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Would love to be in San Francisco for the opening of the Luc Tuymans show. They showed a few luscious paintings of his (one of a gas chamber) in a review in Sunday’s Times. But I’m not complaining. We have wifi access at the Lake Side Motel in Lake Placid New York and the Saints are winning. Kind of funny that the town of Lake Placid is not on Lake Placid. It’s on Mirror Lake. Lake Placid, the lake, is next door. The Olympics were held here in 1980 and some members of the US team are training here now. It’s fourteen degrees outside and they have real snow here unlike Vancouver.

We skied in the woods for a while this afternoon and then skied out on Mirror Lake at sunset before settling in at the bar for a local brew and the pregame show. Every other vehicle on the way up here was towing a trailer with a couple of sleds and we spotted snowmobiles darting across the road everywhere. If snowmobiling is a sport it has to be the most popular one up here. We had dinner with a bunch of Canadians downhill skiers. They kept slipping into French so we couldn’t understand what they were saying. They are going to be out on the slopes at 8 in the morning. They made us cross country skiers feel like slackers.

Our motel overlooks the lake and has some pretty cool artwork in the halls (above). We plan to head over to Pete and Shelley‘s neck of the woods tomorrow where we’ll celebrate a significant birthday for Peggi.

We got out of town ahead just ahead of the other day and drove to my brother’s place in Montclair, New Jersey. We kept his kids up way too late, talking and listening to Christmas records from his vinyl collection. We had breakfast with the kids, who were already late for school, and said goodbye to my brother as he raced off to work. The last thing he said was, “I left part of the paper here for you”. So I dove into the Friday’s Fine Arts section and spotted a Philip Guston painting with a review by Roberta Smith of a show at Midtown’s McKee Gallery. We instantly had an agenda for our New York trip.

We found our way to Brooklyn and parked the car for the weekend near Duane’s apartment. More coffee and the F train to midtown Manhattan for this eye popping show. Philip Guston is my favorite artist and these small panels blew me away. This was a sensational show. Only four of these pieces were for sale. You could pick up all four for 1.3 million.

Even the Metropolitan Museum could not top that show but Robert Frank’s “The Americans” was pretty incredible. The prints were so much richer than the old book I bought at Light Impressions when they upstairs in Midtown Plaza. It was like seeing these by now familiar photos for the first time. We had an eggplant sandwich and a corn muffin at the museum café and then Duane and Peggi went up to see the “Velazquez Rediscovered” show while I wandered off to the Roman art section and to photograph some busts. I can’t get over how contemporary these heads look, like people you know or wish you knew, even though they were sculpted around the time of Christ.

Duane is the perfect NYC guide. He wears an orange hat and Peggi and I just shut off our navigational instincts and gawk and follow the hat and try not to walk into a light pole or something. We took a couple of trains back to Brooklyn and hung out for bit in pad before heading back out to the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg for an art opening. It was a “Multiples and Editions” show and the curator was a friend of Duanes. The thirty five artists all had small, very reasonably priced (for the holidays) art in every nook and cranny of the two funky rooms. Duane bought a pocket sized “Kodak Guide to Photographing Your Dog“.

After the opening we went next door to the Flying Cow, a saloon style Argentinean restaurant. We shared octopus salad and then a beet salad, a bottle of Spanish Rioja and two vegetarian dishes called, “Shangrila”. I spoiled a perfect meal by trying a Morcilla sausage appetizer. I’m a sucker for those Spanish delicacies. The bartender played the whole “Between The Buttons” record and then some Neil Young. We complimented him on the way out.

Public Service Announcement

One too many bar mitzvahs.

It was smooth sailing through the Poconos and on to Route 280 but then it all went wrong. We zoomed by our exit and saw signs for Newark so we got off and tried to turn around. We got back on but it was the wrong highway and we found ourselves heading north on I-95. The Manhatten skyline was receding behind us. We paid a toll and did a u-turn back through the Oranges and into Montclair just in time to drop our bags off at Dale (New Math) and Myrna’s (Human Switchboard) and get to the temple for a run though of the Hebrew chants. Except the cantor canceled the rehearsal because of a personal conflict so we returned to Dale’s and watched a black and white “Man From Uncle” show..

We did the service without rehearsal so I was on the Bima looking for the groove with a guitar player and the chanting cantor. Two kids were making their bar mitzvah today and there were about three hundred people here. The stained glass looked like it had been designed by a madman but my drum sounded great in the room. The young cantor was attending to her boisterous child while she waited for her partner to show up and she encouraged me to not be shy. She MC’d and juggled her parental duties while effortlessly leading us in ancient sounding songs like “Ma Tovu”, “Adon Olam”, “Kiibud Av Vahem” and “Tav L”hodot”.

The regular service ended and the bar mitzvah portion started. Our nephew offered a few possibilities for the meaning of the name of their temple as his bar mitzvah project. It translates as “Eternal Flame” and he made a good argument for taking on the responsibility of keeping it alight.

His parents got up and told a few stories about their son. I kept thinking of the scene in King of Comedy” where Rupert Pupkin listens to his grade school teacher toast him. Overall the ceremony was lackluster and fidgety with bursts of meaningfulnes. The party afterward was a blast. The kids had fun and we had fun watching the kids. My family chipped in to buy our nephew a Kindle.

click photo for Vincent Gallo details

Somebody told me you’re not supposed to take photos in New York City’s subways but I do it anyway. Hey, I’m from out of town. Peggi and I really liked Buffalo “66 with Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Anjelica Huston, Mickey Rourke and Buffalo’s own Vincent Gallo (on right above). We made a mental note to put this on our Netflix list.

I’m sitting over at Jerome’s Ignition while Igor looks at our car. It’s been making a clunking noise in the front end. This is already sounding like a Click and Clack episode. We are planning to drive to New York soon to see the Marlene Dumas show at the Modern and we are a little concerned about the thump. Igor didn’t see anything so he took it for a spin. When he got back he noticed that the lug nuts on our left front tire were loose. These guys are the best in the world. If only they had a wireless connection here.

I didn’t sleep very well last night and while I was awake I started worrying about my opening tomorrow night. Somebody was saying if I call it an “opening” that would not imply free food but if I call it an “opening reception” that would imply free food. I put “opening reception” on the post card so I stand to look like a cheapskate. I don’t really understand all the protocol of openings and what little I do understand I resist. For instance I can’t bring my own food or beverages in there because that’s their (not for profit) business. I could buy food from them and serve that for free but that’s part I don’t get.

Painting class started up again at the Creative Workshop and my father did some quick watercolor sketches from photos he took on Sunday night of Margaret Explosion on WXXI’s “OnStage”. I took this photo over his shoulder. I’m not sure that he spelled “Margaret ” right but I like the magic carpet under us.

I have no business cropping a Philip Guston but I did. Full drawing.

If NetFlix can have an outage, I can.

We had dinner with Alice and Julio on and learned that Alice was geared up to paint but was having too much fun in the garden to get to it yet. Dinner conversation led to a topic that required the assistance of our laptop. And of course that led to other online topics. Julio had me type in their address on Google maps and we looked at a street view of their house. Alice led me down their street with the little arrows and we turned the corner to find two people walking on the sidewalk in front of a neighbor’s house. It was Alice and Julio out for a walk last summer.

Saturday morning we were reading on our deck, eating cherries and delaying the day’s planned activity, power washing the house. I came in to check email and there was one from Jeff Munson telling us that he had just talked Mary Kaye into driving down to Pike at the bottom of the state for the last day of the Wyoming County Fair. He asked if we wanted to ride along with them. I emailed back that we were on.

We had hoped to see the prize winning animals, our favorite part, but they were mostly all headed home after spending the week at the fairgrounds. We did see some goats, pigs and cows. This is the heart of New York farm country and there were a lot of vendors selling wood stoves, cow milking machines, four wheel drive vehicles, dirt bikes, big farm equipment,huge tractors and “The World’s Fastest Lawnmower”.

We saw women in period dress weaving on old looms and baking in brick ovens. We walked around the midway and rode on the Ferris wheel. A lot of people were wearing t-shirts that made statements like, “I Won’t Lower My Standards To Raise Yours”. And one guy had a red t-shirt on that asked a question that puzzled me at first? “Does This Match My Neck?” Peggi explained it.

We felt like we had done it all and were set to leave when tractor pull satrted. It was ten bucks to get in and we didn’t even know what it was but we went for it. That’s another story. I grabbed a few photos and will sort them out.

On Sunday we borrowed our neighbor’s power washer and hooked the gasoline fired machine up to our garden hose to blast our house clean. It’s now ready to paint. Rick and Monica were doing yard work as well and they invited us over for dinner. We ate on their back porch and then watched Hellboy from Netflix. I fell asleep.

More photos from the Wyoming County Fair

We walked around Cranbrook Academy on Saturday where the the Head of the Architectural Department, William Massie, has constructed his “American House” on the grounds. I thought it was really beautiful but I was certain it was something from the nineteen sixties. It’s not. The Detroit News did a video tour of the place.

We usually drive to Ithaca by going through Arthur Dove’s home town, Geneva, at the top of Seneca Lake and then cutting diagonally across to Rod Serling’s summer hometown at the bottom of Cayuga Lake. This time we drove down the east side of Cayuga for a change and stopped in Aurora to check in on the place after reading about it in the Times. Wells College just went coed and a 1962 graduate of that school, who made some money when she sold her American Girl doll and book company to Mattel, has been refurbishing the college and town. It is a pretty little town. We stopped at an art gallery but they were closed for New Year’s Eve.

Our first stop in Ithaca was the bookstore on the Commons. We have been here may times over the years but this will be our last visit. They are moving to NYC and they were having a 50% off sale on everything. I bought Marsden Hartley’s autobiography, a book of Rembrandt drawings, a 1931 book about Daumier (I was so taken by the drawings that I didn’t realize it was in German until I got it home) and a book called a “A Day With Picasso” with photographs by Jean Cocteau. All for about twenty bucks.

We walked around town and bought a few things at a natural foods store and then drove to a bed and breakfast near Taughannock Falls. We had a great meal in the Inn. I had portobello mushrooms and cheese infused pasta and Peggi had duck. We took a jacuzzi and slept in a king size bed. We turned the tv on around midnight and wished we hadn’t after seeing Dick Clark, Carrie Underwood and the Jonas Brothers. The show creeped us out before they dropped the eco-friendly ball.

We set the alarm to get up in time for a continental breakfast and we took a walk in the State Park next door. We hiked up the gorge to the falls which we read are 33 feet taller than Niagara Falls. We drove back through Middlesex (I love that name) and Lodi while skirting the Willard Facility for the Criminally Insane. We stopped by the side of the road to photograph some white deer on the former Seneca Army Depot grounds and talked about stopping for coffee as we drove though town after town with everything closed for the holiday. We finally found a suitable shop open and drank Ethiopian coffee by their fireplace.

When we got near Pittsford, we stopped to say hi to Peggi’s mom and she had the Buffalo Sabres outdoor hockey game on the Bills’ football field on so we watched a few periods of play. We left when it was tied but heard that Buffalo lost in overtime.

Pretty in pink. Los Angeles.

I use Safari as my primary browser but I switch to Firefox when the javascript acts up. Today I found an add-on for Firefox called “Stumble!” and there went my allotment of spare time. It is a genome project like “Pandora” where you submit to a brief profile and then surf with the Stumble button as your control. I found all sorts of interesting sites and have started building my own list of favorites.

I started looking at my photos from LA. I like the SCN mode on my Sony Cybershot camera. It keeps the lens open as long as it takes to grab a shot in low light. You need something solid to put the camera on and a relatively still subject.

View from the Getty at night.