
Here’s Tuffy P with Memphis before we even brought her home.
And here’s Memphis as a little pup, out in the back yard with Jerry.
A New Student
A fellow contacted me during the week asking if I was the guy who taught button accordion. It is true that I have done a little bit of teaching. I have one regular student and another occasional student. I hadn’t thought about seeking another but this guy seemed really determined to learn.
He came over today for a first lesson. He has a nice accordion, with the notes arranged in what I’ve heard called the continental tuning. His box is a GCF like mine but the note arrangement is a little different. The G row has 12 buttons, the C row has 11 buttons and the F row has 10 buttons for a total of 33. I normally play either the 31 or 34 button system (sometimes called the Hohner or Gabbanelli systems), which are set up such that the C row is longer than either the F or the G row. As well, there is one button on the C row tuned so that the same note plays on either the push or the pull. This doesn’t occur on my accordions. All this is no big deal though. The fingering is close to being the same. The other thing I’ll say about his accordion is it is tuned very wet or what is sometimes called wide open musette. This is very typical with instruments for the Portuguese market.
My new student doesn’t have a musical background so we’re starting at the beginning. We talked about scales and notes and rests and notation and I had him start playing the C scale pushing and pulling air through the bellows. On diatonic accordions, the fingering is different pushing or pulling. This week he’ll work on some basic reading and getting used to playing the scale and then move on to some simple exercises I put together. After that, he’s going to move right into learning the melody side of a simple song.
I have to say that I enjoy teaching, and while I hadn’t planned for a new student, as long as this fellow works at it, I’ll be happy to help him learn.
Hawk
A large hawk was flying around Long Branch today. I watched it way up there as I took the dogs out for their run. It was too far away for me to tell what exactly it was. Let’s just say it was a heaping big bird of prey. When I rounded the corner by the water filtration plant, I looked up again and it was gone.
The last time I saw a hawk around here was a few months ago. I saw that one fairly close up. It had landed on the edge of the roof of the filtration plant. I’m fairly certain that one was a Cooper’s Hawk.
The hawk I saw today was making some big circles. Maybe it was hunting around for something tasty for dinner.
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Yes I said Yodel
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Tonight’s Daily Dose features the late Don Walser, Western Swing singer extraordinaire. My buddy East Texas Red first introduced me to Mr. Walser’s fantastic music.
27th Street 