Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
I am counting down the hours to the World Cup. Of course the US is my first choice but I’m happy there are thirty-one other teams in the tournament to root for in the later rounds. America’s national team coach, former German star, Jurgen Klinsmann, said the US “would have to play the game of our lives seven times to win the tournament. It is not possible.” Sam Borden in the Times said “such candor seems un-American.” What does come after “America First?”
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It was such a delight to hear Louise Wareham Leonard read at Writers & Books last night. I’m still getting over it. The Performance Space there is dramatic. Stadium style seating, theatrical lighting and Louise at the podium with a short stack of pages. There is a “this better be good” vibe to the setting and Louise delivered in rather surprising fashion, surprising only because hearing her read something of hers I had already read brings it to a near boil.
She read from four of her books, some still in progress, and I particularly liked her comments as introduced a piece from “Fiery World,” the first chapter of which is published in this month’s Rochester POST magazine. The book is set in Durand Eastman’s Arboretum, “a spectacularily beautiful place that none goes to.” “I almost don’t even want to tell you about it.”
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Requires no words. Already supplied by Lou. “I want to spend it with you.”
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I had completely forgotten that I did the Landmark Society’s 75th year logo until we were signing in at their annual House and Garden Tour this afternoon. This year, their seventy-fifth, was the historic Mt. Hope and Highland neighborhood, the former Ellwanger and Barry Nursery which at one time was the largest nursery in the world. Nestled between Highland Hospital, Frederick Olmstead”s Highland Park and Mount Hope Cemetery where Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas are buried the tour included Beaux Art, Arts & Crafts Bungalow, Gothic Revival, Italian Villa and a little Art Deco style homes. We started at the Lamberton Conservatory and finished up at both the Ellwanger and Barry homes. Thank god for the gay guys that have restored so many of these houses.
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We started our First Friday art tour before anyone else last night. We were at the MAG savoring the last hours of the Matisse show and I don’t mean his grandson’s pottery. No one draws like Matisse. No one gets as much form and expression in line. Matisse is the master. Your very last last chance to see what I’m talking about is Sunday when the show closes.
This morning’s paper has an item that really isn’t news to those who live here. Despite being one of America’s most livable cities we are ranked third on the list of poverty rates in large metropolitan areas, just behind Detroit and Cleveland. Like I say, not news, but it came the morning after taking in “Upstate Girls” by Brenda Ann Kenneally at Visual Studies Workshop. Kenneally has secured a Guggenheim grant to continue exploring and visually docmenting the how and why of class inequity in America. A meaty project. Take a look at her photos.
In Synecdoche, Katherine Keener, playing Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wife, painted these mildly disturbing miniature pictures and at her openings everyone had to use magnifying glasses to view the art. I was reminded of that bit of absurdity last night at RoCo where the 6×6 show opened. Each piece, limit of six from each entrant, is six by six and every piece is 20 bucks with all proceeds going o Rochester Contemporary. But this year they go food to ceiling. You can hardly see the ones up top but hang. There were signs scattered about that read, “Ladders Available Sundy.”
Ladders Available Sunday.
Summer is so short around here you really have to get a jump on the season. One sure fire way to get in the groove is to peddle down to Sea Breeze as we did a few days ago. Just keep in mind the ride down is a breeze and the uphill trip back takes some manpower.
The kids screaming on the amusement park rides is an integral part of the summer soundtrack. The boaters drifting through the channel between the bay and the lake have their own subculture going and the pier is a great place to play the voyeur. The choice between Bill Grey’s, Don’s Original and Vic & Irv’s is easy but then Don’s has some great chocolate almond custard for dessert. Although there used to be about fifty bars and speakeasies on the bay Marge’s is the only one left. If you go in here the day will be swallowed up. We mostly just stand around and look at the people.
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I took this guy over to the Creative Workshop where he’ll be in a show that starts there next week. I have a new batch of crime faces to tidy up and photograph. Steve Black has invited me to show some drawings in Brooklyn this summer so I’ll have to get them framed and ready to travel.
I was buying the matt board for this one at Rochester Art Supply and Sally from High Falls Gallery was behind the counter with another guy. She asked if Armand had contacted me because he is putting a show together about prison in DC or somewhere and she recommended my work. The other guy asked what I did and Sally told him, “Paul paints local convicts and and I take all the bitterness and rage out of their faces.” That did not ring right but I left it at, “No, I didn’t hear from Armand.
I remember showing my six basketball players from the nineties at Cylinder Sound behind the Bug Jar and Dave Ripton, who was recording there, told me, “I’d like what your portraits would look like if they were on heroin.” That stuck with me.
This guy does look kinda sweet.
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It is no secret that the older you get, the closer together your medical appointments are. You need a good calendar to keep track of them all and someone to take notes. I am that someone, taking notes on my iPad when my father meets with his doctor. After our last visit we stopped by CVS to fill a new prescription and I picked up a New Yorker from the magazine stand while the pharmacist filled the order. I had already looked at the issue and took a chance that my father would like the long excerpt from Roz Chast’s brilliantly honest, graphic memoir on aging, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?. I quietly checked back for a reaction and found my father almost doubled over with laughter.
After today’s appointment my father told me he had finished her book and it wasn’t pretty. He had seen the author on Charlie Rose and ordered the book. But I got the clear sense that he liked the book because he wanted to talk about it. That would be the dark comedy factor working. We have the book too and Peggi finished it the other night. She read whole sections aloud to me because they just couldn’t wait. Funny thing is Peggi’s mom used to say exactly that (title of the book) to us when we talked about something unpleasant.
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We don’t have any Mary Gauthier music but then everybody has YouTube so we watched a couple of videos. “I Drink” kicks ass and “Mercy Now,” in the same vein, sounded good so we headed out to the Lovin’ Cup to check her out. We were hoping she would be playing with the violin player from the video but that didn’t happen. Still Mary holds her own. She’s a real pro and part of the Nashville establishment now having just performed at the Opry. She has her work cut out for her to outdo “I Drink” but then, don’t we all have our work cut out for us?
Someone behind the bar was making a racket during her encore, “Mercy Now.” I was thinking it sounded like a woodpecker. Mary stopped the song and said, “I used to chop parsley.”
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We usually park off Lyell Ave. on Verona or one of those side streets that lead up to the soccer stadium but last night that section of Lyell was completely blocked off with flashing cop cars so we parked in front of Sanda’s Saloon. After the game we decided to cruise down Lake Avenue, Lou Graham style, but when we got to Lake and Ridge the intersection was blocked by firetruck. There were a few ambulances attending to bodies in the street and some cars in unusual positions so we had to take Dewy down toward the lake. On the way across Lakeshore Boulevard we ran into a barricade near the beach. Turns out they were holding the Soap Box Derby this weekend on that hill, the same one they used when I was a kid, so we took the aptly named Kings Highway up to Titus. It was the beautiful night for detours.
I can’t imagine a worse day for a lecture inside a darkened hall. It was gorgeous out today, crystal clear and warm, but Fred Lipp packed the place for his talk on space in the Bausch & Lomb room of the Memorial Art Gallery. The talk based on depicting space in two dimensions, was brilliant. Having helped with the visuals we found it invigorating and only felt somewhat cheated because Fred didn’t have as much time to go over the carefully chosen paintings as he did when he was putting the show together. At the end of the slideshow a gentleman in the back stood up, thanked Fred and reminded him that it was bright sun outside. Fred did not miss a beat and said, “But it is illuminated in here.”
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These lilac blossoms in Durand Eastman make a rather late entrance but it is a grand one. There is a plaque next them with some history. We stood here for quite a while yesterday giving all our senses a workout. Here’s an abbreviated version.
“George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak fame, bestowed a gift upon the City of Rochester that in time became known as Durand-Eastman Park. It is a magnificent piece of property close to Lake Ontario, with hills, rivers and small lakes. If one were looking for a bit of the mountains and hills of China with their mirror lakes, he could not find a more ideal spot in which to plant some of the horticultural wonders of that land. Here Springtime comes gradually and winters are tempered by the great lake.”
Bernard Slavin, the Park’s first Superintendent (and “composer”), planted a number of lilac seedlings. Circumstances forced the widening of a park road and the lilacs were removed. Fortunately a cutting had been successfully rooted and grown in Medina, Ohio. It was brought back to the park and has naturalized itself from seed as lilacs on occasion do. Today it is known as S. julianae ‘George Eastman”.
“Liacdom is filled with circumstances of serendipity!”
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Fred Lipp, an artist and teacher at the Creative Workshop is giving a talk on Sunday at the MAG. I’ve talked about what Fred has tried to teach me many times. I am a slow learner. The talk is entitled “Comparisons of Visual Spatial Effects Utilized in Modern Painting.” That’s a mouthful but the talk is guaranteed to to be an eyeful and a headful as well. Peggi and I were lucky enough to have a brief preview and feel this will be a most rewarding experience.
This could also be a last opportunity to see the fabulous Matisse show there.
2pm Sunday June 1, Memorial Art Gallery
Free with gallery admission.
My math scores on the SATs were about twice my verbal scores. I am visually oriented. My favorite book is only 20,000 words long. In fact the title of the book is “20,000 Words.” It’s a dictionary without definitions and an old-time, invaluable resource for those who can’t spell. Me.
I love looking at the phonetically hyphenated words. Kilo-watt, knee-high, knight-hood, la-dy-bug, la-goon. And it is still a perfect resource for naming instrumental songs. I used it last night to come up with “Hard Boiled.” The photo that we used for the cover is one that went off while my camera was in my pocket. Somehow it found this amazing red light.
Each Margaret Explosion show is different but we’ve been closing in on this melody for the last few weeks. You’ll hear it stated here about a minute and a half into this song from last week’s performance. The bass clarinet plays variations on the theme and the guitar beautifully crystallizes it while the double bass carries the tune. The band is on a roll, as usually happens at the end of a string of shows. We hope you can stop out tonight for our last show in the Little Theater Café until Fall.
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John Gilmore called us yesterday just to tell us he had driven by an inflated “God Bless America” lawn ornament like one of those Santas you see at Christmas time. The words were written on a great big American Flag.
We speculated on just how patriotic God is? Does he/she/it have a soft spot for America? The message is exclusionary and I’m guessing that is the whole point. We are superior. Asking God to bless the world would be just as exclusionary and asking god to bless the universe that he/she/it supposedly created would be plain silly.
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Magnolias are much nicer to look at than political signs. Besides our sign is gone and I never got a photo of it.
Gary Pudup, former Monroe County Sheriff, head of the local ACLU and long time Margaret Explosion fan is running for state assembly in Greece and he has taken a stance on New York’s Safe act. He asked if we would put sign on our lawn and we did but I warned him it would probably be stolen. We live on a dead end but our property meets a busier road down back so we put it there. A little further down this road there are two “Repeal NYS Safe Act” signs in front of houses and I didn’t think those people would tolerate an opposing view. I’m not saying one of those two stole the sign and I certainly don’t want to start something with a gun owner but I’ve been thinking about alternate signage.
Something simple but with a different tact like, “MORE GUNS,” or “BIGGER GUNS,” or “GUN NUTS!”
A few years ago I recounted the story about my mom making a peace flag that got stolen.
My friend, who lived down the street, was in Viet Nam dropping Agent Orange out of a helicopter on anything that moved when my mom made a peace flag. She sewed it! It was a white cloth peace sign on a sky blue piece of material. I remember it being beautiful. We flew it on the flag pole out in front of our house and this friend’s mom got all bent out of shape about it. I remember her calling our house and screaming over the phone while my mom made a rational appeal to her. “Surely you want peace too”, I remember her saying, but the argument continued. This neighbor thought it was flat out wrong to fly something like that while her son was fighting for our country. He was only in the army because he flunked out of Bonaventure and got drafted.
I was so proud of my mom but the thing is a lot of people felt like this neighbor at that time so it was a bit of a mystery when the flag was stolen a few weeks later. “Who stole the peace flag?” became the family’s obsession as we weighed the suspicion level of each neighbor on the street. We found out months later that it was the younger brother of the guy who was in Viet Nam. I’ll bet the guys over there were real happy there were people back home working against peace.
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We’ve been gearing up for the World Cup for four years now. Once the US gets knocked out of their really tough preliminary round we’ll be rooting (in America it means cheering, in Australia it means fucking) for Spain again and yesterday’s match, the Champion’s League Final, was the perfect opportunity to wear the national colors. For the first time ever the two finalists were from the same city, Madrid.
Why a big game like this, the culmination of inter league playoffs between all of Europe’s pro teams, the best players in the world, was so hard to find on tv in the US is a mystery to me. Last year 360 million watched the game. We emailed Matthew for help and he invited us over to their place to watch the game. He streamed a subscription feed from his laptop to the big screen. I’m afraid I wasn’t very sociable for 90 minutes and stoppage time, of course, where Real, clearly the better team here, tied the match in the final minutes and then those two grueling overtime periods where Real walked way with it. We were rooting for Ateletico but it is still a victory for Spain.
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After a busy day I was ready to fall asleep to a good movie on Friday night but instead I got all antsy. “The Last Ride,” supposedly about the last few hours of Hank Williams’ life, was making me anxious and it had nothing to do with Hank’s plight. First of all, why were all his songs sung by somebody else in the movie? I’m guessing his estate got wind of this turkey and said, “forget it.” Hank was surely more complicated and interesting than the one dimensional Jessie James version. We have no idea how this damn thing wound up in our Netflix queue.
On the other hand, an email from Duane with a short rant about a bad day noted how he washed it all away with the fabulous “Beware of Mr. Baker,” a documentary about and with the great drummer Ginger Baker. OK, he’s a flawed character. Give the guy a break. He is a mind blowing drummer. Isn’t that enough?
Dave Mahoney and I hitchhiked down to NYC to see Blind Faith at Madison Square Garden and the crowd left their seats and we all got as close to the stage as possible when Ginger cut loose. This is primal stuff and this movie gets at the magic. Watch closely as he cries while talking about Max Roach, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones. Watch him smile sweetly while playing drums with Fela Kuti.
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I’m happy to report that this Magnolia Warbler shook off its collision with our window and flew away shortly after I took this picture. I hope there was no lasting damage.
I was knocked out once by three fraternity guys. I was a freshman at Indiana sitting on a stone wall near the street waiting for my friends to come home. I had sort of long hair at the time and a car drove by and someone yelled “faggot.” I flipped them the bird. They circled the block, stopped the car and three guys in blue windbreakers with yellow Greek letters on the front came at me. I got a few punches in but these guys were swinging like they wanted to kill me. I came to with my face planted in the sidewalk. My nose was broken and my jaw was dislocated. And my glasses were completely smashed.
I was in the charcoal section of Rochester Art Supply this afternoon when Sally Wood Winslow walked by with her RAS bucket. She and a few other employees fill the buckets with Amazon orders for virtual customers. Peggi was in the next aisle picking out a tube of watercolor and I heard her talking to someone. Turned out to be Jim Mott buying small canvases for paintings he’s doing of the migrating Warblers.
Joe Monacelli Snell works there as well and we said hi. We were just at his mom’s funeral on Tuesday. Pete and Gloria Monacelli have organized a benefit (six kids, no mom.) Six bands play and there’s lot’s of art for sale with all proceeds going to the family. This Sunday at Hochstein School of Music 6-10PM. Margaret Explosion starts at 8.
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They painted the walls in our Creative Workshop room. I’m not crazy about the yellow tint but it does set the unframed drawings off. The drawings I bring to or do in Fred Lipp’s class are not done until Fred says they are done. Fred often tells the story of a student who titled his finished painting “Done.” These three were pronounced “done” last night.
Margaret Explosion plays tonight at the Little Theater.
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Someday the artist statement, the placards, the descriptions of the process, the photos of the artist and the back story will be a bigger percentage of the show than the work. Art educators and museum directors, responsible for the turnstile head count, are getting more aggressive. One way to work around this studied presentation is to start the show at the exit. This view knocked me out.
When Matisse’s artwork is in the house just get out of the way. The drawing, his life’s work, speaks for itself. Watch Matisse capture and portray form in an ever more essential, direct and wildly expressive display. “Matisse As Printmaker,” currently on view at the MAG, is a pure delight.
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