"Old Times" exhibition and unrelated stuff

Many-Me, oil on canvas, 36"x48"

My "Old Times" series of paintings is on exhibit in Knoxville at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. Okay, so this is a shameless plug. Hey, it's my show, and this is my blog! Actually, there are two solo exhibitions there: mine and one featuring original prints by Susan Jenkins. Yesterday (Friday) there was a reception for the two shows. Had a good turnout and met a lot of interesting people. They asked us to do a brief artist talk, which is always fun for me to do. This coming from a guy who absolutely hates to be the center of attention! However, one of the things I learned in the Navy was that a lot of things in life depend on stagecraft, so I learned a bit about how to talk to groups of people, and have gotten to the point where it can be fun. Which it was last night.

Yesterday I also got to meet up with an old friend from my Tennessee Tech days (mid-1970's): Gifford Walker, who now lives in Knoxville. We made arrangements to get together for a couple of hours before the reception and catch up. I last saw Gif maybe five years ago. Yesterday, when I first saw him, I looked straight at him from maybe five feet away and DIDN'T RECOGNIZE HIM. How embarrassing. In my own defense, Gif shaved off the beard he had for about 30 years, so here I was looking for a guy with a full black beard, and instead saw a clean-shaven guy, so I went right back to doing what I was doing until he said something. I think I made a nice recovery ... Gif at least has a great sense of humor. We sat and talked for two hours and had a great time.

Today I made a neat discovery on the 'net. I heard somebody on NPR talking about a web site called "Pandora" and how it was such a great thing for music. So I looked it up. What a cool site! Finding good new music, for me, has been very difficult. Radio plays the same crap over and over again, so does MTV and its clones, and it's difficult to find stuff I like. Well, Pandora has a way to do that. You plug in the name of a musician or group you like, and Pandora will stream music like that straight to you. They call it the "music genome project" - each song has a unique fingerprint, and their system will give you other songs and artists with similar fingerprints. It's free, it just requires registration. Cool stuff. I've already found some good artists, some I'd heard of, just never heard, and others that are completely new to me. Check it out!