In era of caller-ID, are phone polls valid?

In our house, we don't pickup calls that say "Political Call" "Unknown caller"  "no name" or any variant of customer, services, marketing or anything that isn't someone's name or a company we know is local.

We do not pick up, so our opinion is never counted in the know-it-all polls from Quinipiac and other groups who officiously announce what Connecticut Voters want. 

I am guessing the era of caller ID we are not alone in this foible. Frankly no one that I know picks up the phone unless they know who is on the other end.  I think it's just a handful of the foolish and/or technically challenged  who actually answer pollsters' calls.

I wonder if  the polls are often wrong - I mean how would we know?. Of course would equal numbers of opposing view holders exist in the group that refuses to pickup or in the group that consistently answers?  I think it is possible that the people MOST likely to vote are LEAST likely to pickup calls from unknown groups, and are also most unlikely to answer questions strangers pose, if they did pick up!  SO - In the era of  caller ID and cell phones -  is the classic telephone  opinion poll  an acurrate measure of public opinion?

And I am so sick of hearing politicians proclaim that this or that is not what "The American People" want. As if we were all alike. As if they really knew -

Governor Malloy, you are doing a great job. Thank you. Glad I voted for you.

Fiddling with new program

I have been fiddling with a new program from the mac app store. It's called Paintr and it is fairly inexpense on sale for $7.99. This is my first experiment with the program. Just fiddling. I will be using this to sign my work digitally in the future as picnik has proved ahh, unreliable.

Unexpected sights: wild mix & match

The other day, a drab day, I saw a wonderful eccentric sight in the grocery store, that cheered me immeasurably. It was like I had moved to some  Caribbean island nation on perpetual vacation. Or as if the sun had suddenly emerged from deep fog. What I saw, was a pre-occupied grey haired gentleman (or perhaps rascal) with a beard and sandals who was sporting a wild wild shirt. I loved the sight so much I had to take a picture, though I took pains to not show his face to preserve his privacy. Thank you so much dear sir, you made my day so much better.  I left the store humming.

Poetry at New Britain's Museum of American Art

On April 17th, 2011, twenty poets read poems on paintings that were hanging at the Museum of American Art in New Britain. The poems were all written specifically for painting the museum had on display. Behind the podium was a large slide show of the paintings - so that as the poet read, the listeners could see the painting that inspired the poem.

This extravaganza was dreamed up and arranged by Colin Haskins (the CT Beat Festival & The Free Poets Collective) in cahoots with the very congenial museum staff. Particulars of the reading were fussed with by a few busy ladies from the free poets collective. I will be adding a few shots the readers are below, in the grainy manor of my phone. I wrote a poem for the occasion on a Georgia O'Keeffe painting in the museum's collection, that I had never seen before - of New York and East River, a surprising subject for O'Keeffe.

It was a wonderful event, really wonderful and I got a great poem out of it, well I like it anyway:


East River from the 30th Floor of the Shelton Hotel, 1928
a painting by Georgia O'Keefe

New York morning panorama
Center stage: blue wedge of river
of tugs and steamers
barges, buoys
gruff handlers yawning,
a days work taken on,
busy already at dawn

On its banks: A greyed up city of squared rooftops
synchronous to the horizon
aligned with smoke stacks and chimneys
ingrained with streets and avenues
a structure of shelter, housing:
the sleepy and the busy,
the languid and the industrious,
the despairing and the inspired alike

Here is a vast city as smooth as the velvet petal
of a white flower filling a picture frame
Or a row of desert bleached skulls
empty and eyeless, cast like dice
yet full of various purpose.

A city ready. egalitarian a city welcoming the day
a city that history will alter
as a painter alters a canvas
one layer covering another
visions and revisions
in this accented high-rise air
waking to this earnest tenement light


Written for an ekphrastic Event of the Free Poets Collective at the museum of American Art in New Britain CT, April 12?, 2011 subsequently included in Visions and Verses? an Exile Press/Free Poets Collective publication

April Fools Poem: "Rest Stop"

A Poem for April Fools Day.

Rest stop 

Pavement, road gravel, dirt dry throat

     heavy lids, dizzy routine. A hunger and thirst to see,

purple hills, a thread of river, the spit of a falls,            

                                the grandmother's smile, a wink, a grin,

          a future, another 24, another ten,

                                            breath into, breath, out of .... breathe.

                                        Get up, start up, try again

Memorial Concert for Sergei Vladimiroff, pianist, woodsman, grandpa

This post was updated on April 7, and April 12, 2011.

A musical tribute and celebration of the life of Sergei Vladimiroff of Brooklyn NY took place at the Valley Presbyterian Church in Brookfield CT on Saturday, March 26.

Players included  Natalya Shamis (violin), Bonnie Aher (violin), Zarchary Paranyuk (cello), Maragrita Nuller (piano), soprano Patricia Hulber, and Sergei's son Maxim (piano). The program, which was played with great skill and deep feeling, included Tchaikovsky's prelude "Autumn Song" Opus 37, "If we live in the spirit" by Clement W Barker, the Largo from the Sonata in C Minor (BWV 1017) by J.S. Bach, two Rachmaninoff works "Moment Musical" Op 16 #1 and "Daisies" Op 38 #3 and finally Sonata for violin and piano in F minor by Eugene Ysaye.

In addition Sergei's two grandsons dedicated performances to their gandpa - Damian on guitar and Luca on piano - both displaying the musicality and feeling of fine beginning musicians. During the Remembrances many spoke of their fond memories of Sergei including Tatyana his wife, with Max translating from the Russian.  Sergei  "would have clapped very loudly," one of his grandsons said of the performances.

Concert pianist, woodsman, showman, grandfather - Sergei died in the midst of living - of  a sudden heart attack while riding the city subway on his way to the beach on March 15, 2011. He was well known in this area as a concert pianist, having performed at the Danbury Music Center on quite a few occassions. For the past ten years he served as organist at First Church of Christ Scientist Katonah.

The official bio:

A native of Klintzi (Ukraine) Sergei Vladimiroff spent his childhood in Saratov, a major port on the Volga river. He began studying piano with his mother, and later became a pupil of Dmitri Serov. While a student at the Saratov Conservatory of Music, he met Tatyana, who at that time was attending Saratov State University. The two of them married in 1962, and a few years later moved to Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea coast. Sergei worked as a pianist in the local Philharmonic Society, and Tatyana became a TV commentator and producer. They had two sons, Maxim and Frol. During the last decade of his life, Sergei worked as a ballet accompanist at the Steffi Nossen School of Dance in White Plains, NY, and served as an organist at the First Church of Christ Scientist in Katonah, NY. He gave a number of solo piano recitals at different venues, including the Danbury Music Centre and the Valley Presbyterian Church.

He is survived by his wife  Tatyana, two sons, composer Maxim Vladimiroff (and his wife Leisa), of Brookfield, CT and Frol Vladimiroff of Sochi, Russia, and two grand sons Damian and Luca.

Besides his musical endeavors, Sergei was an avid woodsman who loved life, loved to keep moving. He enjoyed leading his grandsons on hikes though the woods, and also taking extended hunting expeditions to wilderness areas. "His hunting trips could fill up a whole chapter," his son Maxim said this week. "Everything he did, he did with great enthusiasm. He will be greatly missed."

The  70 minutes from memory recital Sergei gave on his 70th birthday with photos.

A News Times  review of Sergei's All-Russian-Composers program from Oct 2008

Read about a joint concert with Sergei and Maxim

A Review of an All Chopin program Sergei played in 2007

Painting: Anyone

This is my 501th post on this blog. Woohoo!

Humans hold many kinds of commonality - via inheritance as well as history. We are connected over centuries by the tranmission of handed down culture as well as hand me down genes. We have a common animal nature and energy that expresses itself in countless individual ways. We are many and one. Any one.

The materials here are watercolor pencil and gesso on paper.