PopWars

The Getty has organized a sixty venue overview of work by LA artists entitled “Pacific Standard Time”. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a few of it’s galleries devoted to the show including “California Design – Living In A Modern Way” the first major study of California midcentury modern design. Although more style than art the style is so distinctive it still looks cutting edge or at least contemporary. On display are photos and plans for Neutra homes, Eames furniture, the first Barbie and these classic lp jackets. This gallery is where Duane Sherwood will spend eternity if he’s good.

Wandering in the hills west of LA without a star map you get a sense of the wide open design possibilities when money trumps steep slope ordinances. Swimming pools hang over cliffs. Architects have free reign to tear down and rebuild for the heck of it. Good taste crashes into bad. Mexican laborers transform the landscape. Houses are built in a Greco-Roman style or look like they were imported from Vermont, Switzerland, Turkey or Mexico. We saw one that looked like a castle from a Johnny Depp movie. Snow is not a concern, rain and cold hardly, roofs are flat, walls are made of glass. People here live in a modern way.

Splitting wood is a perfect Fall activity. I used to swing a sledgehammer at a maul but my elbows hurt for days afterward so now we borrow my neighbor’s wood splitter. It’s a Heathkit. He built it from a kit in the fifties. The chainsaw is technically borrowed too. Bill Jones had one of his trees fall over his neighbor’s driveway a few years ago and bought the saw to clean up the mess and then he loaned it to us. We use it all the time and even let Bill borrow it back to cut down his way overgrown arborvitae.

We mentioned our camping trip to a few friends and neighbors and they offered to let us borrow all sorts of gear. It is amazing that an old fashioned activity like camping would have so many new products. We really hadn’t done any backwoods camping since our honeymoon when we were chased out of a Smokey Mountains virgin forest by a bear. We have a tent and some sleeping bags but none of the modern camping paraphernalia our friend’s offered.

Rubberized dry bags, like duffle bags but they keep your stuff dry.
Pots and pans without handles, sort of a backwards invention. They all share a detachable handle so the pots are easier to stack in your pack.
A tiny propane stove for making coffee.
Polar fleece outerwear that is incredibly light when portaging.
Battery operated headlamps so convenient you forget that the lamp you are wearing is shining in your partners’ eyes.
Slim sleeping pads that self inflate (sort of) and cushion and warm the space between you and the ground.

We had so much stuff I felt like we were packing to go away to college.

It’s hard to tell what people do downtown. I mean what kind of work goes on in an office these days that couldn’t be done by an automated program or by someone at home with an internet connection? I drove out West Ridge Road this morning and then south on Mount Read over to Lyell Avenue where I picked up some stainless steel rods from Triple A Welding. Out there it’s pretty easy to see what people do for a living. Mount Read is full of trucks moving equipment and supplies up and down. Large manufacturing facilities line both sides of the street. Although a ghost of its former self Kodak still has cars and trucks moving on its internal highway and smoke billowing from its stacks. AAA Welding has great big stainless steel food processing tanks out in their lot. People make things out here.

After barging in on our neighbors to watch the Women’s World Cup in the middle of the day for a few weeks in a row they bought us tickets to Wednesday’s New York Flash game against magicJack. It was a an opportunity for the mayor of Rochester to give Rochester’s Abby Wambach (24 hours after her Letterman appearance) the keys to the city as he welcomed fourteen returning Word Cup players from the two teams in front of a sold out crowd of over 15,000.

Rochester’s Flash have an amazing lineup with Canada’s Sinclair on the left flank working with Marta, the wold’s best female soccer player, and Alex Morgan right behind them. Marta’s moves are astounding. She out maneuvers opponents like a magician and gives the ball up to take the heat off only to move to an open spot in seconds so she can receive the pass. The tiniest player on the field, she’s is also tough as nails. We watched her shove an adversary to the ground in frustration because, as a matter of fact, she does own the road. The whole team plays world class soccer passing with artful finesse and they are a joy to watch. How did we get so lucky?

We had our neighbors, Rick and Monica, over for dinner a few nights ago and we ate out on the deck. Monica spotted these raccoons in a tree behind our house and we watched them for a while. Monica said they can be vicious. She told us about a friend whose Irish Setter got in a fight with a raccoon near a pond in the woods and the raccoon almost drowned the dog. I started thinking about the Coon Hunting Convention that I played at outside Bloomington. I was in a working country band, playing two to three times a week in every American Legion, VFW, Elk’s, Eagle’s and Moose Club in southern Indiana and one of the strangest gigs was playing outdoors up on a flat bed trailer for coon hunters. As far as I knew they didn’t shoot the raccoons, they just “treed them” at night using dogs and flashlights.

Monica said the boys in her family used to go out after dinner to shoot ground hogs. They were a nuisance on two counts because they ate crops in the garden and they dug holes that horses might step in their holes and break their legs. Monica said she never ate a raccoon but she did eat squirrel one time. She couldn’t remember what it tasted like other than it was full of buckshot.

This morning I was reading the paper out back when Stella, our white kitty who only goes out for a few minutes in the morning to go to the bathroom, came face to face with one of the raccoons. I broke up the encounter but now feel like I’m going to have to borrow Leo’s Have-A-Heart trap to catch these guys and have Animal Control haul them off. I watched a video last night on how this all goes down. The exterminator in the video recommended peanut butter and jelly as bait.

I have a small box of holy cards at home. I’ve collected them for many years so some are from my youth. I even have a relic of my patron saint in there that a priest friend of our family bought for me when he traveled to Italy. I was born on the feast day of Saint Paul and that’s how I got my name but it’s not the Saul/Saint Paul of the Letters, it’s Saint Paul of the Cross We used to book mark our missals with holy cards and they gave some when we made our first communion and confirmation and I fell in love with them. They were every bit as cool as baseball cards. I have some from relatives funerals and the Katarii shrine in Auriesville, New York
but most of my cards are from previous trips to Spain when we used to stop in almost every church we saw. We sort of have that under control now.

There used to be a cluster of religious shops around the Plaza Mayor in Madrid and there still are a few but the Catholics are dying and commerce has a new face. We stopped in the full blown priest supply store above and asked if they had any holy cards, they’re called estampas in Spanish, and the clerk recommended another shop where I found ten or so interesting ones for two euros.

Is my perception all warped or do Europeans pay a lot more attention to design than we do? Everywhere you look, the urinals for crying out loud, from high brow to low brow.

Sevilla has a great bike system for getting around too. It’s called “Sevici”. We noticed the fifties style bikes as soon as we got off the high speed train from Madrid (another great way to get around) and at first we thought they must be tourists but we soon realized they were mostly locals. You can pick up a bike at at over a hundred locations and drop it off at any one. They are a comfortable ride too, fat tires, baskets and fenders.

Last night we found Sevilla’s answer to the Bug Jar without the bands. Good music, Tom Jones to Abba with all sorts of Spanish pop we didn’t recognize, free Internet access and a cool relaxed vibe.

Los Indignados in the Puerto del Sol decided last night to extend their protest for “democracia real.” I’m all for it but it seems like heaven to me. People out strolling not trapped in their cars. Couples, families, old people. Window shopping, talking, eating, smoking and drinking.

The coffee ritual (small plate, spoon, a bag of sugar and expertly frothed cafe con leche) puts everything right with the world. I’ll never forget being scolded for not saying “Buenos dias” immediately on entering a cafe on our first visit. Coffee shops turn seamlessly into “Menu del Dia” restaurants and then tapas bars often doing triple duty throughout the day. Food on display everywhere. No barriers to enjoyment. Spain is the perfect host or at least it seems that way to us.

I stopped in the world famous “House of Guitars” the other day and found a nice looking snare in the back room. It didn’t sound as good as the old Leedy snare sitting next to it but it matched my set. The sales guy said “You can get nice loud crack out of this thing.” I said “I don’t want a loud crack. I want a loose, fat snare sound at low volume.” One of the owners, Bruce, said I could take it home and check it out so I did. I fooled around with it and like it so I went back and gave Bruce the cash.

Bruce’s brother, Armand, made some great underground records like the 3 LP set “A Lot of People Would Like to See Armand Schaubroeck… DEAD!” and “I Came to Visit, But Decided to Stay.” Armand put up a billboard downtown in 1968 that caused quite a reaction. I loved it. I saw a poster sized reproduction of the billboard in the Bop Shop the other day and photographed it. The HOG made some great tv commercials too, the kind that were designed to get under grownups’ skin. I included Armand in a series of “Local Icons” that I painted a long time ago. I heard he has a album in the can with Ginger Baker on drums.