We chased a herd of deer toward the lake as we skied through the woods today, maybe twelve or so of them including a buck with a decent sized rack. And on the way back we chased the same herd back toward our neck of the woods. They must feel a lot more vulnerable in the snow. They are normally camouflaged. In the winter they take off as soon as they see us. In the other seasons they wait and check us out. If we act casual they will hold their ground and we get within fifteen feet or so. We come across their sleeping spots all the time, melted snow, indentations about a foot deep with leaves visible and of course, deer scat.
We got back from New York just in time to make a toasted cheese sandwich and head out for painting class. I didn’t even have time to shovel the roof until the next morning. The temperatures were above freezing by then and ice damning is a concern when the snow melts and rolls toward our big overhangs. The roof temperature there is quite a bit colder than it is over our living quarters so freezes, forms an ice damn and can lift the shingles and drip into the house. This has only been a problem one time so I head it off at the pass. I’m only up there a few time a year and it’s pretty easy shoveling because it is all downhill. I just have to keep my wits about me up there and that is a challenge.
View of Central Park from 29th floor of the Park Lane Hotel
Peggi was an AAU competitive swimmer in her younger years and Matisse’s “Swimming Pool” cutout, re-installed at the Met in a room built to the same specs as the dining room where the work originally wrapped around the four walls, seems to have awoken the deep connection she has with water and art. This was the piece she wanted to see the most on our second tour of the show. And like the faithful on a religious pilgrimage we were rewarded at journey’s end. The piece is a masterpiece created by a master. Cut shapes that are not. Matisse cuts forms from flatly painted paper. The figures and water are abstract and representational and expressive at once. Ultimately thrilling.
This visit to the big city was different. We didn’t stay at Chez Sherwood although we did hook up for dinner. Peggi booked a room in midtown on Central Park South. Because we booked at last minute we were able to secure a “handicap accessible” room that they were looking to fill for a song. And when we checked in they asked if we needed the handicap stuff. We shook our heads (someday we’ll get ours) and upgraded it to a junior suite on the 29th floor overlooking the park for the same price.
We never took the subway this time and walked to the Met, MoMa and dinner. We stayed mostly in midtown and managed to not set foot in the big brand name shops, Gucci, Armani, Coach, Prada and Apple. And because it is so close to Peggi’s birthday we spent thirty five dollars on a pair of perfumy gin and tonics at the hotel bar.
View of Central Park from 29th floor of the Park Lane Hotel2 Comments
Madame Cezanne painting at Metropolitan Museum of Art
“El Greco in New York” is a pretty sensational name for the show that ended today at 5:30 at the the Metropolitan Museum of Art considering the city did not even exist in his time. And the show is just as sensational but not the showstopper that the “Madame Cezanne” show at the same institution is.
Twenty four of the twenty nine known paintings that Cezanne did of his wife have been rounded up for this show. Every painter that matters cites Cezanne as the man and this is what they’re talking about. The “father of modern art” depicted form in two dimensions better than anyone and he did it primarily with color but followed it up with radical form depiction in his drawing. He is also the godfather of cubism.
He pulls out all the stops with this “Madame Cezanne in Red” (above). The bottom of her dress is being thrown at you. She is very present but only part of this huge environment. We are drawn in on the left side and come out on the right along with that curtain. Madame Cezanne’s face, which can be pretty even as she pouts in the other paintings is sacrificed here and close to distorted in a masterful show of form.
Super Bowl cup-cakes at Kneads & Wants on Lake Avenue in Rochester, New York
Amy and Eric got right into it last night. They rocked the Aerodome until the wheels did fall off. They played some great new songs about home remodeling and Sysco trucks on the interstate. They started “Astrovan” in three different keys before settling on “A” and they delivered a stellar version of “Do You Remember That?”
To my ears, Eric and Amy sound best the more stripped down their sound gets. Last night’s songs with Eric on acoustic and Amy on keys were brilliant. Amy Alison, Mose’s daughter, was the surprise guest and she sounded great. We’re going out of our way to avoid the Super Bowl today.
The Homemade Aeroplane site said we would receive our boarding passes by post and sure enough, on the day before our departure they arrived. Google maps said the journey to the Catskill Aerodrome would take just under four hours but we took the scenic route along Routes 5 & 20.
It was a clear sunny day but dangerous snow had drifted across the road in some of the wide open spots. Our hotel room was on the other side of the river in Hudson so we passed through the town of Catskill on the way, in effect doing a reverse dry run of the hop over the Rip Van Winkle bridge to Amy and Eric’s place later tonight.
A Trip Advisor review of the 139 year old Saint Charles Hotel said, “Don’t do it!” but we tempted fate. It’s a funky old brick building in the center of town that was probably a pretty cool bar in its day. We signed a waiver that said we’d be charged $250 if we smoked in our room and then found the room already smelled like smoke. The floor runs uphill toward the windows too but we’re not complaining.
The show tonight promises a special guest but that’s a secret. I told Duane Sherwood (owner of a beautiful Wreckless Eric painting) we were headed down this way for the show and he said, “Are you sure you are not the special guests?” I am sure of that.
Peggi cutting handmade soap at Abundance CoOp in Rochester, New York
We were members of Abundance CoOp back in the mid seventies when they located in the old firehouse on Monroe Avenue. We used to have work there for a few hours for the privilege. They might have changed their name since then but they are on the move again. Instead of being tucked away behind KrudCo they’ll have much more visibly on South Avenue. And you’ll have better visibility while you’re shopping as well because the new building has giant windows across the front. If I sound like one of the two thousand shareholders I am and we were there yesterday to take advantage of our once a month 10% off that each member enjoys.
While we were there we picked up a copy of their newsletter, the “Rutabaga Rap,” and learned that at the monthly board meeting they discussed what to do with all their new space. The most popular item on the expansion list was beer. Winter enthusiast, Jack Bradigan Spula has a great article in the newsletter about the subnivium, the vital ecosystem under the snow.
We hear they hauled away two dumpsters of stuff from our house before we bought it. The former owner lived alone, he had no relatives here and he had a heart attack in our bedroom. I wish they had just left the stuff here. I kind of like going through junk.
The house was empty when we moved in except for a giant candle, maybe a foot tall and six inches in diameter with a huge wick. We left it burning on our porch one night and reduced it to a small puddle of wax. There was a deer rack mounted over the back door of the garage and we kept that up. There was a pool cue rack on the wall of the basement which we threw out. And beneath a built-in seat in our living room we found a big, cardboard box of photos.
There were five different Kodak, photo business cards of his were in the box so we arranged them chronologically. He looked a lot like they in the photo above but we’re pretty sure that is his father and mother. We were able to piece together his hobbies (going to auto races and shooting telephoto shots of women’s rear ends) and the places he visited (amusement parks with his two kids during his visitation stints). He probably had free film processing so he shot thousands of of bad photos, not even interestingly bad. We filled a garbage bag with them but I did manage to fill a small scrapbook with a strange assortment. Some day maybe someone will piece my life together with my junk.
Freshly groomed cross-country ski trails in Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York
Donations to the Rochester X-Country Ski Foundation are in order this year. The groomed trails in the parks are the best option for skiing due to the lack of a substantial snowfall that would cushion the trials in the woods. And all that time out in the open covering a vast expanse of open land (golf course) has made us better skiers. When we first started it was clearly a trudge. I would say we skied no faster than we would move through the snow on foot. Then came a slow glide and it was much less effort than walking and we covered more ground. Now we have taken to studying the motion of skiers who ski like you would skate. We mimic them for a few strokes and then stop to marvel at the scenery.
Bowling balls at Park View Bowl on Culver Road in Rochester, New York
I’ve read that Rochester used to have more bowling lanes per capita than any other city in the world. Park View Bowl in Sea Breeze might have capitalized on that boom, somewhere in the fifties or sixties, when they busted a hole in the side of their concrete-block building and added a seventh and eighth lane. That’s where they put our crew on Monday night, a perfect spot as we surely would have disrupted the regular’s groove.
Louise wore her Hendrix t-shirt and she and Peggi were the only women in the place other than the owner’s sister who was behind the bar while her brother bowled. But they did have room for us tonight so we each picked out a ball. Louise chose a “Smart Ball.” It was so light it couldn’t fully return on the ramp that brings your ball back. My solid black ball weighed a ton and was labeled “Ebonite.” Peggi chose a blue sparkly ball called “Galaxie 300.” We laughed about that one because Louise’s bother played in a band called “Galaxie 500.” Matthew’s ball was nicknamed “The Hammer.”
One dollar bought three tunes on the juke box. Mine went for the Righteous Brothers, Temptations and Stones. I bought the second pitcher and the owners’s sister started to pour Yuengling. I asked if she could make this one Labatt’s Blue and she gave me a Marlene Dietrich worthy look of exasperation. Earlier, when I asked for size eleven shoes, she said, “I can’t reach those.” Her brother, Kevin, is a sweetie. He tallied up our scores at the end of both games because we none of us could keep score.
You know how it gets in the depth of winter, you don’t see your neighbors for weeks at a time. Well we headed out for a walk the other day and ran into Jared who told us he was just inspecting the work RGE had done in front of Diane’s house. He said Diane had called him to find out if he knew what was going on out there. If I wanted to know what was going on I couldn’t think of a better call to place either. Jared thinks the power company may be preparing to replace the gas lines that run down our street. Or maybe the artists on staff there were charged with brightening up our dreary, grey landscape.
Our red envelope of the week contained “Finding Vivian Maier” and it is just fantastic. It is fantastic because Vivian’s photos are so incredible, in league with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank but a true original. Working as a nanny and completely unknown as an artist in her lifetime, her treasure trove of negatives could be the greatest garage sale find in history. She was damaged in some way but had finely tuned observation skills. She followed her nose on the street and brought back an extraordinary record of of what it’s like to be human.
Diana Vreeland is a dynamo. I knew next to nothing about her other than her name and that Warhol probably did a portrait of her. Seems like she was always in Interview magazine but I just never caught up with her until this documentary, “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel.” Vreeland was a first rate creative artist. OK, she wasn’t the best mother. The movie is exhilerating.
While I’m reading “Kansas City Lightning” Peggi finished “Joni Mitchell – In Her Own Words” by Malka Marom and that led to another viewing of “Joni Mitchell – Woman of Heart and Mind: A Life Story” in which the author of the book makes an appearance. I was knocked out by “Ladies of the Canyon” and still love it to this day. “Circle Game” is one of the songs I’d put on a playlist for my funeral. And I enjoyed the way Joni scolded the audience here when she opened for Dylan in 1998. Performances like that stick with you.
It might be time for another screening of Altman’s “Three Women.”
Matthew’s company car, a hybrid, lost its charge in Syracuse so our bowling date was cancelled or rather postponed until last night. But the eight lanes at Park View Bowl were all occupied with a women’s league when we got there. The idea contained in the name of a view of the park (Durand Eastman) while you’re bowling is crazy. We had a drink at the bar and I returned Matthew’s “Speaking of Art: Four decades of art in conversation” book. I wanted to show Louise this quote from Nancy Spero, Leon Golub’s wife and one of the artists in the book, but there wasn’t enough light at the bar for her to see it.
“There’s a basic risk in the practice of art itself, in that it’s something that’s not wanted particularly by society. Only a few understand the need for this innocence in a culture, and yet it is the artifact of a culture in the final sense of the word.”
And I thought this one from Ed Ruscha was nice especially because he found common ground between his work and Morandi’s. “One of my favourite artists is Giorgio Morandi, and he painted the same picture for all of his life and did it very well. He fulfilled his destiny without doing any of this pushing into new frontiers. So pushing into a new frontier is not a necessity for any artist. But unless it’s done by someone, things end up at a standstill.”
The night was young so we moved down the road to the Reunion, another bar we had never set foot in. Sea Breeze apparently used to have a small shop that supplied the word with clown shoes and sure enough there was one over the bar. They have a print of Goya’s “Naked Maja” in an ornate frame and a sign that looked vintage but used contemporary jargon. “Wine. How classy people get wasted.” We pumped dollar bills into the juke box and played three games of 8-Ball on the pool table. We were both good and bad.
Not really sure what year this is so we’ll call it 2000. Steve Black was in town from Singapore with his pre-digital movie equipment and Margaret Explosion was a skeleton crew. In case you are not from around here Cobbs Hill is the gravitational center of Rochester, New York.
Beefheart’s “Circumstances” has been stuck in my head all night. Click here and could be stuck in yours’. It’s not like I heard it recently or anything. It just popped in.
I started this drawing this afternoon and finished in class. It still has a searching, coming into being feel. I like that and find the early, rough stages of my drawings the most exciting but at that stage there is usually structural problems or rethinking at the very least. If I tried to clean this one up I would kill it. These are the circumstances.
When panting class is in session the whole week revolves around that night. We were there a half hour early for our three hour class and it still flew by. We are already starting another revolution. To be continually challenged, it doesn’t get any better than that.
Saint Ann statue at Saint Ann’s Home in Rochester, New York
We parked our car in Saint Ann’s lot across the street from Rochester General in order to save the parking fees. An added bonus was the short walk on a 40 plus degree day. All it takes is one of these days to screw up a winter groove. The rink in front of the town hall looked as sad as can be. We had been on a pretty good X-country ski run until this happened.
Our niece had a baby girl. Penelope. I’m thinking “Peña” as a nickname but me niece didn’t seem to like that one. Penelope is really quite a wonder, not even a day old on her literal “birthday.”
On our way back the lights were on statue of Saint Ann. Saint Ann is Mary’s mother so that would be the future virgin mother standing in front of her. Presumably Mary’s birth was not an immaculate conception. I know my niece’s wasn’t.
Can downtown Rochester ever get its mojo back? Just about every old warehouse, school, factory or department store has been converted to lofts for young urbanites or old empty-nesters but the streets don’t have as much life as this 1932 photo.
Thomas Grasso, president of the Canal Society of New York State, wrote a dreamy guest editorial for the Democrat & Chronicle over the weekend that proposed re-watering the portion of the Erie Canal that used to cross the Genesee River on the Broad Street aqueduct in the middle of downtown Rochester. The idea has been gathering steam for some time now and is really not any more unlikely than filling in half the Inner Loop seemed only a few years ago. It is a far better proposal than Frederick L. Olmstead’s arcade and certainly better than the bone-headed idea of putting city government subsidized shops in the former dank underground homeless refuge.
So let’s make this one happen. A simple diversion of a portion of the canal’s current path would carry water downtown and across the river. This has four season potential as a big draw, a man made marvel created almost 200 years ago, a giant magnet.
And while we’re dreaming, I read Eugene Robinson’s editorial on MLK’s call for economic justice in 1968. “One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality,” King said. “That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. . . . But as we assemble here tonight, I’m sure that each of us is painfully aware of the fact that there is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.” The speech, made just before he was shot, was brilliant but what was more striking than the excerpts was the realization that we have no politician or civic leader today that can talk like that.
Funky signs near Clifton Springs in Rochester, New York
We drove out to Clifton Springs with my parents to attend a birthday party for my. She turned ninety. She was my godmother and one of my earliest memories is being at her wedding. She was a nurse at Saint Mary’s on Genesee Street where I was born and she met her husband while attending to a farm injury that he sustained.
We got off he NYS thruway at Manchester and we took the first left on a road that would take us right into Clifton Spring. Right there, near the intersection I hit the mother-load of content for my Funky Signs site.
“This is the return call you requested regarding the back brace commercial you saw on tv.” ‘Your computer is reporting suspicious errors. Press 1 to talk to a Microsoft representative now.”
We registered our home phone number with the “Do Not Call Registry” but got these two calls this week. I went to the government’s site and found this alert on their front page. “Scammers have been making phone calls claiming to represent the National Do Not Call Registry.” I’m trying to decide whether to go skiing or wait for the next call.
Path to Horseshoe Road near Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York
Twelve degrees is the perfect temperature for cross country skiing. Crisp, light snow with lots of plenty of glide. Not so cold you that want to turn back but cold enough to make the experience exhilarating. I remember being twelve. I thought I was on top of the world. It was my lucky number for a while because I won a box of Snickers at the Saint John the Evangelist fair by placing my bet on that number. A whole box of Snickers!
