Meatpacking District

View of Matadero in Madrid at night
View of Matadero in Madrid at night

Spain was a special place for Hemingway. Many bars in the old section of Madrid claim that he hung out there. El Matadero, the former slaughterhouse where the bullfighting-obsessed Hemingway liked to watch matadors practice killing bulls and the old women drink the blood of the freshly slaughtered cattle, has been transformed into a Dia Beacon/Mass MoCA like space for art installations, theater, dining or just strolling. Free admission. The government here does things like that. They have a Minister of Culture.

It was dark before we left and of course the lights came on, but with some simple thought the red brick slaughterhouse was bathed in red flood lights and the bare trees in front were lit with white. A display worthy of Duane Sherwood’s work with New Math and Personal Effects.

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Moderismo

View of Gran Via from Círculo de Bellas Arte building in Madrid
View of Gran Via from Círculo de Bellas Arte building in Madrid

At the end of every Breaking Bad episode they showed a quick shot of Gran Via in Madrid, the namesake of the show’s production company. The dramatic, round Metropolis and Rolex buildings look fantastic from the street but for three Euros you can take take an elevator to the top of the nearby Círculo de Bellas Arte building and get a sensational 360 of Madrid with the white snow capped mountains in the distance. Best tres Euros you’ll ever spend.

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Viva Lorca!

Lorca performers in a Madrid bookshop near Plaza Santa Ana
Lorca performers in a Madrid bookshop near Plaza Santa Ana

As sub culture/high culture hops go this is as deep as it gets. Thank God Federico Garcia Lorca is still revered by some. A cool bookstore near Plaza Santa Ana called Sin Tarima Libros (with a choice selection of vinyl record reissues including Bill Evans “Waltz for Debby”) that we had stopped into twice already was having a performance of Lorca poetry accompanied by a flamenco guitarist.

We reserved a spot and showed up as prompted fifteen minutes before 20:00. We were the only Americanos in the crowd of eighteen or so and were introduced as such at the conclusion of the performance. I didn’t understand a word of it but it was unbelievable.

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Lollipops

Trees in Donana National Park in Madrid
Trees in Donana National Park in Madrid

Philip Guston was really taken by the shapes of the trees in Rome. He was invited to teach there and did a series of paintings generally referred to as the Roma Series. These trees, also in Spain and in Doñana National Park, are seductively shaped. They contrast perfectly with the tall pointed cypress trees that are everywhere.

The public service workers trim the trees that line the streets in a severe manner. At this time of year, before most of the trees have bloomed, you wonder if they could ever bloom again. The orange trees in the south, which are already blooming, look like lollipops but are cut flat on the bottom at about my height.

Further reading (en ingles)

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Exposición

View of and from Parador at Arcos de la Frontera
View of and from Parador at Arcos de la Frontera

We came to Spain without a solid agenda. We thought it might be nice to go to the south where it is quite a bit warmer and off season as well. We talked of crossing the border into Portugal but every time we checked the weather in Tavira it was raining and we talked of renting a car but we never got around to that. So we took an autobús out into the country and up into the hills where we have pretty much sat and walked in circles, enjoying the ambiance immensely. Roosters are crowing outside and the view from the top of Arcos de la Frontera is not bad at all.

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Petting Zoo

Wild boar and deer in Doñana Wildlife Preserve
Wild boar and deer in Doñana Wildlife Preserve

We weren’t sure what sherry was so we did a wiki search for it and found that it is a drink developed by the Phoenicians in 800 BC, fortified new wine, and it is a anglicized mispronunciation of “Jerez,” the town we were in. Jerez de la Frontera is in the southwestern part of Spain near Portugal where they make their proprietary “port,” which is pretty much the same thing as sherry, I think.

Jerez is strangely hard to pronounce. The “J” is like an “h” and the accent is on the second syllable and the “z” at the end sounds more like a soft “th” and trails off as soon as it starts. From here we took a half hour bus ride to Sanlucar de Barrameda on the Atantic shore. We wanted to see the national forest and nature preserve down here called Doñana. We spotted a wild boar and deer with great big web-like racks. I took this photo of them but they looked more spectacular through our guide’s binoculars.

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Myths Today

Mythological sculpture near train station in Jerez de la Frontera
Mythological sculpture near train station in Jerez de la Frontera

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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Service Cat

Service Dog paperwork
Service Dog paperwork

The hardest thing about leaving town or even thinking about leaving town is leaving your pet behind. This condition probably gets worse as you get older. I know I have a hard time falling asleep if our cat isn’t up on the bed. She is always up before us but she lets us sleep until we open our eyes. Once she senses we are awake she meows to be let out while I grab the paper and then she must be fed before I make the coffee we hear about it. I love this routine and I can’t help but think she would be upset if we weren’t here for it to unfold. It would be so much easier if we could travel with our cat.

We had dinner with a couple who were up from upstate (an hour north of the city) and they showed us the “Service Dog” get-up they purchased online. For a hundred and fifty bucks you get this dog vest with pockets for badges and official looking identification. They had just used the badges at a downtown hotel that was not dog friendly. In fact their dog was back in the hotel room while we were dining.

The front side of the card reads “In Accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990: This card identifies (so and so) as the rightful owner of the service dog named below” and to protect the company that prints these the the back side makes it clear that the card has nothing to with the Department of Justice.

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No Particular Place To Go

Gloden corn field in October
Gloden corn field in October

Any time is a good time to take a ride in the country but there is no better time than October. The hills are alive with color, the weather is warm enough to stop the car near a farmer’s field, a roadside stand or somewhere in a small town. Without the ferry our only option here is to head south and the Finger Lakes are somewhat of an obstacle for east/west travel so we often pick a lake and drive around it. But even that is really over planning.

It becomes pretty clear we have no idea what’s in our own backyard when you get down to Watkins Glen at the bottom of Seneca Lake. The tiny town is full of tourists from all over the world. We walked up the glen’s stream in the state park past waterfalls and 200-foot cliffs with an international crowd of smartphone photographers.

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Killer Salad

Cows in pasture with purple flowers
Cows in pasture with purple flowers

We opened a Google map of NYS this morning and zeroed in the the FingerLakes in the middle of the state. We wanted to take a day trip so we started with parks and forests looking for a hiking trail. We found a few spots we’ve heard about but weren’t familiar with like Harriet Holister and High Tor and the Finger Lakes National Forest. We settled on Watkins Glen State Park.

Next we looked for a restaurant in that area and found Suzanne’s Fine Regional Cuisine in wine country along Seneca Lake in Lodi. The place was fantastic. I may have had the best salad I have ever had in my life there and I told the chef (Suzanne) as much in the comment card that was included with our check. It was fresh greens from a farm in nearby Hector. Purslane was in there, the same weed that grows between the sidewalk slabs down at our pool, goat cheese, roasted beets and caramelized walnuts but the real kick was the dressing. They must have misted it on. It was so light and delicate.

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Empty Room

Robert Irwin installation at the Whitney
Robert Irwin installation at the Whitney

The title, “Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light (1977)” pretty much sums up the parts of Robert Irwin’s masterpiece which has been reinstalled at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art for their last go around before their facilities are swallowed up by the Metropolitan. Roberta Smith put all the parts together in her review of the show in Friday’s paper.

I’m thinking Robert Irwin must be about my height because the black line that forms the rectangle, which surrounds the room, lines up with the bottom, black border of the giant scrim so that you really don’t see it on the far wall. This served to disorient you with the simplest of means. Irwin maximizes the drama of the essentially empty room by animating the window from which the scrim departs.

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Day Trippin’ Yeah

Ben Shawn Mural at Syracuse University
Ben Shawn Mural at Syracuse University

We told a few people that we were going to Syracuse this weekend and two of them asked, “Why?” Hey, Lou Reed went to school here. There is a show at the Everson Museum, a modern painting show from the Brooklyn Museum, that got a great review from our painting teacher so we hopped on the thruway. We stopped at Starbucks for a cappuccino and the next thing you know we were looking at a field of RVs with their doors open, an RV Liquidation Sale at the State Fairgrounds in Syracuse. It was early afternoon but hundreds of SU kids were stumbling around town with red plastic cups of beer in their hands, celebrating something called “May Fest” on April 26th.

We stumbled onto a Ben Shahn mural that was done in small tiles in 1967 and based on the the “good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler,” Sacco and Vanzetti trail. Long before the OJ trial in an earlier wave of domestic terrorism, the 1920 murder of two payroll guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, became the trial of the century. A plot had been exposed in which thirty bombs, disguised as free samples from the Gimbels department store, were sent to such pillars of American capitalism as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. The plot failed due to lack of sufficient postage and in the resulting atmosphere of shock, fear, and repression, two working-class Italian Americans with anarchist connections, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco became scapegoats in the reaction to the supposed threat of the combined forces of labor unrest, new waves of immigration, and the advance of the “red menace” that followed the end of World War I.

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My Summer Vacation

REd barn near Pultneyville New York
REd barn near Pultneyville New York

We’re on Steve Greene’s mailing list and we learned that Steve’s band, The White Hots, was playing at a restaurant in Pultneyville, NY. In the email Steve said, “and the food’s good.” That stuck with me so when my father got out of the hospital we took a little drive out there. The hamlet is right on Lake Ontario so we took Lake Road out there with luxury homes on the lake side and orchards and farm land on the right hand side. It’s only a half hour ride but the countryside is so pretty you feel like you are vacation. The French traded with the Indians here in the 1600’s and the town was established in 1800 or so and they played a part in the War of 1812. We whizzed by the historical marker and I only caught the headline.

The closer we got, the more of these red stone foundations we saw. We stopped to photograph this one and speculated as to why the bigger stones were on the top. My mom thought maybe it was an addition. The restaurant is surrounded by marinas and we watched some big sail boats come in as we ate. Our friend, Jon, had taken us sailing here a few years ago. A small jazz band started playing as we were having coffee, small as in keyboards and drums. They were doing standards and the piano player played bass with his left hand. Barbara Fox was sitting at the next table over so we chatted for a bit. Peggi asked the waitress if there was a hotel in town. She said, “only one bed and breakfast.” My father wants to go back out there and paint some of the barns. We’re thinking about taking a vacation out there.

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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 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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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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Juggler

Juggler in streets of Barcelona, Spain
Juggler in streets of Barcelona, Spain

My punishment for going away is that I have to wade through and catalog all of the photos I took. We watched this guy for a while, waiting for the light to turn red and then darting out in front of the stopped cars to juggle for a minute and then hit the drivers up for money. Better than someone spitting on your windshield and then using a dirty rag to wipe it before accosting you for spare change.

Listen to Margaret Explosion “Juggler” with Jack Schaefer on bass clarinet

Margaret Explosion 45 RPM "Juggler/Purple Heart" (EAR 16) on Earring Records, released 2011 on black vinyl.
Margaret Explosion 45 RPM “Juggler/Purple Heart” (EAR 16) on Earring Records, released 2011 on black vinyl.
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Psicodèlico

Greenery with human touch in Girona Spain
Greenery with human touch in Girona Spain

The great Antoni Gaudí picked up what they were putting down in Barcelona and transformed the city and architecture worldwide. Pablo Picasso painted here for twenty years. Juan Joan Miró was born here and spent most of his life here. Dali lived and worked nearby. Surrealism, Modernismo or Moderisime in Catalan, Novcentisme, new century movement (last century change, not this one), Manzana de la Discordia or just plain Psicodèlico, Barcelona wears it well.

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LA SAD

Cyprus trees at sunset in LA
Cyprus trees at sunset in LA

We flew Delta but I’ll bet all airlines share a similar game plan in their race to the bottom. They took our bottled water at the gate and gave us a short lecture for having it in our bag. Bottled is $4.50 at the concession stand on the other side of the gate. There is a charge for the disposable headphones and the monitor on the back of the seat in front of us works fine when they’re showing you ads for Lincoln Continental and Coca Cola but you have to swipe your credit card for movies and special programing. The plane is equipped with WiFi but it costs $12.95 for the flight. We paid $31 for two sandwiches and a drink and they wouldn’t take cash. Tiny bags of salty peanuts are free, just like in bars where they want you buy more drinks, but on our flight the attendant announced “we were traveling with a passenger who is highly allergic to peanuts so in order to ensure that passenger has a safe trip we will not be serving peanuts.”

My nephew is considering a move to New York to continue making his top tier chef inroads. We asked if he could handle real weather and he said it was a concern. LA is unreal. You forget. My sister-in-law said, “If I lived in Seattle or a place like that I would kill myself.” That is SAD or seasonal affect disorder in a nutshell. I’m a minor key kinda guy so I don’t even notice when its cloudy. If fact I found it hard to take photos in LA because there is too damn much sun. You need a polarizing lens to minimize all that glare. My skin gets so dry out here that my feet pop open and wearing a hat and all that sun screen in eighty degree weather is whacky. But I do love LA and I was sad to leave.

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