Odds & Ends @ the End of the Week
EXTREME MAKEOVER, BRIDGE EDITION: The Walkway Over the Hudson is scheduled to open to the public at 3pm on Saturday (October 3), with a weekend-long celebration that features fireworks, parades, music, a night circus, biking and of course, walking. The former Poughkeepsie-Highland Railway Bridge has been transformed into a linear pedestrian park, connecting the city of Poughkeepsie in Dutchess County to the town of Lloyd in Ulster County. There are the numbers: The bridge is 6,767 feet long (approximately 1.25 miles). The top of the bridge deck is 212 feet above the water and the width expands from 24 feet over land, to 35 feet over the Hudson River. It is the longest pedestrian bridge in the world. Pretty cool…
SAD NEWS: It seems as though musicians and nightclub owners are natural born enemies, but that certainly wasn’t the case with Peter Paquet, who owned and ran the Metro in Saratoga Springs throughout the ’80s and early ’90s. Formerly known simply by its address – 17 Maple Ave. – the nightspot hosted lots of great local talent (soul singer Jill Hughes practically lived there) as well as national stars (Joan Osborne turned in some of the most electrifying performances I’ve ever seen there) before Paquet decided to leave the nightclub business behind and devote himself fulltime to making art in 1996. Peter Paquet died on Monday after a lengthy, brave battle against cancer. Jill Hughes and Peter’s wife Melissa are organizing a memorial service at Skidmore College on Sunday, October 11. “I’d like to get the word out to the many musicians who played at the Metro in the hopes of making his memorial a musical event,” says Hughes. Contact her at [email protected].
“Early last spring, I was feeling that artistically I was in a rut so I began pulling out old prints and watercolors for ideas,” Hollinde recalls. “I left the pile on my studio floor only to come home the next day to find my dog had torn many of the pieces up. I sat on the floor amid the torn work and began to reassemble and play with the pieces. I added handmade paper; the texture and color complimented the torn edges of the images. Suddenly, this happy accident helped me see many new possibilities and directions that my work could go in. It was as if the icons I had created in my prints had been freed from the page they were trapped in.”
Hollinde celebrates the opening of her new exhibit, “Serendipity” with a reception at the Albany Art Room from 5-9pm tonight in conjunction with the monthly First Friday arts walk.
HEY, WHO’S THAT GUY?: If you check out Solid Smoke at the Ale House in Troy on Saturday (October 3), you might do a double-take at the bandstand. (If there was actually a bandstand, of course.) Yup, that’s Boston-based saxman Sam Kininger of Soulive sittin’ in with Nippertown’s own solidly smokin’ funk ‘n’ soul combo.
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