A couple of weeks ago we took a drive to Corning (about 30 miles away) to check out the Museum of Glass which we knew about from reading finger lakes area tourist info. Corning as a town seems much smaller than Ithaca with the exception of CMOG - obviously the main attraction there. We were surprised to find a huge, ultra-modern (and glass-walled, go figure) building in the midst of a farmland valley.

The posted admission for adults is 12 bucks, but here’s a tip: Ithaca residents qualify as ‘locals’, so show ID and pay only 4 bucks! Great deal :O)

There’s an enormous marketplace on the main floor selling products in all configurations of glass you can imagine - some pieces of art we saw were tens of thousands of dollars, but there’s plenty to buy for those with a tighter budget. Christmas ornaments, perfume decanters, glass-bead jewelry, beverage glasses, dishware, and the latest bodum designs… we didn’t spend, but there’s enough temptation.

The museum is definitely of world-class quality and wouldn’t be out of place in the big city, so go if you can! Here’s a link to some pics I took.

Found out today via Boing Boing that the Beastie Boys have released acapella tracks on their site for anyone to download and remix for non-commercial fun.

I downloaded Root Down and did a clip with the only instrumental track I had on my computer - an 80s song by Trans-X. It’s only a 1-minute clip called Droppin Science (MP3), dedicated to Matt of course… so check it check it out!

Oh and people are sharing their mixes on the Beastie Boys forum here.

The other day I looked up The Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies to answer a question about this photo - Are there monks in Ithaca?

Yes, there are! They have a very colourful house in downtown Ithaca, and it’s not that uncommon to see monks out and about. They have plans to build a much larger monastery here in the near future.

While doing a wee bit of Ithaca+Monks research I came across this article Kurt Cobain’s Final Tour from Esquire Magazine’s Feb 96 issue.

I suppose locals who were around in 1996 could tell us more tales about Courtney, who made a pilgrimage to the Namgyal Monastery with Kurt’s ashes:

Cobain was first brought to Ithaca in the summer by his widow, Courtney Love, and packed with her wedding dress in a small knapsack shaped like a teddy bear. He’d been dead for three months, and Courtney, the bear, the dress, and the ashes had traveled cross-country twice before landing at this little monastery in the middle of nowhere.

Wow, there’s lots of dish about Ms. Love’s 2-week stay here… as well as a humorous description of Ithaca:

It’s a tolerant place, a college town where PH.D.’s from Cornell bag your groceries and stage poetry slams, a place with one trouser leg caught in a charming time warp, where it’s always 1970.

Possibility is high that some of Kurt’s ashes were spread around these parts. An interesting read.

Hello all, it’s the Doctor, coming to you live from the beautiful Philadelphia International airport. I’m halfway through a six hour layover using the (not free, grumble) wireless network. As Tiff posted, I’m on my way to the Lattice 2005 conference in sunny Dublin Ireland. Very, very exciting.

Since I’m going to Ireland, I thought I’d set up the ithacablogradio with some Irish tunes for y’all to listen to. So go ahead and click the Radio link up top, and be wisked away to the land of Leprechauns and Guinness.

You’ll notice a new button on the top of this page called ‘Radio’. That’s what it is, people! Now and then I’ll be switching up the playlist when the mood strikes me.

Today I decided to select Wartime Ditties for Frustrated Folks, to reflect some of my own thoughts about what’s going on in the world at the moment. Please be warned this selection of songs is laced with profanity, so if you’re sensitive to such things you might want to avoid the page for now.

You’ll notice volume fluctuation between tracks. It’s not that bad, but I think indicative of the age variance of the CDs I ripped the music from. Otherwise, enjoy!

It’s a wonderful thing that Ithaca has several works of art in public spaces, primarily along the Commons. My favorite piece is a 3-foot bronze man in a suit with dragonfly butterfly wings, he appears ready to take flight from the planter box he sits in near Tioga and Seneca. It’s called Businessman in touch with Nature and was dedicated by NYSEG.

He has a new buddy a few feet away from him - an enormous rusted-metal armadillo calf that I haven’t stopped to take a close look at yet, and it’s one of several new (metal) art pieces that have been planted over the past couple of weeks.

At the entrance to DeWitt Park you can’t miss this:

Forgive me (if you are the artist) for questioning how the positioning of this work has any benefit to the community or artistic merit as it stands. At first sight I think anyone would see this as an awkward installation: it’s parked smack in the middle of a high-traffic pedestrian spot, creating an obstacle preventing free movement through the area; sightlines from the adjacent park benches are disrupted; and in a college town with poor night-lighting it won’t be long before that rusty beak makes hazardous contact with an eye - its height is actually at my own eye-level and I’m nervous about passing within a few feet of it. To add insult, the context of its predatory expression tells me to run far away, as fast as I can run. Not ‘Welcome to DeWitt Park, come hang out here’. Where it stands this bird is not art, it’s a nemesis to the pedestrian.

Public art is always a topic for debate and discussion.

Also new to the Commons is a pocked, hammered-metal sculpture of a woman seated against a wall. I’ll snap a pic of that one soon, and save my comments til then…

Finally we’re getting some rain after a solid week of an epic heatwave. I was watching TV when the thunderstorm started at about 7-ish, got up to shut some windows and sat back down. About 10 minutes later a National Weather Service buzz came on warning of severe thunderstorms coming through. A few minutes late but hey, it’s a Syracuse channel, so I guess it was relevant timing for them.

At this moment I’m listening to our neighbour next door practicing cello on his back porch. It sounds particularly beautiful with the rain as backdrop - which is perhaps what inspired him, because I haven’t heard him playing before.

On Sunday there was another record fair at the Holiday Inn, where a bunch of NY state dealers unload their vans full of albums to sell. There’s a huge selection - they claim more than 100,000 records and CDs each time, I think it’s a bi-annual event. There’s everything from bargain-bin crap to new releases and good deals on still-sealed old and desirable albums. I can’t bring myself to buy a record (such as Chestnut Street Incident by Johnny Cougar!) in its original wrapper, bring it home and tear it open. That just doesn’t feel right for some reason. So I leave those for the hardcore collectors.

What I did get was two double and three single albums for 23 bucks: The Kinks Everybody’s in Show Biz, live Lou Reed Rock n Roll Animal, Prince Around the World in a Day and 1999 and Weather Report I Sing the Body Electric.

There’s also a HUGE selection of bootleg concert recordings on CD. I was all ready to pay for Prince’s 2002 One Night Alone in Chicago when I found out the price was $30. The recording was good (you can listen on the spot to verify this) but I wasn’t prepared to spend that much. Maybe in the fall when the sale comes around again…

I checked out the exhibitions at the stunning Johnson Museum yesterday. You’ve just got to love free admission!

Aside from the apparently-very-popular Rover Landings: Cornell on Mars exhibit, I really wanted to see the Twice-told Tales images, an exhibit made up of photographs from Cornell Alumni collections. Judging by the scale of what I saw, I’d say those Cornellians have some great taste (not to mention fat pocketbooks)! Some well-known photographers on display are Man Ray, Robert Frank, and Bert Stern (a print from the infamous last-ever session with Marilyn Monroe).

My favorite piece was definitely this camera obscura image by Abelardo Morell. To create it he covered the windows of a Manhattan studio with heavy black tarp, cut a half inch hole in it and did an eight-hour exposure of the studio interior. The effect is somewhat like using the studio walls as the inside of a giant pinhole camera. Brilliant! Check out Times Square in Hotel Room, and pick up a print of your own from his rep for only $4-15k! Worth every penny for sure…

On the museum’s lower level is Cars and Ketchup: Photorealist Images of the American Landscape. Usually I’m not such a fan of paintings made to look like photos but there were some mind-blowing works there. Naturally, Chuck Close’s Phil III (handmade paper in 24 grey values) was a highlight.

David Parrish’s Idol is an awesome depiction of Elvis all shiny and plastic-like. Also a fan of: Guy Johnson’s Step Grandfather Frederik… (oil on paper on aluminum!) and John Salt’s Arrested Vehicle.

Here’s a few pics I took inside the museum, which I think must be the best-designed modern building in Ithaca (by architect I.M. Pei):
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Notorious UK street artist Banksy now boasts Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Natural History and MoMA in his list of current exhibitions. Thing is his work wasn’t actually acquired by those big NYC museums. He personally brought his art pieces into each of those places and hung them on the gallery walls himself, along with the standard description/plaque you see beside works of art.

The Wooster Collective has the exclusive story and though two of the works were removed after some time, as of yesterday two still remained on display.

The piece at the Museum of Natural History was still there. Here’s that piece:

Banksy said, “They’re good enough to be in there, so I don’t see why I should wait.”