Category: Lopsided Observations

Brexit was all anyone wanted to talk about today. That and the hit their stocks took. Texit is next. It’s also the first day of Jazz Fest in Rochester, a perfect day for my camera to go on the fritz. Maybe it’s time to end my obsessive documentation of the acts we catch.

I hate everything about airports, the security, the expensive water, the waiting and mostly, the people. No one is at their best in this situation but these places seem to attract creeps. This guy was sitting behind me and I snuck a few photos of the back of his head.

Spain had possession in the seventy percent range for most of yesterday’s Euro Cup match with the Czech Republic and yet they couldn’t get through the final third to the net until the final minutes. Most of the match was played in that zone, lateral passes that were beautifully executed, back and forth until Iniesta poked one through. Some players are smarter than others. They are always in the right place even when they don’t have the ball and they always know where everyone else is when they do get the ball. Iniesta is brilliant at this and a joy to watch.

My father was scheduled to do a repeat of his presentation on Edmunds Woods on Saturday afternoon. The Brighton town historian filled in for him and she talked over my father’s slideshow. It was a small crowd that gathered in the park shelter next to the woods but it was a giant reminder of my father’s former presence. He had mapped the wildflowers, the trees and the wildlife of the this tiny bit of remaining old growth woods. He began calling it “Edmunds Woods” after the family that worked the near farm and we hear the town is planning to officially designate it so.

I hadn’t had an IPA in a while so I ordered one when sat down in the Uptown Brasserie at JFK but they were out of the Goose Island so I went with a Stella Artois, something that tasted exactly like the Spanish beers we had been drinking for the last few weeks. We sat near the window and had an ocean view. They were playing jazz on the sound system, Chet Baker, Duke Ellington and piano standards. We found an oasis on our way back to Rochester.

Back home we were stunned by how green everything was. Not just green but lush and overgrown. Pink Rhododendrons in full bloom. And it’s now impossible to see our neighbors through the backyard trees. If I could walk like a normal person I would be out in the woods with my tick-guard on.

Our map app delivers surprising results in Madrid. When we plot routes between places the times via “auto” are longer than those via “walk.” Madrid, in the old part, is that kind of city.

The streets of Madrid were empty last night. The bars were full. Atlético was playing Real in the European club championship. We sided with Atlético but the match could not be settled in overtime and went to Real Madrid with penalty kicks. Ronaldo struck the decisive blow and the streets erupted.

Are we supposed to be dumbfounded? Peggi and I were going to school in Indiana when Bobby Knight was in his prime. It only figures that guy could do Trump some good. And how about this first family? I find them far more interesting than the Kardashians.

I went out on a limb back in ’08 but I’ve pretty much stayed away from politics here. I will say we have watched almost all the debates. Some were a lot better than others. I fell asleep in the Clinton Bernie bash last night. We haven’t gone out to see any of the candidates in person. Cruz is here today but that wouldn’t be much fun. There’s a green house around the corner that has been flying a yellow snake flag for the last few years and his neighbor just put up up a small homemade sign that reads, “Billionaires Can’t Buy Bernie.” He put it right on the edge of his property line and faced it not out at the street but toward his neighbor. New York is in play for the first time in a long time and we are having fun with it so far.

There is an old horse path that runs through the undeveloped part of Durand Eastman Park. It’s a beautiful trail that hardly gets any use although it did get a lot of attention when Bulldozer Man drove part of the trail with his earthmoving moving equipment about five or six years ago. Not a park employee or anything, just a private citizen, he atempted to clear the trial again for horseback riding. Some alert woods-walkers notified Larry Staub, the director of the Monroe County Park system. At one point this path skirts a cluster of homes and this statue stands behind a house at the edge of the woods. The base rotted out and he was laying down for a while. I probably have a picture of that on this blog somewhere. I keep track of that sort of thing.

We always had a statue of Saint Francis in the house when I was growing up and I have one today near my desk. My youngest brother youngest brother was named after him. The Paton Saint of animals and the environment, he is one of the church’s favorite saints and is usually pictured in a brown robe, sandals and a rope belt with birds on his shoulder. Born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, he is the patron saint of Italy. He is reported to have received the stigmata during the apparition of Seraphic angels in a religious ecstasy making him the first recorded person to bear the wounds of Christ’s Passion.

Peggi took the survey and then I tried but the SurveyMonkey software told me I had already taken the survey. One to an ip address. So we went to the meeting at the town hall tonight expecting a crowd as big as the coyote meeting but it wasn’t even close. Instead of a simple, straight-forward plan to lay down bike only lanes on the main thoroughfares of Irondequoit (Titus, Culver, Hudson, Goodman, Portland, Saint Paul) we found charts and maps and big print-outs of photos of certain intersections all laid out on tables. It felt like a grade school presentation.

And when we pushed the issue, striped, bike-only lanes on these main thoroughfares, with any the attendants they told us the county is in charge of the main roads in the town. The town is simply repaving the roads and then re-striping them, not reconfiguring the size or shape. The county has has stats on the numbers of vehicles and the geometry of the intersections and they configure the lanes at intersections based on that. We learned the town was only collecting data. A few bike riders will need to die before get bike only lanes.

Preferring to see the hand of the artist I especially liked seeing Jill Gussow’s current show at MCC’s Mercer Gallery, “Antidotes and Such.” She has hand sewn every object in the show. Some are clearly faces but other, unidentifiable objects feel familiar and ancient at the same time like the handiwork of a lost tribe. Equally playful and pretty, hand stitched and cut like Mexican molas with embroidery. This show is a delight.

We’re lining up our route for First Friday tonight. I know we will start with Peter Monacelli’s show at Warren Philip’s Gallery and I’d like to see Lin Price‘s paintings over at Axom, across from the strip club on Anderson Avenue. From there we will follow the wind.

The Hammer Museum on the UCLA campus can usually be counted on to deliver the goods. Their current show, “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” is made up of work from both students and teachers. The school in the Blue Ridge Mountains set the template for art schools today. Its first director was Josef Albers who had been educated in the Bauhaus School but was forced to flee the Nazis that same year. He came here with his wife, Annie, and she was a force of her own. Brice Marden has made a career of her work.

Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Rauschenberg, Ben Shahn, Ray Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Elaine and William de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Eric Satie, John Altoon and Robert Creeley all taught or were students here.

There was no house style, no uniform trend to art making here. Albers encouraged students to look longer, to see how something was made and to understand how visual information can be manipulated. Founded in the Depression and open through WWII the school had a Utopian culture of scarcity, an ethos of “making do.” I would enroll if it was still open. This show was the next best thing.

We used Uber for the first time to return to the canyon and hopped in my sister-in-law’s car for a drive to Venice in time to watch the sunset from our nephew’s office, the Swell headquarters. We had dinner at the “Tasting Kitchen” and walked the magical canals on the way home. Why do you think they call it Venice?

We were running out the door this morning, to meet with the lawyers that are handling my parents’ estate, and I had my jacket in my hand. I didn’t take the time to put it on in the house. I was too busy reading the paper. The zipper in my jacket got caught near the bottom of the door to our house and I couldn’t free it. I couldn’t open the door either and the key wouldn’t turn the lock. I tried ramming the door with my shoulder. That didn’t work either so we left. I had a hat on but no jacket in the middle of winter.

But that’s another thing. What kind of a winter is this? Imagine if you were on the high school cross-country ski team. They’ve had one week to ski. In that week I did notice that cross-country is a co-ed sport. I should have figured that out in high school.

We had lunch at Joe Bean. Ran into Fireball Jr. and Linda from Parkleigh. I was still running around without a coat. We stopped in to see my mom in her new digs and signed a contract for her room and board. When we got home I went down to Jared’s place and borrowed a pry bar to pop the door open and free my jacket.

In the dorms back at IU we used to “penny” people in their rooms. We’d lean on the closed door and push pennies into the space between the door and the door jam. Guys would be locked in for hours. Peggi and I were essentially pennied out of our house.

Gary Pudup, a former sheriff and head of the local ACLU chapter, is very active in New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. When he ran for office we tried to support him by posting a NYAGV sign on the road behind our house. Someone stole it in the first week. Gary lost his race but we are still friends. He and his wife come to every Margaret Explosion performance.

Last night the Little Theater screened “No Control,” a documentary about gun violence, and Gary brought in the head of the statewide group and a photo journalist for a discussion. Joe Quint’s photos were really powerful. “No Control,” the movie, was a little messy. They contrasted an anti-gun artist with a pro-gun, freedom loving, Cody Wilson, who was busted for making the downloadable plans for a 3D printer gun, “The Liberator.” I didn’t care for the artwork and was kind of drawn into Cody’s open source argument.

My father gave me a Kodak Instamatic in 1969. It was my first camera. Left to right, top to bottom, my mother, my brothers John and Fran, my friend Brad Fox, Joey Occhipinti with the soccer ball, another Occhipinti with the basketball, my friend Dave Mahoney, and three neighborhood kids with toy guns. Tim Meisenzahl, at the bottom right, was dad’s financial advisor. I think my dad actually started with Tim’s dad. They lived across the street from us when I took this photo. I have to bring my dad’s death certificate out to Tim tomorrow and settle an account he had with Wells Fargo.

“Hitchcock/Truffaut” played to a packed House at the Dryden Theater last weekend. The 2015 movie based on the the 1962 week-long interview François Truffaut conducted with Hitchcock. That interview, the greatest cinema lesson of all time, became a book, a “bible” to filmmakers. The movie is footage from the interview. footage from Hitchcock movies along with commentary from Martin Scorsese, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader and, of course, Peter Bogdanovich. The Hitchcock quotes are mint. “Logic is dull.”

Time to march through the Hitchcock oeuvre again.

When we were coming down to Manhattan with the band in the early eighties the gallery scene was clustered in the loft spaces of SoHo. Clothing designers moved in, the gritty old factory spaces went upscale and the galleries moved out. Today there are a hundred or so galleries in a five block area of Chelsea and although the art market is richer than ever or maybe because the art market is richer than ever the real estate values in that part of town are going though the roof. So galleries are are closing shop or moving out.

The big galleries that remain are becoming small museums with suited guards and blue chip artists. Just today we saw shows by the op art queen, Bridget Riley, the minimalist champion, Donald Judd, giant photo emulsion paintings from the nineties by Robert Rauschenberg, career spanning work from Brice Marden in three different Matthew Marks galleries, twenty five large Jeff Koons’ copies of El Grecos, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Manet and Picasso, each with three dimensional, blue reflective globes mounted directly in front of the paintings, a move that struck me as John Baldesarri without the humor.

Claes Oldenburg is still doing three dimensional, oversize, soft looking everyday objects and easily filled gallery with new work. We sat in Mary Hielman’s brightly colored chairs in the center of a gallery and marveled at her new shaped canvas paintings. I get these clunky looking chairs now. They are a port to an immensely more playful world. Beautiful Robert Motherwell collages from the seventies filled a gallery on 24th Street. Fantastic to see how he picked up motifs in scraps of paper, a discarded cigarette package, and created a dialog with it. We stumbled on a group of graphic and somewhat rude Carrol Dunham paintings. He’s always popping up on my Tumblr blog. Louise Fishman was at her own show, holding court in front of a wall of her luscious water colors. And of course admission to all these shows was free.

I’ve saved the best for last. Georgio Morandi is one of my favorite artists. He lived his whole live in the house he grew up in painting fairly small still lifes of bottles and vases that he often painted before arranging, theatrically staging actually, on a tabletop. David Zwirner gallery has mounted a knock-out show of his work. Please click the detail photo above to see the whole painting. It is near criminal to crop a Morandi as I have.

Although he died in the mid sixties his work is painterly like that of a master yet dramatically minimal at the same time. The mundane taken to extremes. He is quoted as saying, “Nothing is more abstract than reality.” He does so much with so little. Looking at his paintings is somehow a quieting and exhilarating experience at the same time.

Peggi spotted a familiar looking tall man with a white beard talking to the people behind the desk in the gallery. It was the LA art guru himself, John Baldessari!

There are very few remnants of farm life left in Brighton, a mature, inner-ring suburb of Rochester. The barns along Westfall Road, where there are now more doctors per square inch than Strong hospital, are some of the last remaining. My father, an active member of Historic Brighton, would like to see the town save them.

I met my dad the other day inside one of these barns, now a “ruin porn” site. He was measuring the distance between the poles so that he could do an architecturally true, three dimensional drawing of the barn. He uses the free SketchUp program that was developed by Google. I’m guessing he’ll submit the drawings to the town in hopes that they will be able to envision a repurposing. A long shot.

We are all oblivious to things going on around us but I felt felt especially so when our new neighbor told me he was seriously considering not buying their house because the police in this part of town had a reputation for racism. It was shortly after they moved in when this story made the news.

So with some new found awareness this little sign near the corner of Titus Avenue and Culver Road caught my eye. Almost too small to be seen as you drive by it easily catches the eye of bike riders. I hope it has nothing to do with the nearby Art Deco house with the nautical theme but I suspect it is the work of a nearby neighbor. Irondequoit is the wrong town to be trying to take this meager campaign away from those whose lives are affected.

The sign, as seen above has had a few incarnations in the last few weeks. It started as “Police Lives Matter” in a lighter font. Someone scratched out “Police” and added “Black.” The originator came back with a bolder “Police Lives Matter” and pasted right over the amended sign and then shrink wrapped the whole sign in plastic.

Yesterday afternoon I wrote the word “Black” with a Sharpie, just above “Police Lives Matter” creating this confounding black police message. You see, I not only manage the Funky Signs website I am also a customer. Peggi and I rode by today and the sign was gone.

Apparently people feel left out by Black Lives Matter slogan because I keep hearing people say, “all lives matter.” Well, that wouldn’t be much of a campaign and it completely sidesteps the issue.