I’ve been writing arts and culture reviews for more than a decade now. I write anywhere from 6 to 12 CD reviews a month. I also do a ton of driving. Way too much actually. So much that I feel guilty. But what that means is that I work in the car. Which is bad I know, but I have a mini recorder and CD player there and 10 hours a week, 320 hours per year, close to 15 days out of a year driving. So I do a lot of work from my car.
And a lot of looking. I see, as you do too if you drive around Northwestern Pennsylvania, lots of stuff. Or rather the ghosts of lots of stuff – empty factories, brown fields, faded Red Man chewing tobacco signs, empty frozen custard stand open to the environment, melting away in to the ground, framed by cows lazily grazing, staring at the cars going by, wondering what happens to the soul after the sledgehammer and the electric knife.
Gypsy Dave and Stumpjumer's new album, As the Stars Gather Light tries, and in most ways, succeeds to capture all those things I see on my drive and turn them into music; to take the raw material which can beat us down when we consider what they were – the material of a prosperous culture, now gone – and reunderstands them as they are now –pieces of art.
The first thing that strikes the listener is how clean and clear the recording is. David Washousky has a high clear voice that, although I’m sure he’ll wince when he reads this, is pretty. The rest of the band, Ryan Nageotte on upright bass, Kristel Bastian playing fiddle and Jared Luteran with percussion, is equally as skilled and clear. No one instrument really stands out in the mix. Instead imdividual fancy-pantsness is subjugated to the overall sound of the band. They use that prettiness to their advantage by retaining the playfulness that is a oft-neglected part of folk music – “Baby Don’t Touch My Whiskers”, a goofy tune that celebrates facial hair(I don’t give a darn/if my beards two feet long/as long as it keeps me warm”) wouldn’t be out of place on a children’s album, the sort advertised in Time Out New York: Kids.
The flipside to that evenness is that it’s harder to put a finger on what to call this album’s genre. The album’s overall tone itself is almost (pleasntly) schizophrenic with lush alt-country balladry sounds and poetic writing like that found in "April’s Song” rubbing up against more sparse and by-the-books folk numbers like “Two Tears from the City” a hard luck story about not seeing “how livin’s livin without being free”. Other reviewers seem to settle on Americana, or folk , but that may be more because of instrumental choice (although at the same time, there’s no harmonica, and banjos are kept mastered at the back of the sound) rather than the overall sound. (
So let me go out on a limb here and suggest that what the album really sounds (best typified in cuts like "The Fox and the Chicken") the most like is Western Swing. Not in a cookie cutter retro sort of way, but in spirit. In fact if there’s a dominant theme in As the Stars Gather Light it’s the same sort of happy mélange that Western Swing relied upon – a mixture of a fusion of hillbilly music, pop, jazz, and blues aimed at an upbeat danceable sound. So while On his MySpace page the band cites Bob Dylan, bluegrass and Hank Sr as influences and the band itself even takes (part of its) name from a song popularized by Woody Guthrie:
When I saw the campfire gleaming.
I heard the notes of the big guitar
And the voice of the gypsies singing
That song of the Gypsy Dave.
There in the light of the camping fire,
I saw her fair face beaming.
Her heart in tune with the big guitar
And the voice of the gypsies singing
That song of the Gypsy Dave.
Have you forsaken your house and home?
Have you forsaken your baby?
Have you forsaken your husband dear
To go with the Gypsy Davy?
And sing with the Gypsy Davy?
The song of the Gypsy Dave?
I hear Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings, and Asleep at the Wheel. In fact, if there’s a drawback to this sound, it’s that the album is so darn happy and swingy. I like a little menace in my Americana, a little Nebraska in my Magic; a little “State Trooper” with my “Old Dan Tucker”.
Sitting here in my car, scribbling a few notes in a Sheetz parking lot is not how I imagined the life of CD reviewers – I imagine (and to be honest, I still imagine) them to be guys, about my age, early thirties, who sit in a darkened room as evening begins to fall in a metro area. They’re dressed in hipster clothes surrounded by milk crates full of vinyl and scattered broken CD cases. They’re drinking red wine and smoking a joint (actually, I still strongly believe that 95% of SPIN magazine’s editorial content is created this way) and nodding their heads very, very slowly and saying things like ” Ummm….yeah…”
In other words, I thought (and think) that reviewers are as cartoonish as the artists they review. Artists who send me press releases with language like, “Band X is not just a band to founder and songwriter John Frontman. It’s a way of life. While healing from a failed relationship Frontman did the only thing he knew how to. Live his life to the fullest. Out in the ocean catching waves with his friends in Costa Rica, Frontman was inspired to begin Band X’s latest release.”
So, I’m a little cynical.
But the thing is, I keep listening to music. When I see a friend after a long interval, one of the first questions we ask is, “What are you listening to?”
Now, I can say that I’ve been listening to Gypsy Dave and the Stumpjumpers' new album As the Stars Gather Light. And if most popular music is a cartoon, poorly and quickly drawn to be distributed, consumed and forgotten as quickly as possible, As the Stars… is a clear eyed piece of art that demands those jaded consumers close pay attention.Visit Gypsy Dave and The Stumpjumpers and check out their touring schedule on MySpace
Buy Gypsy Dave's
And Gypsy Dave and the Syumpjumper's
As The Stars Gather Light on CDBaby
George A. Romero Presents ... Deadtime Stories is filming in Fayette County. I'm starting to think Venango County needs a film comission.
Seth McClaine of Clarion will hold his B.F.A. senior exhibit, "An Outdoor View: The Streetscape paintings of Seth McClaine," in the University Gallery, Level A, Carlson Library at Clarion University, Dec. 3-7. An opening reception is scheduled Tuesday, Dec. 4 at 5 p.m.
The exhibit and the reception are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are: Monday-Thursday from 10 a.m.-3 p.m.
“In the past year and a half I’ve focused mostly on painting naturalistic streetscape based on the photographs that I’ve shot,” said McClaine. “These streetscapes are mainly of areas in Clarion and Pittsburgh.
St Louis is the new hotspot for comic artists.
How are all us bloggers going to make some money?
. The discussions will be moderated by Ben Fortel and the book is for sale here at the coffeehouse for $15. Send Gwen an email for more info or to join.“There was a strange connection [with Christina]. One of those odd collisions that happen. We were a little alike. I was an unhealthy child that was kept at home. So there was an unsaid feeling between us that was an utter naturalness.” A – Wyeth.
Museums and libraries have long thrilled me as places of refuge. It’s telling of my personality perhaps, that I seek out cool, quiet places with clean restrooms where quiet introspection is not only tolerated, it’s expected. Still though, I was surprised Saturday at Youngstown Ohio’s Butler Institute of American Art - the first museum dedicated exclusively to American Art – at the amount of people who weren’t there. A fine museum in a metro area showing a major free exhibition on a beautiful day attended by four people – three of them in my group.
“Andrew Wyeth: Watercolors and Drawings” is a collection of the popularly admired, but critically snubbed, Wyeth’s work including the studies (but not the actual painting, a egg tempera piece too delicate to move) for his most famous work, “Christina’s World”. In this show, sketches are enlarged, shrunken combined and fleshed out on their way to the final project. Entire studies are spent on an elbow, delicate lines creating a figure of strength, but reveling in the delicateness of the joint, the lines on the skin, the flakes and folds created by work and life.
By exhibiting sequential sketches and final paintings, the artist’s physical and indeed internal, process is laid bare. We watch, for example, the color slowly fade out of the work until, by 1949, Wyeth is using only earth tones in an attempt to lose his predilection as his wife said, “to use color for color’s sake”. Without color, the line and the techniques, the watercolor drapery and the physical scraping of the image begun to create what we expect from Wyeth – a Hopper-like sense of isolation (or if you’re anti-Wyeth an illustration rather than fine art quality) as found in , “Christina’s’ World” the artist’s most iconic image of a woman staring from the grass towards the house (a pose, revealed in the exhibit, but until then unknown to me, created because Christine suffered from a degenerative muscle disorder – losing the use of her legs eventually pulling herself around the house by her hands, or sliding on the chair – refusing a wheelchair until the end of her life – associating it with feebleness, a trait which she assuredly did not possess). 
Some of the studies add a much needed piece of whimsy to an otherwise cold set of images. Paw prints on some of the sketches illustrate Wyeth’s careless disregard of his studies as well create a sense of the artist as human, in contrast to the watercolors in the exhibit which have rushed, busy brush lines, adding to a sense of urgency, sometimes adding a hint of violence to an otherwise coolly considered artistic mise en place.
That violence is connected to a thirst for control that a portraitist feels for his subject. In this work, even those choosing not to be present become representational subjects through items become atavistic. A bag of drying shell beans become a stand in not only for Christina’s brother, Alvaro, who made the decision not have his portrait done after a short time with Wyeth, but also a stand-in for the Alvaro’s way of life as opposed to Wyeth’s – the beans are the business (and busyness) of the kitchen, a trope for the life and split household duties of brother and sister. These portraits, perhaps like all portraits, say less about their subjects and more about their creator. Through these watercolors and temperas, Wyeth is working out his own thoughts on life, death, isolation, and loneliness as well as difference.
“Andrew Wyeth: Watercolors and Drawings” runs at the Butler Institute for American Art until December 16, 2007.
, Nathanial Philbrick as he returns for a stop at the Drue Heinz lecture. 
The Clarion-Venango Film Series entry this weekend is The Machinist. Admission is free. Show starts at 7:30 pm at Clarion-venango Campus' Rhoades Auditorium
The Pittsburgh City Paper profiles one of my favorite regional bands, Celloforte
author (among many other delightful kid's books) Mo Willems appears Saturday at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall, Oakland, at 10 a.m. Tickets: 412-622-8866. The Post Gazette asks him a few questions., can be found here..
Pittsburgh filmmaker Jill Wiggins (r) receives People's Choice Awards for First and Third Place from Joann Wheeler (m) and Troy Wood (l) at the Venango Digital Film Association's First Annual Film Festival. Her winning films were Don's Diner and A Thunderous Life. Second Place was won by Venango Catholic High School's film History in Our Backyard, submitted by Judith Frost. A September date has already been set for next year's Film Festival. Photo by Dixie MorrowHORSES (the band that plays early video-game themed songs, including Mario Brothers, Mega Man and the Legend of Zelda) and GWAR on our tour together. If that's not strange enough, the tour includes a stop in Butler. They'll be playing Nov. 8 at the Meridian Vets Club, 125 Vets Club Rd.
NPR streams Nickel Creek's Washington DC show.
NPR streams Over The Rhine's harrisburg show
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