Jeff Koons makes perfect sense in LA. and his sculpture of Michael Jackson with his pet monkey Bubbles, is over the top.
2 CommentsOver The Top
Civilization
Los Indignados in the Puerto del Sol decided last night to extend their protest for “democracia real.” I’m all for it but it seems like heaven to me. People out strolling not trapped in their cars. Couples, families, old people. Window shopping, talking, eating, smoking and drinking.
The coffee ritual (small plate, spoon, a bag of sugar and expertly frothed cafe con leche) puts everything right with the world. I’ll never forget being scolded for not saying “Buenos dias” immediately on entering a cafe on our first visit. Coffee shops turn seamlessly into “Menu del Dia” restaurants and then tapas bars often doing triple duty throughout the day. Food on display everywhere. No barriers to enjoyment. Spain is the perfect host or at least it seems that way to us.
Leave a commentEl Barca!
Barcelona meets Manchester United in Wembley Stadium for the European Champions Final in fifteen minutes. I had hoped to be sitting comfortably in a Madrid bar screaming at the telly but instead I’m crammed into a British Airways plane sitting on the runway at Heathrow.
Air Canada’s evening Toronto flight out of Rochester runs late regularly. Two hours is enough to set your whole itinerary back. It gave us plenty of time to play in the Richard Serra sculpture in the Toronto airport.
Leave a commentEntering The Kingdom
We approached Pete and Shelley’s mountain kingdom by sea on the Port Henry ferry that is temporarily replacing the Crown Point bridge which is currently being rebuilt. Lake Champlain separates the two states but there is a whole lot more at play. We spent some time looking at the New York mountains from the Vermont side and then the snow capped Vermont peaks from the New York side and we couldn’t quite put our finger on the difference in the two states. It is mostly perception but that is a lot.
There was so much snow up there we kept skiing into three feet of powder and getting so bogged down that we were tempted to take our skis off but we knew full well that would be the last anyone would see of us. We sat around the stove enough to learn what a condition called “Granny’s Tartan” is all about.
We came home without driving on the Northway or the New York State Thruway proving the adage that it is not the destination but the journey. We whizzed by a sign that read “Highway Hair Cuts”, hand painted in all caps. I pictured a brush cut with a flat top.
Rick Simpson played Pete LaBonne‘s “We Live Like Kings” on his radio show last week. I plan to request it this week.
Trouble Comin’ Every Day
Gary and Kathy come see Margaret Explosion quite a bit and they were telling us how much they like Vergennes. Gary called it “the smallest city in the US.” But the sign on the way into town read, “The Smallest City in Vermont.” All we knew about Vergennes was that Ted and Janet Williams used live in a museum there. They were the caretakers and Ted was the editor of the newspaper there, the oldest in the US until it folded. We asked around but couldn’t find the museum. We spotted a few posters for Chad and Jeremy who were playing that night at the Vergennes Opera House (which also doubles as the Vergennes Town Hall).
We had a delicious dinner at the Black Sheep Bistro. We couldn’t get in until eight at night because the place was booked. People drive down from Burlington to eat here and they are celebrating their tenth year so you know they are doing things right. The salads are incredibly crisp and distinctive. The walls are covered salon style with old drawings and prints. We sat near a Daumier. I had the vegetarian lasagna which had no pasta but held together like Mama Tacones.
The next morning we stopped in the Vergenes Laundry, a stylish bakery with white walls, steamy windows, rocket fuel espresso, wifi and some delicious bread. We drove up to Burlington and walked up and down the pedestrian friendly Church Street. Pretty idyllic up there overlooking Lake Champlain. They pipe soft classical music onto the street but this morning it was interrupted by some students cranking The Mothers’ “Trouble Coming Every Day.” It occurred to us that we had forgotten to feed the meter so we ran back to the car and got out of town.
1 CommentLoons
Peggi and I jumped at the the chance to slip into the void and spend a few days in the mountains at a cabin with a stuffed moose head, a whole stuffed mountain lion, a stuffed snapping turtle and something that looked like a stuffed crow. Actually those animals were all in my sister’s cottage. We were staying in the knotty pine lined cabin next door along with my parents. We threw the contents of our refrigerator into a cooler and split right after our noon phone conference on Tuesday.
We climbed Castle Rock trail near Indian Lake on Wednesday, went kayaking and sat around the fire at night. My father bought a bird app for his iPad and my brother-in-law hooked it up to his iPod speakers so my father could play loon sounds to answer the real loon that was calling from the woods. They got an interesting dialog going but our nephew said the other voice may have just been another guy on his iPad.
On Thursday we drove an hour north up to Pete and Shelley’s place in the Adirondacks. We got trapped between a Whiteman camper with a Marines sticker on it and a drunk delivery truck driver who kept crossing the yellow line in our rear view mirror. We surprised Pete and Shelley and took a hike across the marsh and up the hills out back. Shelley took us to a wild strawberry patch. At about one tenth the size of farm raised they have an delicious, intense flavor. She pointed out a deadly “Death Cap” mushroom and some golden Chantrells that she was planning to pick when they got a little bigger. On the way back to Rochester we listened to the Brazil game as they lost to the Netherlands.
Leave a commentTranscendental Landscapes
There are only two days left to see the Charles Burchfield Watercolor Show in Buffalo. The show was put together by the Hammer Museum at UCLA and it travels to New York next but seeing it in in Buffalo, where Burchfield worked as a wallpaper designer (his “hack” job), is a special treat. Burchfield paints “the healthy glamour of everyday life.” Passages from his journals accompany each of the paintings. He was a marvelous painter and writer. The show includes his compulsive doodles, a notebook of drawings called “Conventions for Abstract Thoughts” and rooms full of his transcendental landscapes. My favorite painting was of an oak leaf in his neighbors snow coverd front lawn, “The Constant Leaf.”
The Burchfield Penny Museum here, across the street from the Albright Knox, is brand new building. Their state of art men’s room use Sloan Technology on their “zero-water consumption urinals”. Thank god the water fountains were not similarly equipped.
A trip to Buffalo would not be complete without a visit with Mark from PosterArt. We started talking about the old days and he went in the back room and returned with a stack of “Closet Punk Productions” posters that he designed when he was booking bands at the Continental. A lot of them had dates one day earlier or later than the posters on the Scorgies website.
Mark recommended Coles, down the street on Elmwood for something to eat. This place has been around since the thirties and the outdoor tables were the perfect perch for taking in the Buffalo vibe. “Anarchy in the UK” was playing on the sound system as we sat down. Back on the thruway, pointed at Rochester, the trees looked Burchfield trees.
2 CommentsCross Country Slackers
Would love to be in San Francisco for the opening of the Luc Tuymans show. They showed a few luscious paintings of his (one of a gas chamber) in a review in Sunday’s Times. But I’m not complaining. We have wifi access at the Lake Side Motel in Lake Placid New York and the Saints are winning. Kind of funny that the town of Lake Placid is not on Lake Placid. It’s on Mirror Lake. Lake Placid, the lake, is next door. The Olympics were held here in 1980 and some members of the US team are training here now. It’s fourteen degrees outside and they have real snow here unlike Vancouver.
We skied in the woods for a while this afternoon and then skied out on Mirror Lake at sunset before settling in at the bar for a local brew and the pregame show. Every other vehicle on the way up here was towing a trailer with a couple of sleds and we spotted snowmobiles darting across the road everywhere. If snowmobiling is a sport it has to be the most popular one up here. We had dinner with a bunch of Canadians downhill skiers. They kept slipping into French so we couldn’t understand what they were saying. They are going to be out on the slopes at 8 in the morning. They made us cross country skiers feel like slackers.
Our motel overlooks the lake and has some pretty cool artwork in the halls (above). We plan to head over to Pete and Shelley‘s neck of the woods tomorrow where we’ll celebrate a significant birthday for Peggi.
4 CommentsInstant Agenda
We got out of town ahead just ahead of the other day and drove to my brother’s place in Montclair, New Jersey. We kept his kids up way too late, talking and listening to Christmas records from his vinyl collection. We had breakfast with the kids, who were already late for school, and said goodbye to my brother as he raced off to work. The last thing he said was, “I left part of the paper here for you”. So I dove into the Friday’s Fine Arts section and spotted a Philip Guston painting with a review by Roberta Smith of a show at Midtown’s McKee Gallery. We instantly had an agenda for our New York trip.
We found our way to Brooklyn and parked the car for the weekend near Duane’s apartment. More coffee and the F train to midtown Manhattan for this eye popping show. Philip Guston is my favorite artist and these small panels blew me away. This was a sensational show. Only four of these pieces were for sale. You could pick up all four for 1.3 million.
Even the Metropolitan Museum could not top that show but Robert Frank’s “The Americans” was pretty incredible. The prints were so much richer than the old book I bought at Light Impressions when they upstairs in Midtown Plaza. It was like seeing these by now familiar photos for the first time. We had an eggplant sandwich and a corn muffin at the museum café and then Duane and Peggi went up to see the “Velazquez Rediscovered” show while I wandered off to the Roman art section and to photograph some busts. I can’t get over how contemporary these heads look, like people you know or wish you knew, even though they were sculpted around the time of Christ.
Duane is the perfect NYC guide. He wears an orange hat and Peggi and I just shut off our navigational instincts and gawk and follow the hat and try not to walk into a light pole or something. We took a couple of trains back to Brooklyn and hung out for bit in pad before heading back out to the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg for an art opening. It was a “Multiples and Editions” show and the curator was a friend of Duanes. The thirty five artists all had small, very reasonably priced (for the holidays) art in every nook and cranny of the two funky rooms. Duane bought a pocket sized “Kodak Guide to Photographing Your Dog“.
After the opening we went next door to the Flying Cow, a saloon style Argentinean restaurant. We shared octopus salad and then a beet salad, a bottle of Spanish Rioja and two vegetarian dishes called, “Shangrila”. I spoiled a perfect meal by trying a Morcilla sausage appetizer. I’m a sucker for those Spanish delicacies. The bartender played the whole “Between The Buttons” record and then some Neil Young. We complimented him on the way out.
Leave a commentExactly
Man From Uncle
One too many bar mitzvahs.
It was smooth sailing through the Poconos and on to Route 280 but then it all went wrong. We zoomed by our exit and saw signs for Newark so we got off and tried to turn around. We got back on but it was the wrong highway and we found ourselves heading north on I-95. The Manhatten skyline was receding behind us. We paid a toll and did a u-turn back through the Oranges and into Montclair just in time to drop our bags off at Dale (New Math) and Myrna’s (Human Switchboard) and get to the temple for a run though of the Hebrew chants. Except the cantor canceled the rehearsal because of a personal conflict so we returned to Dale’s and watched a black and white “Man From Uncle” show..
We did the service without rehearsal so I was on the Bima looking for the groove with a guitar player and the chanting cantor. Two kids were making their bar mitzvah today and there were about three hundred people here. The stained glass looked like it had been designed by a madman but my drum sounded great in the room. The young cantor was attending to her boisterous child while she waited for her partner to show up and she encouraged me to not be shy. She MC’d and juggled her parental duties while effortlessly leading us in ancient sounding songs like “Ma Tovu”, “Adon Olam”, “Kiibud Av Vahem” and “Tav L”hodot”.
The regular service ended and the bar mitzvah portion started. Our nephew offered a few possibilities for the meaning of the name of their temple as his bar mitzvah project. It translates as “Eternal Flame” and he made a good argument for taking on the responsibility of keeping it alight.
His parents got up and told a few stories about their son. I kept thinking of the scene in King of Comedy” where Rupert Pupkin listens to his grade school teacher toast him. Overall the ceremony was lackluster and fidgety with bursts of meaningfulnes. The party afterward was a blast. The kids had fun and we had fun watching the kids. My family chipped in to buy our nephew a Kindle.
Leave a commentFilthy Turd
Somebody told me you’re not supposed to take photos in New York City’s subways but I do it anyway. Hey, I’m from out of town. Peggi and I really liked Buffalo “66 with Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Anjelica Huston, Mickey Rourke and Buffalo’s own Vincent Gallo (on right above). We made a mental note to put this on our Netflix list.
1 CommentMagic Carpet
I’m sitting over at Jerome’s Ignition while Igor looks at our car. It’s been making a clunking noise in the front end. This is already sounding like a Click and Clack episode. We are planning to drive to New York soon to see the Marlene Dumas show at the Modern and we are a little concerned about the thump. Igor didn’t see anything so he took it for a spin. When he got back he noticed that the lug nuts on our left front tire were loose. These guys are the best in the world. If only they had a wireless connection here.
I didn’t sleep very well last night and while I was awake I started worrying about my opening tomorrow night. Somebody was saying if I call it an “opening” that would not imply free food but if I call it an “opening reception” that would imply free food. I put “opening reception” on the post card so I stand to look like a cheapskate. I don’t really understand all the protocol of openings and what little I do understand I resist. For instance I can’t bring my own food or beverages in there because that’s their (not for profit) business. I could buy food from them and serve that for free but that’s part I don’t get.
Painting class started up again at the Creative Workshop and my father did some quick watercolor sketches from photos he took on Sunday night of Margaret Explosion on WXXI’s “OnStage”. I took this photo over his shoulder. I’m not sure that he spelled “Margaret ” right but I like the magic carpet under us.
3 CommentsBowl of Cherries
If NetFlix can have an outage, I can.
We had dinner with Alice and Julio on and learned that Alice was geared up to paint but was having too much fun in the garden to get to it yet. Dinner conversation led to a topic that required the assistance of our laptop. And of course that led to other online topics. Julio had me type in their address on Google maps and we looked at a street view of their house. Alice led me down their street with the little arrows and we turned the corner to find two people walking on the sidewalk in front of a neighbor’s house. It was Alice and Julio out for a walk last summer.
Saturday morning we were reading on our deck, eating cherries and delaying the day’s planned activity, power washing the house. I came in to check email and there was one from Jeff Munson telling us that he had just talked Mary Kaye into driving down to Pike at the bottom of the state for the last day of the Wyoming County Fair. He asked if we wanted to ride along with them. I emailed back that we were on.
We had hoped to see the prize winning animals, our favorite part, but they were mostly all headed home after spending the week at the fairgrounds. We did see some goats, pigs and cows. This is the heart of New York farm country and there were a lot of vendors selling wood stoves, cow milking machines, four wheel drive vehicles, dirt bikes, big farm equipment,huge tractors and “The World’s Fastest Lawnmower”.
We saw women in period dress weaving on old looms and baking in brick ovens. We walked around the midway and rode on the Ferris wheel. A lot of people were wearing t-shirts that made statements like, “I Won’t Lower My Standards To Raise Yours”. And one guy had a red t-shirt on that asked a question that puzzled me at first? “Does This Match My Neck?” Peggi explained it.
We felt like we had done it all and were set to leave when tractor pull satrted. It was ten bucks to get in and we didn’t even know what it was but we went for it. That’s another story. I grabbed a few photos and will sort them out.
On Sunday we borrowed our neighbor’s power washer and hooked the gasoline fired machine up to our garden hose to blast our house clean. It’s now ready to paint. Rick and Monica were doing yard work as well and they invited us over for dinner. We ate on their back porch and then watched Hellboy from Netflix. I fell asleep.
More photos from the Wyoming County Fair
Leave a commentThis American House
We walked around Cranbrook Academy on Saturday where the Head of the Architectural Department, William Massie, has constructed his “American House” on the grounds. I thought it was really beautiful but I was certain it was something from the nineteen sixties. It’s not. The Detroit News did a video tour of the place.
Leave a comment33 Feet Taller Than Niagara Falls
We usually drive to Ithaca by going through Arthur Dove’s home town, Geneva, at the top of Seneca Lake and then cutting diagonally across to Rod Serling’s summer hometown at the bottom of Cayuga Lake. This time we drove down the east side of Cayuga for a change and stopped in Aurora to check in on the place after reading about it in the Times. Wells College just went coed and a 1962 graduate of that school, who made some money when she sold her American Girl doll and book company to Mattel, has been refurbishing the college and town. It is a pretty little town. We stopped at an art gallery but they were closed for New Year’s Eve.
Our first stop in Ithaca was the bookstore on the Commons. We have been here may times over the years but this will be our last visit. They are moving to NYC and they were having a 50% off sale on everything. I bought Marsden Hartley’s autobiography, a book of Rembrandt drawings, a 1931 book about Daumier (I was so taken by the drawings that I didn’t realize it was in German until I got it home) and a book called a “A Day With Picasso” with photographs by Jean Cocteau. All for about twenty bucks.
We walked around town and bought a few things at a natural foods store and then drove to a bed and breakfast near Taughannock Falls. We had a great meal in the Inn. I had portobello mushrooms and cheese infused pasta and Peggi had duck. We took a jacuzzi and slept in a king size bed. We turned the tv on around midnight and wished we hadn’t after seeing Dick Clark, Carrie Underwood and the Jonas Brothers. The show creeped us out before they dropped the eco-friendly ball.
We set the alarm to get up in time for a continental breakfast and we took a walk in the State Park next door. We hiked up the gorge to the falls which we read are 33 feet taller than Niagara Falls. We drove back through Middlesex (I love that name) and Lodi while skirting the Willard Facility for the Criminally Insane. We stopped by the side of the road to photograph some white deer on the former Seneca Army Depot grounds and talked about stopping for coffee as we drove though town after town with everything closed for the holiday. We finally found a suitable shop open and drank Ethiopian coffee by their fireplace.
When we got near Pittsford, we stopped to say hi to Peggi’s mom and she had the Buffalo Sabres outdoor hockey game on the Bills’ football field on so we watched a few periods of play. We left when it was tied but heard that Buffalo lost in overtime.
Leave a commentStumble On
I use Safari as my primary browser but I switch to Firefox when the javascript acts up. Today I found an add-on for Firefox called “Stumble!” and there went my allotment of spare time. It is a genome project like “Pandora” where you submit to a brief profile and then surf with the Stumble button as your control. I found all sorts of interesting sites and have started building my own list of favorites.
I started looking at my photos from LA. I like the SCN mode on my Sony Cybershot camera. It keeps the lens open as long as it takes to grab a shot in low light. You need something solid to put the camera on and a relatively still subject.
Leave a commentDangerous Curves
LAX had free wireless access but we didn’t have any time to kill. We were ten minutes into our trip to the airport when Peggi realized that she had forgotten her jacket with her house keys and drivers license in the pocket. So we waited by the side of the road for our brother-in-law to speed the jacket to us.
Now in Chicago I have the option of joining the Boingo Wireless network here for $6.95. Forget about that. I’m not that wired. We are traveling with my mother-in-law and she did some sort of frequent flier upgrade with the tickets so we sat up with the fat cats in first class. Plenty of legroom, free drinks and and a hot meal. There is a thriving class distinction in this country. We read the NYT and I dove back into “On Photography.” I am really enjoying Sontag. “Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans — the used things, warm with generations of human touch. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A feather weight portable museum.” That from 1977 and “photography itself increasingly reflects the prestige of the rough, the self-disparaging, the offhand, the undisciplined — the “anti-photograph.”
This will be a nice addition to the Funky Signs section on the Refrigerator. This car looks like it is built to handle the curves in the Hollywood Hills.
Forecast: Haze
We checked the LA weather online before leaving Rochester and it said, “Haze.” We woke this morning to news that the Santa Ana winds were responsible for new fires in Malibu last night. We took a long walk in the hills across Beverly Glen canyon from where we were staying. Walked by Rod Stewart’s house, Frank’s former pad and Barbra’s palace and then climbed the hills to 10050 Cielo Drive where the Tate LaBianca murders happened in 1969.
Smoke from the fires in Malibu drifted through the canyons in LA this morning. This is how it looked out our bedroom window.
We are having dinner at the Getty with my in-laws. There is a traveling Weston photography show there, two outstanding Rembrandts and a beautiful Goya bullfight painting. We’ve been here before. We’ll be up there for the hazy sunset too.
Leave a commentOrange County
We watched Orange County last night with Jack Black, Catherine O’Hara and Colin Hanks as family and Schuyler Fisk as the girlfriend. The tagline for the 2002 movie is, “It’s not just a place. It’s a state of mind” and sure enough this film could have taken place anywhere. It is a very entertaining slice of life. Five stars. Perfect fair for a family gathering. My wife’s mom was the only one not laughing. We took a 4 mile walk in the Will Rogers State Historic Park. It was a beautiful day for a walk but I think it’s always a beautiful day in California so that’s not saying much.
Will Rogers Park looks like all scrub brush but there are some beautiful trails that hug the hillsides and keep you out of the blazing sun.
Our nephew, Andrew, asked if we wanted to go the the Hammer Museum on the UCLA campus. We saw a show of Francis Alys’ work—mostly video installations of his performance art called, “The Politics of Rehearsal.” An old red VW bug tries to drive to the top of a steep, dusty hill in Tijuana only to roll back and try again while a band stops and restarts a song. A stripper continually removes her clothes and puts them back on while Alys is heard off camera discussing Mexican politics. And in a collaboration with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Alys uses rehearsal footage from a scene in Inarritu’s film, Amores Perros, along with outtakes, alternate camera shots and the final take to again illustrate his zen-like idea of enjoying the ride and the opportunities for renewal instead of focusing on closure.
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