Author: Paul

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Not Much Of An Exaggeration

Noguchi sculpture in garden at Noguchi Museum in Long Island City
Noguchi sculpture in garden at Noguchi Museum in Long Island City

There was something strangely familiar about this particular sculpture in in the garden of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until Peggi pointed out that it reminded her of “Subterranean Surrogates.” The museum here, on the site of Noguchi’s last NYC studio, was recently renovated but remains the first and only museum in the country to be founded by an artist during his lifetime and dedicated to his work. Noguchi worked in ceramics, drew, designed gardens, furniture, architecture, and sets but it is his stone sculptures that have always knocked me out and there is a large section of them here in a protected outdoor setting and garden. We started there and I didn’t want to leave to go inside.

This Week In New York called the Noguchi Museum “one of the most peaceful, beautiful, spiritual, and moving places in New York.” Not much of an exaggeration. Michael Black (one of the founding members of the Bang On A Can All Stars) and the Hartt Bass Band (eight double basses) performed pieces in the museum the day we were there. They sounded great but not great enough to keep us from going back out to the sculpture garden.

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Poor Chuck Webster

Chuck Webster painting entitled "Untitled" 2012 at Ziehersmith Gallery in Chelsea NYC
Chuck Webster painting entitled “Untitled” 2012 at Ziehersmith Gallery in Chelsea NYC

Poor Chuck Webster. He delivered a monster painting (it is a crime for me to have cropped the photo of it so click through for the full thing) to his current show at Ziehersmith in Chelsea. The fine work in the rest of the show is not nearly as strong. This one is like a magnet. You are drawn to it. It is hard to look away. You must get closer and examine the surface because it has already convinced you that it is three dimensional. It is not. It has the meaty presence of a Guston. How is he going to top this?

I can’t figure out why there would be an Alice Neel show in Chelsea. Doesn’t someone already own all of her gorgeous paintings? She is a painter’s painter and my favorite woman artist hands down so I don’t really care why there is a show of hers in Chelsea, I’m just happy there is one.

I had jotted down the addresses of three shows in Chelsea in my little notebook and we saw all three along with a Cindy Sherman show and lots of instantly forgettable stuff. The third show on my list was a Brancusi photo show, beautiful arty black and white photos of his sculpture in the studio. This gallery was up on 24th Street so climbed the stairs to the High Line, an absolutely beautiful rooftop park on an old elevated train track. Even in New York City nature can can give art a good run for it’s money.

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Jamming With The Yankees

New Jersey Bat Mitzvah band
New Jersey Bat Mitzvah band

The altar in the temple, they may not even call it an altar, looks pagan to me. I know that is an absurd assessment since Jesus was a Jew but the prohibition of idols or images of god thing takes my favorite part of religion off the table. There’s a great big wooden cabinet behind the lectern, they probably don’t call it a lectern, and inside the cabinet there is a reproduction of the sacred Torah scrolls. I know this because I opened the cabinet a few years ago when my nephew made his Bar Mitzvah.

My brother converted from Catholicism and we’ve been to three of these coming of age rituals now. Our niece had just turned thirteen the day before and that is such a pivotal period, it’s fun to just look at her on this cusp. Serious on one hand and childlike on the other, the rabbi scolded her when she made eye contact with her friends who were sitting right behind us.

Peggi and I were asked to play music during the event so we were sitting right by the piano. The canter had a beautiful voice and she was backed by the keyboardist for the Yankees. Peggi and I jumped in on sax and hand drum. The minor key modal thing is right up the Margaret Explosion alley.

Our neice’s lesson (upon being called to Torah as a Bat Mitzvah she is now a “teacher”), one she picked from a story in the book of Numbers, was how she learned and will continue to learn how to stop complaining and be happy with what she has. She said, “I know Apple will always introduce new products that are better than what I now have.”

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Getting Out

Family in Dobb's Country Kitchen near Great Bend, Pennsylvania
Family in Dobb’s Country Kitchen near Great Bend, Pennsylvania

We drove along the eastern shore of Skaneateles Lake on the way down to my brother’s place. We got behind a few farm vehicles that slowed traffic to a crawl until they pulled off in to a field. My parents were in the back seat and we were looking for a place to stop for lunch. We’ve eaten at Dobb’s Country Kitchen in Great Bend before but my father said it wasn’t very good last time they were here. We took our chances any way and sat next to the the group above.

My father asked for mashed potatoes instead the fries that would normally come with his sandwich. The waitress said, “That will be a dollar extra” and my dad approved the expenditure. About five minutes later she came out out the kitchen and asked if he wanted gravy with his mashed potatoes. My father said yes and we went on with our conversation. The food came out and my father had fries next to his sandwich. He mentioned this to the waitress and she took my fathers plate back to the kitchen. We sat there with our food on table until she returned with the same plate and said, “We’re out of mashed potatoes.”

Gas is cheap down here, $3.49 a gallon, so we decided to fill up across the street. The gas station was truck stop huge and they were cranking some country music like everyone loves the stuff. On top of that they had tv monitors built in to the gas pumps showing headline news and commercials. My dad and I were kind of wowed. We really ought to get out more.

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I Sing the Body Electric

Marsh at the end of Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York
Marsh at the end of Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York

Ray Bradbury, who died the other day, was good friends with Federico Fellini and the Renaissance art scholar, Bernard Berenson. I would love to be a fly on the wall in a room with those three.

Berenson, the lesser known, left us with a bounty of quotations.

“I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value. So, as I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge or a vigor of spring as well as an infinite variety of color that no artifact I have seen in the last 60 years can rival. Each day, as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday.”

and my favorite
“Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.”

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Model 102

Sprinkler on diving board at the pool
Sprinkler on diving board at the pool

I helped my neighbor do a few repairs to the pump down at the pool today and I had to move this old lawn sprinkler out of the way. It is unbelievably heavy and probably worth a few bucks down at Krieger’s just for the scrap metal. “Model 102” is stamped in the metal along with the manufacturer’s name, “Beatrice. F. D. Kees” of Nebraska. I looked them up on line and found they were started as a gunsmith shop and later patented and produced corn-husking hooks and innovative products such as a window defroster for automobiles and a moving lawn sprinkler that resembled a farm tractor. This photo shows one in good condition. It shows it chasing it’s own tail. I plan to hook ours up and see how it behaves. I heard that Dick Storms from the Record Archive used to have the world’s largest collection of lawn sprinklers but I think he got out of that line of work.

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Breaking Brilliant

Black and white dragon fly in woods near Rochester, New York
Black and white dragon fly in woods near Rochester, New York

We’ve been gorging ourselves on the first three seasons of Breaking Bad, all available as “Instant Play” on Netflix, in preparation for the launch of season four on Netflix dvds. Season five drops on June 14th but we don’t have cable tv so this is how we do it. The reruns still have plenty of meat on them.

We’re crazy about the show but also worry that the writers may not be able keep this brilliant run up. When we mention the show people are always trying to us into other shows like Mad Men, Six feet Under, Weeds or The Wire and we’ve given them all a try but come on. Breaking Bad is the bomb.

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Praise The Lord

Sign for 4 bands in Penn Yan New York at top of Seneca Lake
Sign for 4 bands in Penn Yan New York at top of Seneca Lake

The front page story in our local paper Sunday opened with a bang as reporter Gary Craig retold the story of a staff member at the Christian residential ministry, Freedom Village USA, who shot out a television set with a .12-gauge shotgun because the kids were watching a banned show. We’ve driven by this place many times because it is right next to my aunt and uncle’s farm on the shores of Seneca Lake. They were freaked out by this place when it sprang up in middle of farm country thirty years ago. Fueled by PTL (Praise the Lord) donations until the Jim Baker scandal broke, the complex dwarfed Dundee’s tiny parish church and the Mennonite worship house. The flamboyant, evangelical founder, Pastor Fletcher Brothers, commuted by helicopter rattling their community and fueling wild speculation.

He had built up a Gates congregation in the 70’s with strident anti-abortion and anti-pornography stands before running it into bankruptcy by misusing church funds. Now in the middle of a bitter divorce (his fourth) and another bankruptcy at Freedom Village, his own staff is ratting him out over his misuse of the organization’s money. Meanwhile Pastor Fletcher Brothers is still raising money from donors through his weekly show on Rochester’s Christian station. Meanwhile the deacon at Freedom Village USA has quit and started a blog entitled “The Stench Of Spiritual Abuse.”

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Make White Work

Paul Dodd charcoal drawing from "Five Philadelphia Priests" 2012
Paul Dodd charcoal drawing from “Five Philadelphia Priests” 2012

I wrote these three words on the drawing above because that was the last thing Fred Lipp said to me in painting class on Wednesday. I have since worked on it and will bring it back to class when I’m done. It is funny how you start with a pure white piece of paper and add marks and such until you lose sight of the fact that the white needs to work as well as the stuff you’re adding. My father is in the class too and he said that’s the first one of these guys that I’ve seen with a smile on his face. I said, “That because he is a priest.”

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Sitting Ducks

Paul Dodd charcoal drawing from "Five Philadelphia Priests" 2012
Paul Dodd charcoal drawing from “Five Philadelphia Priests” 2012

It is so easy to pick on the church. They took a perfectly agreeable cat, an early bohemian, and ascribed absurd, super-human miracles to him and then browbeat a congregation, hungary for the literal word of god, with righteous rules and regulations. We don’t even know yet what kind of dirt the Pope’s butler was preparing to peddle. The Vatican has it’s own justice system, the better to shuffle predator priests around.

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Leave Us Alone

Newborn fawn in the woods
Newborn fawn in the woods

“Don’t you be fawning over me.” This baby fawn was almost in the middle of our path as we walked through the woods today. We came across a fawn a few years ago while walking with Jim Mott and he told us not to go near the fawn or the mother would be spooked. The doe feel the fawn are safer from predators if they are left alone. Even I can smell a deer if they’re nearby so this makes some sense.

Further along we found ourselves between a group of wild turkeys. They get confused when some of the pack are separated and humans make them nervous so they were making a racket while we were in the way. It’s pretty easy to feel like an intruder in the woods.

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Call Any Vegetable

Cat on counter at Case's Garden Store Norton Street in Rochester, New York
Cat on counter at Case’s Garden Store Norton Street in Rochester, New York

It has been so warm this year we could have had our plants in a month ago but we just got around to it today. No excuse or anything, I’m just saying. We usually go to Cases’ on Norton and it was good to see them so busy today. We bought some tomato plants and some Jalapénos (our staples) and basil bit they didn’t have the Italian basil so we bought Lebanese. It has smaller leaves and tastes a little spicier. We sampled some of their lemon basil but that was sort of intense. We bought a small box of eggplant plants and some zucchini and I looked at a oregano plant and don’t remember putting it in our cart but we came home with it. We seem to have red bell peppers at every dinner in one dish or another so we bought twelve of those plants. Now we’ll hope to keep the rabbits, ground hogs and chipmunks at bay.

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No Dirt On The MBA Candidate

Eric DuFaure and Dwight Glodell in PCI Studios in Rochester, New York mixing Personal Effects' "So Hard"
Eric DuFaure and Dwight Glodell in PCI Studios in Rochester, New York mixing Personal Effects’ “So Hard”

I love this Polaroid because it perfectly captures the vibe between Eric DuFaure, who signed Personal Effects to Cachalot Records and Dwight Glodell who produced our first ep. We had dinner with Eric and his wife last night, the first time we had seen him them in thirty years. They have been living in Paris and we had a lot of catching up to do.

Eric had just visited Hal Willner in New York and he showed us some photos of Hal and his puppet collection. Howdy Doudy was in there. Eric told us he and Mitt Romney were in the same Harvard MBA class so he has been fielding a lot of inquiries lately from the press looking for salient Mitt stories.

When we first met Eric he was living in a loft on Mercer Street, we recorded tracks at nearby Sorcerer Sound and Cachalot’s office was at 611 Broadway at Houston, a building with lots of characters. Kieth Haring was downstairs, Ed Steinberg, Bob Singerman Management and Peter Leak. Neil Cooper, who founded the cassette only company called Reach Out Records (ROIR) was right next door to Eric.

We picked up right where we left off, so much so we wound up looking at old PE videos and Eric fell in love with “Bring Out The Jazz“, a song he never heard because we recorded it in our basement a few months after we parted ways. On the way out the door he suggested hiring some young kids to lip sync to the song and make a hit.

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I Know What You’re Talking About

No Delivery sign in southern New York
No Delivery sign in southern New York

Not just “No Deliveries” but “NO Deliveries,” professionally painted on the loading dock door of this concrete block building in southern New York. You know how signs register as you cruise by them and sometimes the image just lingers? I had to ask the driver to pull the car over when I spotted this.

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We Live Like Kings

"Wes Peden and his partner juggling in Rochester, New York
“Wes Peden and his partner juggling in Rochester, New York

Baptist Churches can be scary places like that video I saw on Huffington Post with the Baptist preacher talking about rounding up all the homosexuals. The auditorium at Northridge Baptist Church tonight, though was “More Fun Than Visiting A Zoo.” Our neighbor, Rick, tipped us off to this show which featured Rick’s juggling partner’s son Wes and his partner from Ohio with a sensational live percussionist from Sweden. Wes has been studying for three years at a circus school in Sweden and is now considered one of the top jugglers in the world! I missed a lot of their act because I was gawking at the drummer.

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Diagnosed

Little girl dance outfit on purple wall
Little girl dance outfit on purple wall

I have a great deal of anxiety over “lack of time” issues and now I know what my problem is. I’m an optimist.

An article in yesterday’s paper described an optimist in terms I had never associated with the condition.

“An optimist is “Someone, like me, who plans to get more done than time permits. Having failed to achieve the impossible, someone, like me, who is sure everything will somehow get done anyway.”

A more classical definition from the Mayo Clinic: “Optimism is the belief that good things will happen to you and that negative events are temporary setbacks to be overcome.”

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Que Viva España

Spanish and French cheese at the European Cheese Shop in the Public Market, Rochester, New York
Spanish and French cheese at the European Cheese Shop in the Public Market, Rochester, New York

Vincenzo Giordano runs the coolest spot in Rochester’s Public Market, the “European Cheese Shop.” You could spend your week’s paycheck in here and not be sorry. The yellow tags in this photo mark the Spanish cheese and the green identify the French cheese and the figs in the blue container are out of this world. There’s plenty of Italian cheese here too but we’re loyal to the to the Spanish. If the Spanish Civil War was to break out again we’d be over there fighting to save the Republic.

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Cans Used To Rust

Bud Lite cans in branch of Cattaraugus Creek, Zoar Valley, New York
Bud Lite cans in branch of Cattaraugus Creek, Zoar Valley, New York

I am no chemist but isn’t it better for a can to rust than hang around forever in shiny aluminum glory? Cans used to rust away. I spotted a few of them on the way out yesterday as we hiked up the steep slopes that form Zoar Valley. About two hours from Rochester, a dreamy ride in Jeff Munson’s car, the steep gorges, up to 380 feet in some spots, was cut by the Cattaraugus River and has some of the finest old-growth stands in the eastern United States.

Bud Lite is clearly the official beer of Zoar Valley.

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Robert Frank’s Shoes

Scott McCarney "Bible For Terry Jones" at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York
Scott McCarney “Bible For Terry Jones” at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York

Scott McCarney’s beautiful new show, “Reversing the Catastrophe of Fixed Meaning,” opened last night a Visual Studies Workshop. An ambitious title that for me actually succeeds in the incendiary piece, “Bible For Terry Jones.” There is something of a “Boy’s Life” nostalgia in Scott’s work but he manages to shatter the stereotypes. His “book art” rewrites the museum tags on this dying medium.

And then there is Robert Frank’s shoes, the ones he wore while shooting photos for “The Americans.” He donated them to Visual Studies after a workshop here in the seventies. I had heard they were here but I wasn’t prepared for their dandyness. It puts a whole new spin on these classic images.

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Google Thumbs Up

Google Street View car on our street, Rochester, New York
Google Street View car on our street, Rochester, New York

My neighbor, Rick, and I were out playing horseshoes when the Google car drove by this afternoon so I wound up with this “making of” shot. I’m thinking we’ll both be in the updated street view when it is released. I had thought Google tried to take these shots early in the day so as not to get so many people, cars and potential lawsuits in the “street view” but that was based on our friends, Alice and Julio, who found themselves in the current street view of their neighborhood. They were up early, walking, and didn’t even see the Google car drive by. Months later they spotted themselves on the sidewalk halfway around the block from their house.

Rick beat me two games to none today. He keeps track of these things on his calendar. I’m up for the year but it’s a long season.

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