Category: Lopsided Observations

We stopped in the Frederick Douglas Resource Center on King Street on Rochester’s west side for a Black Power art exhibit on Saturday night but it turns out it was more than an art opening. The admission was fifteen bucks and we only had about fifteen minutes so we said we’d stop back. I love the building and all that they have done to one of Rochester’s oldest neighborhoods. Madison Park is looking good with the statue of Susan B. and Frederick as a center piece. Our friend, Shirley Zimmer, lived on King Street many years and the neighborhood looks a lot better than it did when used to visit her. I hope it is not just an illusion. I think this is the same street dj, Roger McCall was killed on when someone held him up.

Speaking of hold ups. My nephew was walking only a few blocks from his home in Brighton on Rochester’s east side when some guys pulled up next to him and his friend and asked if they knew aha time it was. Our nephew’s friend reached into his pocket to pull out his iPhone and the guys in the car pulled out a gun. They rode off with the phone.

Peggi has been quietly building DonHershey.com, a website devoted to the famed Rochester architect. Hershey was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and they both had a profound reverence for nature. Hershey, we’re told would pull up to an empty lot, survey the lie of the land and start sketching the footprint of the house, determining which way to orient the rooms, the windows, the entrance in order to have the house be in close harmony with the land.

The Frank Lloyd Wright house in Rochester is occasionally open to the public but Buffalo’s Martin House is always ready for non-for-profit business so we booked an 11 AM tour on Saturday. In some cities your commute could be an hour, in Rochester you can be in another city in an hour. This place is much more than a house, it is an entire complex. There is a pavilion on site with a mini museum inside, and there is a beautiful gardener’s house on the property. Wright designed and built a stable and garage, a conservatory with an underground and above ground passageway to it. And there is an additional house on the property for the in-laws. It is undergoing renovation but all work is being done to spec and that’s what makes this tour so interesting. You really get a sense of the effort involved in creating this treasure.

This beautiful grey/brown palette won’t last so I’m making the most of it. We went off trail today, (it is so much easier to do that this time of year) ducking under branches and stepping over fallen branches and looking for sheds. Thats what our local deer authority calls them. Deer shed their racks this time of year. They become uncomfortable and deer bang their heads against trees to knock them off. Our neighbor Monica found both sides of a ten pointer yesterday and that got us going.

Funny how many people still haven’t picked up their phone books. Nobody wants those damn things anymore and they’re still sitting in the white plastic Frontier bags at the base of mailboxes a week after they were delivered. I put ours directly in the the recycling box.

I miss downtown. I worked at a few ad agencies down there and loved hanging around midtown at noon. This photo from the mid seventies looks pretty bleak in black and white but it was quite lively and a lot more interesting than it is now. Can we get that Inner Loop filled in and just start over?

I have one of our old computers set up in the painting room that streams music from a drive in another part of the house. It’s on shuffle and I love it that way, random with a one big control factor, it only plays stuff that I put in to the library in one form or another. Of course I ripped most of the cds we had before selling them and some lps and I’m not above borrowing cds from friends and giving them back in five minutes once they’ve been ripped. I’ve taken my laptop over to my brother-in-law’s and ripped while we celebrate a holiday and I occasionally buy downloads from Amazon or the Apple Store. And then there were those Napster years and the news groups so there are plenty of surprises in there. If I stumble on something I don’t like I hit the delete key and it’s gone forever.

But the coolest thing about this setup is the moods that iTunes gets into. It’s been on a Joni Mitchell kick lately. This afternoon it really hit a sweet spot and got on a good run. I was struggling with a drawing and iTunes was as gentle as could be. Think Afro Harping or Below The Bassline. It started with a modern loungy Tango Club thing (cover has woman’s fishnet stocking legs crossed) and then a Gypsy King instrumental and then the real gypsy king, Django Reinhardt, a slinky Cuban piece from Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban, a spacey piano thing by Bill Dixon, something from Kronos Quartet’s Early Music release, Miss Peggy Lee, a beautiful chamber jazz number with cello from Chico Hamilton, Pete LaBonne’s quiet anthem, “Arouse The Thunder,” a Nino Rota piece from Amacord and Bill Frisell, Ron Carter & Paul Motian doing a very slow number called “Introduction” and sounding a lot like Bob Martin.

This set got me where I wanted to go and when I got there all hell broke loose with MX-80’s “Face Of The Earth.”

On the way into Manhattan a well dressed, middle aged, black man walked through the door of our subway car and started singing an acapella version of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” He was wearing a small mic and he had a small PA in his backpack with a great reverb setting. We changed trains and a group of three musicians got on. They too had a black singer and they did a beautiful version of “Hooked On A Feeling,” a song I thought I never wanted to hear again.

On the way back to Rochester we were one stop out of NYC when a couple got on the train in Croton on Harmon. We held our breath as they walked by. I tried to give off bad vibes but they sat down across from us anyway in the one seat in the car that faced the opposite way the train was traveling so they faced us. I tried not to look directly at them but she had died blonde hair and dark glasses. He had a pot belly and hearing aids in both ears and he was wearing a faded Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt. They talked non-stop to the people next to them and we quickly learned they had been babysitting the woman’s granddaughter while the child’s parents took a Carnival Cruise. Apparently the two year old is brilliant and this couple had the time of their life babysitting her.

He was in the National Guard and has diabetes so the woman scolded him for buying a big bag of chips from the snack bar. She was drinking a large Diet Pepsi and reading a magazine called HELLO! which had a picture of Elton John and his partner holding a little baby on the cover. Growing up with six siblings I got pretty good at tuning out a crying baby but this was something else altogether. They said whatever popped into their heads to whoever would listen and they acted like this was completely normal behavior. Peggi suspects it was some sort of performance art.

Just imagine what will go on in a new white room.

When the snow is this deep it takes a while to get through the woods. And then, of course, it takes a while to get back through the woods but I’m not really keeping track of the time, I’m just trying to figure out where the day went. And a funny thing happens around here, guaranteed. When you go north and you go downhill. If it was the other way around Lake Ontario would overflow. Still, it’s flat enough to be a one speed bike town.

We were at my brother’s house outside of New York in late 2009 and planning to take the train into Manhattan and then eventually out to Duane’s place in Brooklyn. I was reading the NYT over coffee. (My brother makes it strong, so strong one of my other brothers had an anxiety attack down there.) I spotted an Roberta Smith penned announcement for a show at the McKee Gallery of Philip Guston’s Small Panels, paintings he did between 1969 and 1973 when he switch from the abstract to figurative. I was ecstatic. That was a while ago but I am still ecstatic about these paintings and they are still up at the McKee site. Be sure to click though on the enlargements for even larger enlargements.

Pete Monacelli, who has been helping us with our project, has been creating work that explores the the connection between a a small group of the abstract expressionist and the spiritual realm. Pete mentioned that Guston is in that group but he said he didn’t know that much about him.There is no book on the Small Panels so I went to Amazon to order a book I thought Pete would like called “Philip Guston: Roma.” I bought it for 29 bucks or so but it’s now 225 And the retrospective book I have is just gone! Oh well, just gonna have to savor the McKee website.

Guston painted the KKK while he was living in LA. They were active there and didn’t like Jews any better than blacks. When he returned to figurative work the hooded figures became stand-ins for bumbling humans of all stripes including himself. I love how animated this conversation (above) looks even though we can’t see their faces. He is my favorite painter but then I have probably said that before.