There is nurture and there is nature and then there is the “Wolfpack,” the type of documentary that just sweeps you away into another world. This one a site in plain sight, an tall apartment building in the lower East Side of Manhattan where six Angulo brothers and their sister were locked away by their parents. Home-schooled and deeply immersed in the movies, an oddball combination, they lived a surreal life until one of them escaped and the director became their “first friend” outside the family.
Conversations with Steve Hoy cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time with hardly a discernible path to look back on once you hang up. A science fiction buff, he somehow got around to “Illustrated Man,” the 1969 movie with a clunky Rod Steiger whose tattoos came alive for anyone who looked too close. Peggi added it to our queue. Ray Bradbury’s book must have been better than the movie. With most people running out of space for tattoos today, it is ripe for and updated film version.
Beaver damage on the east side of Eastman Lake in Rochester, New York
Away from Lake Ontario, further south but at higher elevations, the Fall colors are peaking or past. Up near the lake we are still coming on. We walked around the east side of Eastman Lake and then back along the western side of Durand Lake today. The paths were partially underwater along both lakes, unusual for this time of year. We suspected beaver action and sure enough we found it about halfway down.
Way blue sky over Fall colors in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York
“Red,”John Logan’s play about Mark Rothko, currently at Geva Theatre, is a particularly meaty discourse about art and art-making. I was totally engrossed but the guy sitting in front of us dozed off. It probably isn’t for everyone. The play as written may even be too good for the two actors but I warmed up to them and was eventually carried away by their performance.
Abstract Expressionism out intellectualized the physicality of Cubism and then the “Barbarians at the Gate” assault of Pop Art, just as Rothko was getting successful, took down the Ab Exers. Architect, Philip Johnson, asked Rothko to create murals for a new restaurant in his Seagrams Building in Midtown Manhattan and this is the time frame for this play. A studio assistant, hired by Rothko, takes on the old man. Not by out painting him but by challenging the master to be true to his own game. Rothko eventually turns down the distasteful commission down and he sets his assistant free to carve out his own life. It is a story for the ages.
Buffalo Bills inflatables on lawn in Rochester, New York
The Buffalo Bills play their NFL game in Wembley Stadium this weekend. And here I’ve been holding out for the English version of football to come this way. We just bought season tickets to Western New York Flash for next year.
I walked with my mom this afternoon. She was too tired to do a lap of the building so walked up and down the halls of her apartment building. There was a real ruckus going on in the big room so we ducked in to see what was going on. A group of woman were playing Wii bowling and we stayed around long enough to watch one of the residents pick off a mean split.
I usually put my iPad in my bike basket but about halfway home I looked down and it wasn’t there. I couldn’t imagine it falling out. I called my mom when I got home asked if she saw my iPad near her chair. She never took to computers and she doesn’t really know what an iPad is so I found myself saying things like, “It’s black and thin and and it has glass on it.” My mom has a little problem with her hearing and lately with her vision so our conversation went something like a Burns and Allen routine. I drove back over there and by the time I got there she had found it.
Rick came over this evening for a few games of horseshoes. We always play best of three and it usually takes the three to determine a winner. Rick’s two and my one. I feel as though I could win more often if I could concentrate on what I’m doing. In a few more years we’ll be sitting in chairs, playing Wii Bowling.
Old gas station in Johnsburg, Adirondack Mountains, New York
Arthur Dove’s father ran a brick making plant in nearby Geneva, NY. There were as many as ten brickyards in the Rochester area at one time. Henrietta’s town historian invited my father to give a talk on bricks. Specifically, the Brighton Brick yard, which used to sit on Monroe Avenue near 12 corners.
Peggi and I helped by proofing his slides. Peggi caught a measurement labeled with “(inches) rather than ‘(feet) and of course we had to tell my father about the scene in “Spinal Tap” where Nigel does a sketches for some Stonehenge props. I exported my father’s Keynote presentation to his first generation iPad and I sat with the iPad and projector, advancing the slides at my father’s pace. I went the wrong way a few times but we worked pretty good as a team. This was not the first time and my father is getting really good at this. His slides contain the pertinent information, not too much, and he is able to talk to the slides in a comfortable way bring the graphics to life.
Yesterday’s 2PM presentation was held at the Senior Citizens Center on Calkins Road. Last time I was out this way we saw Captain Beefheart with Frank Zappa at the Dome Arena. It was not a good period for either. The Henrietta officials started the presentation with the Pledge of Allegiance, which caught me completely off guard. I should know the words to that damn thing by now. And it was followed by an announced but unexplained “moment of silence.” The florescent lights were washing out the opening slide so I asked the town historian if she could turn them off and she obliged. They gave my father a wireless mic and when he turned it on it screeched with painful feedback. The speakers for the PA were immediately overhead, built into the ceiling, a no-win situation. I asked them to turn the PA down and my father proceeded to use the mic as a pointer so the only time we really heard it was when he touched the screen with it to point something out. “Thump, thump, thump.”
The audience here was really into it. Peggi and I were as well. The guy sitting next to me was taking notes and scrambling o keep up. Ingeniously, my father used a handful of existing photos and early illustrations to pick up scale and measurements of the equipment involved in the brick making process. He used Google’s 3D illustration program,”Sketch-Up,” to create drawings of the buildings, kilns, machinery, molds, transportation systems, rail tracks and even the housing for the workers. And he employed his fanciful side to illustrate with his paintings what these plants must have looked like. He overlaid his to-scale drawings on old maps recreated the past for us. No small feat!
Marsh behind Pete and Shelley’s property in the Adirondacks
Nothing like a couple of days off the grid to get your priorities straight. The “No Service” alert in the upper left hand corner of my mobile device was actually comforting. No emails, texts, news, Google searches or nasty Geo-tagging of my photos. Pete and Shelley made Hominy grits, puff balls and aborted entoloma mushrooms, beet greens and garlic toast over an open fire for breakfast. And I made the French press coffee extra strong. If you were an en plein air painter you would have your work cut out for you up here.
Utica is a day trip but we talked about making it an overnight destination,just for fun. Utica Club beer sort of soured the place’s reputation but it is a cool small city and the old brewery sign still stands tall above downtown. We were here to see the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. How did they ever amass such a stellar collection of twentieth century art?
We hadn’t even paid our entrance fees when we spotted an Arthur Dove and a Marsden Hartley right next to it. They have five Joseph Cornell constructions! They have early and late paintings by Modrian, Stuart Davis and Philip Guston. The early ones are better for Modrian and Davis, Guston’s late work is killer. There is another Marsdon Hartley upstairs, one of his late Maine landscapes. It alone is worth the drive but there is a traveling Impressionist show, “Monet to Matisse” there now as well.
The wood paneled walls of the museum are a rich setting for their collection. The upstairs entrance, shown above, features a choice Jackson Pollack, a Louise Bourgeois spider, and Andy Warhol’s Eletric Chair in one shot.
Instead of staying overnight we had a cup of Utica roasted coffee, the company’s slogan is “Wake The Hell Up,” and continued on to Pete and Shelley’s home in the Adirondacks.
Sheryl Crowe’s shaky anthem was a clunker but the Democratic debate proved to be as entertaining as the Republican two. I really didn’t think they had it in them. Bernie lit the fire and Hilary rolled with the punches. The other three one per-centers just set the two leading candidates up. I don’t see how Biden fits in here.
We missed “2-Ton-Tony.” He was at our door and we were out so he left a note on his campaign flyer. I can sort of imagine what he looks like.
While walking with my mom in the halls of their apartment building I spotted a sign “Welcome to new residents, Giuseppe and Concetta Profetta” I am looking forward to meeting them.
I ran this idea by Gary Pudup at last week’s Margaret Explosion gig and it really didn’t click. He’s a former Monroe County Sheriff and then was the head of the local ACLU. On top of that experience he is a strong gun opponent. My idea was a bumper sticker, condensed block letters, black on white, that read “MORE GUNS.” Knowing where I’m coming from he just looked at me for bit and then said, “People would take that seriously.”
Pickle ball players at Charlotte Beach in Rochester, New York
It has been espcially clear around here lately, very low humidity, so we rode our bikes down to the lake. There were a lot of people strolling on the beach and a guy who appeared to be alone taking selfies with one of those sticks. He was turning around with the stick extended and the phone attached to the end. We watched him for a few minutes and walked out to the end of the pier.
Three kids on one jet ski were riding back and forth in the high waves and then they suddenly made a beeline back through the channel to the bay. Peggi guessed that one of them had bit his lip. We walked the pier back to shore and that guy was still taking selfies. If I had my camera I would have taken a picture of him but all I had was my iPad mini and it just can’t hack those harsh lighting situations.
I sent my Sony pocket camera in for service. It had oily looking spots in the same place on all my photos. The warranty people had the camera for five weeks and when they returned it I was only able to squeeze off a few shots before another bizarre computer glitch-like problem appeared on the screen. I took it out to Rowe where I bought it and they didn’t even want to look a it. Nobody knows how to fix cameras anymore. They did offer to send it back to the warranty place again.
We tried to find this secret sidewalk years ago. I forget who it was that told us about it but we gave up. Olga, recommended it the other day so we gave it another shot. It is not as close to Charlotte as we thought. In fact the entrance is twenty one big houses down Beach Avenue from the Charrlotte bath house. We counted so we could tell others.
The sidewalk runs behind the David Geffen style homes that line the beach, between the homes and the lake. So as you walk westward the patios and boat houses are on your right overlooking the lake and the backs of the homes are to your left. There is a statue of the Virgin Mary at the end with about ten rosarys draped over her arms. When we got there we turned around and walked back. You feel as though you’re going to interrupt a croquet game but everyone is very friendly.
Needs & Wants bakery on Lake Avnue in Rochester, New York
Since the beginning of time the northern end of Lake Avenue in Rochester has been biker. Biker bars, bikers riding up and down, bikers in the restaurants. You want to stare at them and their “old ladies” but you’re sort of afraid. Only Diane Arbus could get away with that.
Lou Gramm’s (Grammatico) Band, Black Sheep, used to play the Penny Arcade, the hard rock club at the very end of Lake Avenue, more than forty years ago. The bar tenders there wore “Punk Rock Sucks” t-shirts when New Math played there in the seventies. Of course that may have been WCMF that put them up to that. Lou Gramm wrote a song about the gear-head sub culture here with the lines,
“Running all night on Lake Avenue
It’s a piece of cake
If you know what to do”
Charlotte, as this part of the city is known, is a magnet, though. The city meets the lake in dramatic fashion as Lake Avenue ends. Engineers plan to water the new marina next week. Condos in the Port of Rochester are on the horizon. And “Kneads & Wants” the artisan bakery on the east side, just north of the old Stutson Street bridge is an oasis. Olga told us about the place. We had driven by it many times but were never seduced by the sandwich sign.
We stopped after our Saturday morning yoga class and had coffee and cinnamon scones as we talked to the owner. We had been in the habit of stopping at Sips for coffee but the service there is so slow I started shopping at Herrama’s while Peggi waited for our iced lattes. I need and want to return here.
Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs screened the Alice Neel documentary tonight and it was a perfect evening for the 45 minute drive. Clear blue skies, very low humidity and a generous touch of color in the trees. In other places a 45 minute drive is nothing. Here it is time enough for deep conversation and Alice Neel’s paintings provided the fuel. Louise rode out with us and we had dinner at Warfield’s, across the street from the gallery. Painters, Jim and Gail Thomas, were having dinner at a nearby table.
A woman in the crowd, who lived in New York for many years, told a story before the movie about how she organized a show in the city and rounded up paintings from artists she liked. Alice Neel gave her one for the show but said he would not be around to pick up the painting when the show came down. The woman took the painting home and hung it on her apartment wall for a month or so. Marlene Dumas is in the movie, as well she should be. Alice is the master. Chuck Close is in there too and he tells a funny story about meeting Alice on the street. He told his name and she said, “Oh, I hate Chuck Close paintings.” He said, “I love yours.” And she said, “Well, I’ll have to give yours another look.” I was trying to get a good look at an Alice Neel painting in New York, somewhere in the nineties, and there was a guy in a wheelchair sitting in front of the painting along with a big guy behind the chair. They stayed planted there for an almost rude amount of time and when they finally moved on and the wheelchair spun around I saw it was Chuck Close.
Alice Neel is one of my favorite painters so I was in heaven watching her draw with color as she hung onto the end of her brush. Her portraits look just like the people she paints but they are much more demonstrative. She did the painting above when she was 80 years old and this self portrait when she was 84. She got better and better her whole life and her work remains as an inspiration. Louise said my painting look polite by comparison or something to that effect. I very much agree and plan to do something about it.
View from roof of Capron Street condos, Rochester, New York
I took this shot from the deck on the roof of the Capron Street condominiums downtown. A little further to the north, off to the right of this picture, is the Broad Street Bridge and beyond that the Main Street bridge. There is a plan in the works to re-water the aqueduct under the Broad Street bridge, to remove the road surface and let a portion of the Erie Canal flow over the Genesee River again as it did a century ago. Like so many European cities this center city attraction will be a year round magnet. Let’s make it happen.
Ford Torino in front of Home Depot in Rochester, New York
My cousin tries to organize a yearly “family reunion.” This year I suggested she just call it a “family picnic” because one year is not long enough for a reunion. Well see how much sway i have when the email invite comes next year. I have about fifty cousins and of course they all have children so we have to wear name tags. My aunt used to bring a giant percolator for coffee but she has passed on so this year we had Wegman’s Expresso. At the coffee table I found myself between two teachers, cousins of mine, and those conversations always go in one direction with two enemies. Overbearing parents and state and federal curriculums. Common Core and No Child Left Behind carnage.
My painting teacher started his career teaching elementary school students and he discovered that kids have an innate sense of color and design. When he switched to teaching adults he had to start undoing the grade school damage. He was my mentor as well as a friend and I miss him. Without his actual voice I rely on his abstracted voice. Instead of hearing him tell me to trust my eyes I am learning to trust my eyes.
Sam lives in a home with four other young adults. The five are classified as autistic but, as with everything, the boundaries are fuzzy. We drove down to Elmira to visit him on Saturday. At first it was hard to tell the aides from the clients. That distinction becomes clear fairly quickly. The clients are more interesting. Sam is lucky. The proportion of aides to clients is weighted heavily in his favor and the aides genuinely like Sam. How could they not? He is so sweet.
Sam lived with his parents, friends of ours, for more than thirty years and now this is his home. He is happy here. He is healthier, much thinner and calmer. Sam took us up to see his room, his computer, game console and tv with the connection ports in the front where he likes them. Sam has always been a computer buff and he calls us every time Apple has an update to make sure we know about it.
An aide gave Sam his medication and we took off. He had an agenda. First stop was Five Guys, a hamburger joint. They pride themselves on their fries. They keep the skin on and use only peanut oil. The three of us ordered grilled cheese and fries and we each had a pop. Next stop was Target where Sam bought some new headphones, a gallon of grape juice with no sugar added and a big box of Scooby Doo graham crackers. We spent a good part of the afternoon in the store and had a ball. In fact I bought a ball, one of those size 5 soccer balls.
Memo to self: Elmira, Horseheads, Big Flats, the southern part of New York is gorgeous this time of year. Wear your camouflage and you’ll fit right in.
Claude Bragdon’s Universalist Church in Rochester, New York
Martin Edic’s friend, Lucia Guarino, had the nicest stop on the Landmark Society’s tour this weekend. Her Capron Street condo in a former canal warehouse is fabulously decorated, has a perfect layout and a rooftop terrace with a great view of downtown. And she was there in person to welcome the throngs. The tour wasn’t as spectacular as last year’s but it did get us out to new Edge of the Wedge lofts, the Cub Room and Local Meat Market.
It was hard for me, an ex-Catholic, to appreciate the Claude Bragdon designed, Arts & Crafts, Universalist Church. Where is all the iconography, the Stations of the Cross, the heavenly aspirations? It was kind of fun to get into the old National Clothing Store where the new Holiday Garden Inn has set up shop. The National was always a step above Sibley’s and McCurdy’s. I remember my mom picking out a pretty adventurous sport coat for my Confirmation. I was nine or ten and had some input but she had great taste. This was a wide striped cream and maroon number making me the loudest note in the class photos.
Our First Friday route has to be rethought with the closing of Lumiere’s gallery. The photo gallery was one of our favorite stops. R Gallery, next door, had a solo exhibition of sculpture and installation by RIT alumni and Dedalus Foundation Fellowship recipient Cecily Culver. Her work “aims to shift viewer perspective and celebrate the mundane phenomena of the everyday” and it did that.
Pete Monacelli’s “Midtown Plaza” works on paper at Richard Margolis’s next door gallery looked fantastic. And on top of that Pete was holding court with a small crowd gathered around him in the center of the room when we got there, talking first about Midtown, his love of the city, and the changes he has seen in his years here. The conversation quickly swerved to Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons and then Thomas Merton’s letters to Ad Reinhardt. And then the many facets of Thomas Merton who was born one hundred years ago. Someone said, “he sounds like a Unitarian.” Please, the Catholics need all the help they can get. There is a show of Merton’s “Zen” photos at Nazareth College, up until November 4th.
Geri’s son, Sam, called to see if we had upgraded to OSX El Capitan. He was doing so as we talked. I might wait a few days and see how the reviews go. We had a few hiccups with the last update. We plan to visit Sam in Elmira this weekend so we’ll hear all about it.
We helped close up the street pool this morning, piled up the chairs, took the ladder out and put the diving board in the pump house. Peggi is in charge of the chemicals this year and she found the PH was a little low so we stopped down to our neighbor’s place to ask him how we should address this. He’s is a chemist so the answer took about a half hour to get to.
I’m not sure exactly what happened at the end of the gig last night. Either someone tripped on the cord for the Zoom recorder, maybe the upright bass knocked the recorder, but it and the stand it was mounted on fell toward Bob’s brand new guitar and it has a few dings in it.
Ossia has their first program of the new year tonight. They’re free at Kilbourn Hall. This one finishes with a Steve Reich piece. We are going to have to hustle home to catch the NWSL final between Kansas City (Heather O’Reilly‘s team) and Seattle. And there is another 20th Anniversary OJ show on tonight.
The Creative Workshop is offering an open studio in Fred Lipp’s former classroom. Tonight would have been the first night of a new session with Fred. He died near the end of the last round and the idea of showing up here to paint without him and his incisive guidance is absurd. You can pay by the session so we decided to give it a whirl.
I brought in some paintings that I was working on during that last session. I had been looking at them all summer and I knew pretty much what I needed to do. Mostly small things, Annoyances that kept drawing my attention. But still, questioning a painting, determining that something is wrong and then making that correction feels like big decisions without Fred.
Louise Wareham Leonard at Visual Studies Workshop Pub Fair in Rochester, New York
I was on the roof, making a racket with our leaf blower. We don’t really have any leaves up there yet but plenty of sticks, acorns and moss to dislodge. I had my Home Depot earmuffs on, in my own world, trying to remember to be careful when I got near the edge when I spotted the green Google Earth car coming down our street. I was out playing horseshoes the last time a Google car visited. In fact I can be seen taking a photo of the car in the Google shots of our house. I’m hoping they got me up there in my element.
Visual Studies Workshop had their annual Pub Fair on Saturday. The auditorium was filled with book artists and self publishers. It was tempting to buy something from every table but we held off until reaching Marc Pietrzykowski’s table. Peggi bought his novel about a murder in an old age home and I sprung for a three volume set of his poetry. We ran into Anne Havens and made plans to get together and play music before she heads back to Florida. Visual Studies has such a great art book collection in their library it is upsetting to see them sell parts of it off each year but we always manage to scoop up a few things. Peggi found a book of Flannery O’Conner photos and I came home with “Ninety-Nine Drawings by Marsden Hartley.”
The writers’ readings, which should have been on the main stage, all took place upstairs. Rob Tyler read eight vignettes, each wry and crisp. They walked a funny fine line between mundane and absurd. Louise Wareham Leonard didn’t so much read as perform her Rumpus piece, “How To Date A Writer.” Her performance was hilarious and especially searing in the room full of writers. Reading entries from her new book, “52 Men,” she brought new life to the pieces and made you want to read the book all over again.
Sailboats on river from Rochester Yacht Club yoga class
I talked before about Jeffery’s Saturday morning yoga class at the Rochester Yacht Club so I won’t recap how beautiful the setting is. I will point out how delightfully distracting the activity on the river is. The yacht club is built out on the river. It almost feels like you are on an island and boats sail past on all sides. The view is unobstructed even when you are on your back because the railing is clear plexiglass. (You can see a bit of it in the blow-up of the photo above.) Yesterday Jeffery had us put out our legs up the wall, the clear plexiglass guardrails, and we did a series of inversions.
Jeffery improvises the practice and his classes have an effortless flow from one position to the next. Consequently the hour and a half flies by. He was telling us about someone who was helped by a particular class. The person asked Jeffery if he could recap what the exercises were and Jeffery said he could not remember. He said if he planned out a class he would be bored out of his mind. When we finished the inversions he said. “This is the best wall ever.” I liked that.
You don’t have to be a member of the club to participate in the class but many of the people are. When class was over a man who is a member, a trustworthy sort, said there was so much going on this weekend. He rattled off a few things and then mentioned the Landmark Society’s tour. My father had given us his tickets to this event and we had forgotten all about it so we thanked the gentleman for reminding us. We stopped back at the house, changed clothes and headed downtown. We found a spot on Washington Square with no problem and walked over to Claude Bragdon’s Universalist Church. There was hardly anyone around and the doors were locked. The tour is next week.
