Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Spain has a way to knock you out when you least expect it. We stepped off the train in Jerez de la Frontera and entered a traffic circle with this giant sculpture by Victor Ochoc in the center. The Minotaur from Greek mythology has come to represent all bull headed creatures like me, a classic Taurus. The Minotaur eventually got a bull’s head. Picasso worked with this character extensively. Elsewhere in Jerez we came across this.
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It was raining when we stopped in Sevilla. The locals were acting like this was a big deal because it had been raining for a few days. It was ten degrees where we came from so we couldn’t take them seriously. The streets are lined with orange trees down here and the rain dropped the ripe fruit everywhere. The municipal workers had their hands full cleaning them up.
At the cafe where we had coffee we watched the woman behind the counter throw oranges into the Zumex machine like she was playing basketball. We couldn’t resist and ordered dos zumos de naranja.
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We stood outside a Vodaphone shop in Puerta del Sol trying to decide if we wanted to buy a SIM card for our iPad. Do we really need to be connected all the time? It seems the rest of the world is but we have resisted. Of course we have a high speed connection in our home and we couldn’t live without that even though we managed to do so for many years.
Phone calls can feel like an intrusion and I would rather not get one at all in the woods or at Wegmans. We find wifi connections when we travel and check in a few times a day, but in those moments when I know we could call up a map to avoid walking exactly 180 degrees the wrong way out of the center of Parque de Retiro I feel like we are living some sort of performance art piece by going without a cellular connection.
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The Reina Sophia, Madrid’s contemporary art museum has a world class collection so it is a must stop. We wandered through the place in a methodical fashion so as to see it all in one day. We gorged ourselves on Richard Serra, Edvard Munch and Paul Klee as well as younger artists we had never heard of. My jaw dropped when I saw two big Philip Guston paintings and five or six drawings as part of a provocative show called, “Elements: The Space of Crisis.”
A display of graphics, photos and art from the Spanish Cival War wound us up for the killer piece in this museum’s collection, Picasso’s Guernica, a monumental painting he did for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris in response to the fascist bombing of the Basque town. A total knockout!
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With only a couple of hours of sleep we walked in a daze around the old section of Madrid stopping for cafe con leche a few times before checking into a hotel. Instead of crashing, we went for it and headed back out. We found the quintessential Spanish cafe slash bar slash restaurant. I love how the Europeans seamlessly meld these three essential environments. We were in the literary section of Madrid near Plaza Santa Ana with its statutes of Calderón de la Barca and Federico García Lorca, near Cervantes’ home on Calle Lope de Vega.
People were eating in a back room with long tables and tiled walls but we sat in the bar and ordered Pimientos de Padrón, cerveza, vino tinto, aceitunas marinated in onions, manchego y pan. We believe we have found civilization.
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My new camera offers a lot of advice that I am choosing to ignore like the “Basic techniques for shooting” screen where Sony says, “Position a subject off center.” And “Movie Basics: Continuous shooting can produce a monotonous movie.” Those are my favorite movies.
I’m taking Steve Hoy’s recommendation and going with the 2×3 aspect ratio setting. It’s actually a higher res photo which is counterintuitive unless you’re a math major. The display screen on the back of the camera is 4×3 so the default 2×3 looks smaller back there. It looks like the top and bottom were cropped off but it is actually showing me the same height with more width so if I want 4×3 I’ll just crop the 2x3s.
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Painting class at the Creative Workshop is over crowded this session, so much so that Maureen dropped out. But, as usually happens, some new people drop out because the whole experience is not what they expected. A visitor to the class could spot the newcomers in a flash. They’re the ones with their earbuds in as they work away. Veterans quickly learn that Fred Lipp offers the same advice to every person in the room as he wanders from student to student. And this advice needs to be heard or overheard over and over because it is always relevant to whatever it is that you’re working on. Students work in all mediums on abstracts, portraits, still lifes, landscapes or a Corn Hill cityscape in my father’s case, and all can take advantage of this advice. It is all rather Zen.
Last night a new student, a painter with an art school background, was butting heads with Fred. The spirited discussion between those two was another golden opportunity for all of us to refresh the fundamentals. Fred was pointing out two intense dark spots on her painting that were calling way too much attention to themselves. “I’m only just beginning,” she protested, “Those are my darks. This is my process.”
For Fred any process should include an orderly direction. You don’t get out ahead of yourself by throwing up obstacles and if you have created an obstacle you deal with it now. The obstacle is your next move. You proceed in a fashion that allows the work to tell you when it is done. Painting and art or life, for that matter, is an adventure not some preplanned execution of a plan.
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I took photos of these local homeless kids a few years ago. One of them was sixteen and pregnant. I’ve painted them in oil and I painted them again in opaque watercolor. And then I drew them in charcoal on craft paper. The ones shown above are charcoal on drawing paper, multiple versions of six kids. I’m still working on a few but am preparing to move on to another project. Then I’ll photograph these drawings properly and put them in a drawer.
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I’ve carried my Nikon 7000 in my left front pocket for four years now. I can barely get the lens cover open now. Lint takes a toll. I bought a smaller Sony pocket camera, an RX100, and by default it is set up to shoot photos in the traditional 3×2 aspect ratio. My first digital camera, a Kodak DC210 used that format, same as the old 35mm film cameras, and I thought I missed that but I am having a hard time adjusting. I’m thinking the 2×3 format might be the way they designed the sensor and therefore it might be the optimum ratio. Does one fit mobile platforms better? I don’t really care about that. I’m just on the fence as to which ratio works best for me. I’ve been using the 4×3 for so long I kind of frame shots that way before I shoot. I’m gonna have to think about this for a while.
The blow up above is 4×3 and the this link is 3×2.
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We really wanted to see Rochester’s Renee Fleming sing the national anthem but we missed it. We were still in Wegman’s buying avocados to make guacamole for the big game, the only game we’d see all year. I remember watching the first Super Bowl in my parent’s family room. It was just as lopsided as last night’s game. There was a marching band at halftime and I don’t remember the family gathered around, clicking away on their mobil devices. OK, football caught on. Too bad it wasn’t the international version.
I grabbed the remote when the halftime show started and started to crank the volume but my thumb slipped and I hit a small button that killed the sound and miniaturized the screen behind a menu of choices that made no sense. Loud protest ensued and I couldn’t get out that mode so I passed the clicker to my nephew who I figured had the fastest digital skills. He could’t figure it out either so my brother, Tim, the biggest sports fan in the room, took charge and he rescued the Bruno Mars performance.
There was a lot of talk about how Bruno is a manufactured artist who distills James Brown and Michael Jackson but the kids hardly knew who those two were. With over a billion youtube hits this guy is obviously fun to watch and this ain’t the sixties. For me the entire event was overshadowed by the death of another Rochesterian, the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, at XLVI.
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My favorite scenes in “Blue Velvet” are the ones that take place in the “Slow Club,” the nightclub where Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy performs multiple versions of the Bobby Vinton song. Angelo Badalamenti makes a cameo appearance as the pianist. Margaret Explosion is always getting compared to Lynch music. “The music is slow, sinuous and spooky. It is David Lynch soundtrack material. I could dig being in the house band at the Slow Club.
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I’ve been thinking about my old friend Brad lately. My father’s financial advisor used to live across the street from us and he asked about Brad and his name has come up in a few other contexts. I’m remembering things like how Brad used to singe the hair on his legs with his cigarette between puffs. And how he used to punch me in the arm so hard I couldn’t even lift it. I’m bad on the phone but I owe him a call.
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We were on the way out the door of Nick’s Sea Breeze Inn when my father asked, “Where else would you see a bench like this?” We have seen it used when the waiting room is full but not in the dead of winter. My mom ordered her usual spaghetti and meatballs, my dad went with the broiled Haddock and Peggi and I each order the “Italian Trio” special (choice of three: Manicotti, Gnocchi, Lasagna, Chicken Parm or Eggplant Parm) with a salad.
Nick stopped by our table as he always does. My dad used to meet here once a week for lunch with his retired engineers’ posse and Nick and my dad have some sort of rapport. Even though Nick played football for Geneva High School he said he wouldn’t be watching the Super Bowl. “Bunch of babies. That’s not football. That’s a circus.”
He inserted the story of how he shined shoes at the Naval base on Seneca Lake and brought the money home to his mom and then how he dragged blocks of ice upstairs at Club 86 and chipped them by hand to stock the bar before Jimmy Dorsey or whoever took the stage. He worked his way back to a football analogy. “Those guys make one small play and then cut to a commercial. I go in the back room here, he said, and the dishwasher will say ‘I’m on break’.” Nick looked at his watch to illustrate. “I have two more minutes! In my day they would tell you your hours are 9 to ‘u’, nine AM to unconscious.
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I usually chop my hair with scissors by pulling it out and cutting it all at about the same length and then I ask Peggi to help with the rear. It takes all of five minutes. But today I decided to tag along with Peggi when she went to Chi Wah’s on Monroe Avenue.
Our friend Jeff and Mary Kaye’s daughter, Maddie, works there now and we signed up for her. We chatted with Chi Wah and of course the only thing you can think of when you talk to her is the role she played in “China Doll” and Rochester bust. I haven’t really looked in the mirror yet but I think Maddie did a good job. I’ll know when I get out of the shower tomorrow morning.
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Many years ago I bought a few boxes of slides at a garage sale. The person attending the sale said the woman who used to live in the house had traveled all over the world so I gambled on the lot. I used one of the photos on the cover of the Invisible Idiot cd and I think the goat photo above is one. They’re in the public domain now like my Flickr photos. I put a slideshow together of these found photos and they are serving as a short winter vacation.
We were at the Dyden Theater for “Blue Velvet” when we saw the previews for “The Great Beauty.” We had not seen that since it came out and this ages like a fine wine. We’ve spent a lot of time in movie houses in the last few weeks. I wore my long underwear for last night’s showing of “The Great Beauty and almost nodded off. I was plenty engaged, the movie was so dreamy and Tony Sevillo does such a great job of getting into his character that I found myself as detached and then introspective as Jep Gambardella. This is a beautiful movie to look at and listen to. ESG’s brilliant “Moody” is even in there. Director Paolo Sorrentino reminds us Fellini is not dead.
We watched Hitchcock’s “Rope” over the weekend. By the time we get to the end our Hitchcock binge it will be time to go around again. “Liv and Ingmar: Painfully Connected” was perhaps a perfect winter movie. I finally like Leonardo DiCaprio in a movie. “The Wolf of Wall Street” was an all out romp. And I was happy that “Inside Llewyn Davis” was so dark. I was afraid to see the damn thing not because of the David Van Ronk revival but because of all the nostalgic, reverent singer/songwriter myth making going on.
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Rochester architects Chris Brandt and Craig Jensen contacted Peggi through her Don Hershey website and arranged to meet here yesterday afternoon to talk Hershey. We woke up without heat. The small motor that opens the flap on our furnace flu burnt out so the boiler had gone into rest mode. Wayne Heid rescued us hours before the meeting.
The architects brought Cynthia Howe from the Landmark Society along as well and we stood around the table talking about homes that we all suspect may be Hersheys. He designed 300 some houses in this area and some of them are really tucked away. It was a delightful three hours spent ping ponging around town on cell phone maps as we pooled our knowledge. Cynthia pushed Peggi to write a book on Hershey. Peggi has a spread sheet of confirmed Hersheys that she continues to add to and someday it will all be on the site. Craig bought a stack of photos that he bought from Dick Storms after Dick scooped them up at Don Hershey’s house when the architect died and the kitchen shot above was in there.
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Abbott’s Custard at Culver and Ridge is closing. The “U” and the “S” have already left. Go US!
Not everyone has a Tumblr page but everyone should. So much fun. I keep my Funky Sign collection over there.
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I stopped over to visit Sparky, our former neighbor, and he had just finished lunch when I walked in. A dirty pot was still in the sink and empty can of Popeye spinach was on the edge of the sink. I felt as if I had finally discovered his secret potion and asked if I could take a photo of the can.
I will have to add this to pictures of Sparky on his mini website (sparky.com) I think the last update was the “Sparky Dolls.” His counter is still broken and there is an ongoing slew of “Episodes” to add but it will be hard to top these gems.
Sparky Recycles Aluminum (he pronouces it ally-loon-ee-mum) – smashes up old lawn chairs, dimantles lawn mowers in his garage. Has an old scale in there to weigh the recyclbles..
Sparky’s Boat Cuts Loose From His Trailer And Passes Him On The Road (he says)
Sparky Changes Rusty’s Name To Little Man And Then “Little Manny”
Sparky Takes Little Man To The Vet Because He Can’t Poop
Sparky Goes To A Body Building Contest In Buffalo
Sparky Shoots At Squirrel With Homemade Slingshot
All it takes is a couple of inches of new white stuff and winter is all fresh again. And of course it helps when the temperatures don’t even make it out of single digits. The air crisp and the snow is perfect for skiing. We drove to the other side of the park, the undeveloped section on he west side of Kings Highway, and skied up along the ridge that runs almost all the way up o the fire department. We were the only human tracks, plenty of others out but no walkers, snowshoers or other cross-country nuts.
We skied in the park yesterday too. There still isn’t quite enough snow to cushion the trails in the woods so we’re going all civilized rather than bushwhacking. The Rochester Cross-Country Ski Foundation grooms trails on the golf course and we saw a few tiny signs for the “Nordic Center.” We can only image what that is or where it might be. The signs so few and far between that you might freeze trying to follow them. I should add that our style of X-Crountry skiing is worlds away from the upcoming Olympic variety of skate skiing. We trudge. They glide.
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