Diamond Light

In the slushiest, wettest weather possible, Brian and I headed over the bridge to In Your Ear records in Brighton yesterday. It's right near a pretty sweet salvation army, a boxing school, a store that sells recording equipment, and a cold stone creamery. I got a 10 dollar nasty microwave at the salvy, and a bonsai tree growing kit. It'll be great if one of them actually works.

IYE records was a real find though. Lenny and Squiggy, at about the age they'd be now, run the ship, and it's tight down there. For instance, there's an entire rack of 8 tracks, and there were three DIFFERENT Boz Scaggs 8-tracks on that shelf. I wasn't aware he had three albums. I bought one of them, since Brian bought me an early festivus gift - 60% of a car 8-track player. One time I replaced my car radio with another. It took forever. Then Ani wrecked my car a few weeks later. Still, It would be sweet end days for my current shit box to have an 8-track player installed. If I'm successful in that, I'm going back for those other two Box Scaggs.

Another gem there: a black candle, which was placed right by the checkout.

Me (after Brian threw done some non-insignificant bills for a record player setup for Jrock): How much for the [crappy, used, dusty] candle?

Lenny: Oh, that's not for sale.

Me: C'mon, name a price, you don't need that thing.

Lenny: Hey Squiggy, is the candle for sale?

Squiggy: Ah yeah. Just give it to him.

The other great thing about IYE is that they have all sorts of decent albums for about 3 dollars. I couldn't resist but force Brian to get Anita Baker and Sade. When I get into something, I force it upon my friends, and currently I'm into 70's women soul singers, and Sade. Lenny is also into Sade. Upon mention, he says; "Oh, you gotta get Diamond Light...great record." That was awesome. Also, Lenny gave me a little trade secret: when people test new speakers etc, they often use the album JT by James Taylor, because it's supposedly one of the best recordings regarding diversity and sound quality out there. My man James. I tested Brian's system with it, it sounded great. Your smiling face.

You know when you are driving and you see a car pass beside you, but optically it appears that his wheels are spinning backwards? Technics record players use that phenomenon to do small-scale speed adjustments of their turn tables. You adjust until the phantom freezes in place. That was exciting because I've never seen an application of that phenomenon.

I did two new paintings this week, which I'm pretty happy about. They are both here.

Globe coverage for the gallery on Sunday! I always like the way newspapers and magazines come up with clever titles. I bet they have software or something that they type in some keywords and it busts out some ideas. In this case they went with Out of obscurity. Well, that changes the intended meaning of Lighting the obscure world, but no matter, no one seemed to get that right anyhow. Some friends tore into me when they found at that name, thinking I meant it like, how cool g263 is, lighting the obscure world. I meant that artists in general shed light on the obscure world when they do paintings. And, I stole it anyhow, from that weird movie Synecdoche, NY.

I'd like to list a few things wrong with my car, because I think that would be fun. But I'll make that my next post, because I've slipped on my posting and this one's already long enough.

Stay warm. My house is freezing these days. Baer would rather catch squirrels than put decent windows in. Or he has hibernated.