Paddlewheel boat on Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York
We had read that the lake levels were unusually high and we had to see it for ourselves so we walked that way. We got there too late to see Chuck Schumer make his announcement about new measures to clean up the lake. There is hardly any beach at all at Durand. They control the lake level but they pick a level in the Spring and when we have a lot of rain they sort of have to live with the consequences. They could lower it but Montreal has a dam up there that allows water to run through it while they generate power from it and they don’t want to just dump the water for our sake.
Lucky Peterson backstage with his drummer and bass player at the Rochester International Jazz Fest
There’s one extra in this picture, the guy sitting behind Lucky Peterson. His Cuban born drummer and New Orleans’ bass player are to his right. Lucky grew up in Buffalo. You can tell by looking at his boots. He played with Little Milton and Bobby Blue Bland so his blues has soul. He is a monster on the organ, piano and guitar. He has a voice big enough to comand attention in a full house (in this case a tent) while off mic. He has the showmanship thing down with spades!
Is it my imagination or is the city falling apart? This view of downtown Rochester contrasts nicely with yesterday’s post of Madrid’s skyline. Midtown Plaza was built in 1960 and they are already tearing it down or at least we thought that was the case. We were scurrying to our next Jazz Fest stop at the Xerox Auditorium when we stopped to take in this view. I said “I thought they were tearing this whole thing down” to Peggi but a guy on the street behind us said “Oh no. They’re going to save that part of the building.”
I was thinking of the time Personal Effects had 2000 people up in that overhanging portion of this building for a record release party in the early eighties. It was called the Top Of The Plaza back then.
El flamenco es filosofía pura,anõs de filosofía condensada. It is the heart of Andulasia in Southern Spain. We had to see some flamenco on our last night in Sevilla so we asked a number of people what they recommended and decided our best bet was the Museo de Flamenco founded by the famous flamenco singer Cristina Hoyos. They have a nightly show and this one included a man and woman who sang and danced, a man who sat and sang while clapping and a virtuoso guitar player. An earthy art form that came from the gypsy streets, flamenco is culturally rich. Antonia Mercé, “La Argentina,” Lorca’s muse, said “There are no schools to create flamenco just as there are no schools to create poets.”
Bull and matador in Madrid
And of course we had to take in a bullfight before leaving Spain, there is so much pomp and ceremony and rich color palette in this ritualized life and death spectacle. It’s pretty certain who is going to die here and it is sometimes messy. As a Taurus I feel sorry for the bull and almost want to root for el toro
Juan Francisco Isidro painting on display in Sevilla, Espana
We got up so late today that they were putting away the breakfast food at the café we stopped at. And they were preparing the tapas for the glass display cases that line the bar between you and the barista. We watched as they put out a display tray of Pimientos del Padrón and made a note to come back here later.
First thing we heard on the street today was an American woman telling her male friend, “Don’t you go thinking you know more Spanish than me.” Lots of Germans walking around Sevilla’s Centro district too, French and Italian, all butchering Spanish no worse than I would if I opened my mouth. I used to think art was the universal language but really good art doesn’t always translate. Food is probably the universal language.
Our guide book said, “Nothing much happens in La Macarena district,” “It is the least altered by tourist hype,” and “Entertainment value is substantially compromised by authenticity,” so that became our day’s destination. We spent a good bit of time ducking the sun and at one point felt overcome by it so we dashed to a fruit stand. We bought some small exotic peaches and and asked the owner if he could recommend a good restaurant. He pointed down the street and said, “Todo recto. Al fin. A la derecha. El Rinconcillo. Es muy bueno.”
This place was established in 1625. It’s older than Guinness. We ordered the house salad for two (asparagus, roasted red peppers, salchitas, grilled shrimp, bonito, calamari stuffed with ?) and we split a spinach and chick pea dish that must have been influenced by our proximity to Morocco. Both were out of this world.
Musa Meyer, Philip Guston’s daughter, wrote an engrossing but brutal memoir about her experience growing up with an artist whose first priority was his work. The critic, novelist and poet Ross Feld wrote a beautiful book about his friendship with the artist and the art itself. Both of these both books brought more depth to the earthshaking experience of standing in front of his paintings.
So I snatched a few more books, “Philip Guston’s Late Work: A Memoir” by the poet William Corbett and “Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Works” by David Kaufmann, the latter too dense in high brow criticism but the subject matter is thrilling.
Amazon thought I might like the recently released “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”. I do. It’s the Gutson mother load. Great artists (Rembrandt, Matisse, and Guston) get better with age, they certainly don’t retire. Just look at the amazing Guston trajectory. Guston was a painter first but also a teacher and somewhat of a philosophy nut so his lectures knock me out. His casual conversation, say hanging with Morton Feldman and a cassette recorder, knocks me out. It’s all here.
My father emailed to thank me for helping him put their awnings up yesterday. It was a beautiful day and I really enjoyed it. Every Spring we put three awnings up on their porch and every Fall we take them back down. My father calls this the “Awning Ritual.”
Last time Steve Black was visiting from Singapore I remember showing him the “Road Masks” I was working on. They wound up on the wall at Tap & Mallet for a few years and now I think it’s in the owner’s back room. Steve called the other day and he’s been on my mind. I was working on some layouts for an ice cream company around that time and I had spray painted some lids and containers from ice cream we bought at Tops. I had spread out some newspapers to do the spraying on and when I was done I feel in love with the way the papers looked with the white holes and colorful sprayed paint. I cropped and mounted four of them under glass Steve really liked them too. He kept saying, “They’re bulletproof, they’re bulletproof”.
I recently submitted a ten six by six watercolors to RoCo’s annual 6X6 show. I cut mask out of white cardboard and held it over a bunch of 9×12 paintings I had done of crime faces. They were all ones that were finished but I wasn’t crazy about them so I cropped out sections that I liked. When I was done I put the mask done on my work table found this “bulletproof” image looking out at me.
The willow tree in the picture above has fallen over but there are enough roots still in the ground to send nourishment to the hundreds of shoots, or branches really, that are growing upward out of its side. We were saddened to hear that Poly Styrene had died of cancer. Her band was so much fun for that brief period. Her smart lyrics and the saxophone were the perfect antidote to the punks. “I Am A Poseur”. My brother in law has cancer and the neighbor’s granddaughter has a brain tumor. We’re all pre-cancerous if we don’t have it already. This fallen willow got me thinking about all this.
I was looking for a replacement window for the skylight that came with our house. The one we have leaks or it used to. I thought it was the roof leaking and I caulked between almost every shingle up there before I realized it was the aluminum seal around the window itself. By that time the wood frame had rotted so I called Velux and determined that they still make our model. I got price from Lowes and then one from Home Depot. Home Depot told me they would match Lowes price and then take 10% off that. So we drove out to Lowes, got he quote in writing and took it to Home Depot. I did this routine once before but I can’t remember what it was I was buying. The clerk at Home Depot had to get special permission to mark the price down and we watched him type “Meat & Beat Competitor” into his computer terminal before he gave us the bill.
I like Home Depot better. They must be hungrier in their race with Lowes but their sales staff seems friendlier and they are very helpful. The Lowes Sore near us is bigger and cleaner with fewer customers. Home Depot is always hopping with contractors and works and of course do-it-tourselfers like us. The store is funkier and more comfortable. Today we saw a a customer having his lunch in the plumbing aisle.
You know how nosey neighbors can be, always speculating about somebody else’s business. The house at the top of the hill in the photo above wasn’t even there when we moved here a few years ago and now it’s for sale. Zillow says their asking 300k and the place doesn’t even have a driveway. Neighbors say it went into foreclosure.
At the edges of the enlargement of the photo above you can see the hill dropping off on both sides, as steeply as it does in the front. We could not believe our eyes when they started building on this lot. Doesn’t the town of Irondequoit have “steep slopes” and “setback”regulations? Did money change hands here or was the town so desperate to increase the tax base that they gave this guy a pass? We hadn’t even set eyes on the owner and we were already calling him “The fool on the hill” but we’re really the fools because this was a beautiful hill on a gorgeous strip of land before they built this modern monstrosity on top of it.
Funniest thing about all of this is I haven’t found a beer can since this guy moved out. We used to haul home twenty at a time from the spot by the creek directly across from his house. We ran into him a few times with the bags of 20 ouncers and we asked if he had any idea who the hops head was. Could it be we found Mister Budweiser?
Three stacks of crime faces from the local paper. Oil paintings by Paul Dodd
I found this photo in my photo library on our iPad. I’m at least three years behind in photographing my paintings. Our addresses, contacts, email and photos all sync effortlessly with our desktop machines and we use theiPad for just about everything. Everything but productivity that is. Unless you count reading, surfing, listening to music or streaming movies as a productive activity. I kind of like typing on the thing.
Who would have guessed that it would take an heroic effort to crop and scale a photo to a particular pixel dimension like 450 x200 for example? As an experiment I tried a few apps like “Crop For Free” and then bought “Photogene” for $2.99 but that didn’t let me crop and scale which is one activity in Photoshop. So I bought FilterStorm and that does the trick in two steps. I saved two versions (the cropped version you see above and the full shot but in a scaled down size for the blowup) of the original photo back to my photo library and inserted them here. When I say “here” I should say I am in the WordPress app because I can’t even reach my photo library from the WP admin panel at my site in Safari. Not sure why that is but it acts like a limited version of Safari.
So I managed to do a post from the iPad but I’m exhausted. I still haven’t plugged in the $29 Camera Connection Kit but that would allow me to reach photos on my camera from the iPad and post to this site through the WP app. I’s all pretty amazing really. .
Painting for sale in house on Queensboro in Rochester, New York
About twenty years ago or so Kim sent us a book called “Thrift Store Paintings” by Jim Shaw. It was a pretty cool collection of good bad paintings and it turned out Jim Shaw was the nephew of Peggi’s parents best friends, the Gardners.
Danny from Abilene has a pretty cool collection of thrift store paintings at his bar downtown so when we spotted this painting this morning in a household sale on Queensboro in Rochester I took a photo and emailed it to him. I could just as easily have alerted Marie Via or Clair Marziotti whose collections were featured in a Democrat & Chronicle article on bad art but if they scooped it up I wouldn’t be able to visit it as often. Jack Wanderman, Susan Plunket’s brother, was organizing the sale and asking $65 for the painting. We were there to visit some of Peggi’s mom’s stuff one last time. Jack has been putting her stuff in household sales around town.
Lake Ontario from the ridge trail in Durand Eastman Park
It was sixty something today but we still have a few pockets of snow and I’m happy about that. If there is one thing that really bothers me it is when Spring comes roaring in like a lion. Winter is a test of of metal and we fail the test if we give up on it. It makes us stronger when we give in to it and it makes Spring all the more dramatic when it unveils itself. Besides I like the minimalist palette of grey brown with small touches of color.
Portrait by Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs
My friend Brad, also a drummer, usually has a good drummer joke when we talk but I haven’t heard any in while. We watched a Nilsson documentary a while back and I really enjoyed it. I was not a fan but I am now. Too bad he’s dead. I thought our friend and neighbor Rick would have some of his records on vinyl but the only one he had was “Sandman.” It’s a very odd record with song titles like “Jesus Christ You’re Tall,” “How To Write A Song,” “The Flying Saucer Song,” “Hear’s Why I Didn’t Go To Work Today,” and “I’ll Take A Tango.” The first lines of that last song are “Deep down in my soul I hate rock and roll. And I don’t like the way that them drummers beat on them drums. They always hum along, out of tune.” That hit home for me.
Oh well, there is always painting. There must be some good painter jokes? We saw a show of Richard Butler’s (lead singer in the Psychedelic Furs) paintings in Chelsea on Saturday. I really liked this portrait.
Philip Guston painting in “Abstract Expressionism” show at MoMA
A note written on the back of a business card next to a full pot of coffee read “Out for bagels, Be back soon.” I hadn’t even finished my PopWars entry when Duane returned with a brown bag full. He got on his computer in the back room and told me I had some of the best typos on my blog. I had written “we opened the widow” in that morning’s post. I can’t spell and I depend on spellcheck so I often use the wrong word because, hey, it doesn’t have a red line under it.
We are not members of MoMA so we had to wait until Sunday to see the “German Expressionism”show when it opened to the public. The museum’s staff staged a dramatic presentation of these powerful, graphic works, mostly prints but some paintings, mounted on grey walls interspersed with deep red, yellow green and mustard sections with the usually offending curator’s notes on colors to match the walls. These details are important in a show with 250 mostly small, mostly black and white works on paper. They come off with a bang.
Otto Dix’s “The War” etchings filled a red wall with updated versions of Goya’s “Disasters of War.” Max Beckman’s 1917 painting, “Descent From The Cross” uses Christ’s crucifixion as a metaphor for war. Kathie Kollowitz’s heart wrenching woodcuts from her series called “War” stand as a timeless display of the emotional costs of war. If they were as powerful as they look we would all learn something from them before heading off to war. None of this work is as grizzly as I’ve made it out to be. Nolde, Egon and Kirchner, all giants of German Expressionism, have a masterly ability to cut to the chase.
We had looked a the “MoMA Abstract Expressionism” iPad app so many times I felt as though we had already seen the show but nothing can prepare you for the impact of these monumental paintings in the flesh. Kline, Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Pollack, Gottlieb and Guston transformed the art world in the last century and their impact is still being felt.
Our car still sports an “Obama” sticker and we parked right next to this guy at the post office today. Politics is a rough business and we don’t have any guns so I guess this guy wins. Our car mechanic listens to Rush and our sticker still gets him all riled up. We had a repairman over here the other day and the first thing he said when we opened the door was, “So how’s Obama working out for you now?” Would it be less controversial if we had a McCain/Palin sticker? I guess most people keep their voting preferences private.
“An Osteria is an Italian-style eating establishment, similar to a tavern, usually in the country, less formal than a ristorante or trattoria, where wine is served as the main attraction and tasty food is prepared to come along with it. The service is casual, wine is sold by the decanter rather than the bottle, prices are low, and the emphasis is on a steady clientele rather than on haute cuisine.
Clients become regulars at Osteria because their tastes and preferences become known, and they become part of the family. The food is modest but plentiful, mostly following regional and local recipes, often served by the owner or his family members on common tables, warm and personal.”
I copied all that from Wikipedia and pasted it here because it perfectly describes “Osteria Restaurant overlooking Lake Ontario on Culver Road in Rochester. We had the homemade Ricotta Raviolis last with a spicy calamari appetizer (two kinds of peppers and green and Calamata olives). Now that Peggi is on the cholesterol meds we plan to continue with our ongoing Italian Restaurant exploration.
The photo above (gotta click the photo above to see the full shot) is the last one I took with my brand new Nikon P7000. I packaged it up today and sent it back to Nikon. It’s two months old and I’ve had this intermittent problem since I got it. The lens covers doesn’t fully open when I turn it on so my photos look like they were taken with a Lomo. Not entirely bad but a Lomo would have been a lot cheaper. Turns out this is a pretty common problem. I contacted Nikon and they told me to send it in on my dime. I paid sixteen bucks to send a brand new camera back. Grrrr.
Winter is getting away from us. The death knell is the Saint Patrick Day decorations that are going up all over. I took this photo while driving through downtown Rochester in Friday morning’s snowstorm. Most of that snow has already melted.
Bleu Cease and Wendell Castle at the Makers Mentors opening at Rochester Contemporary
We got a personal invite from Heather Erwin so we started First Friday at her place. Met an up and coming photo journalist there and told him I thought photo journalism was getting better. This opinion is only based on the number of photos I’ve cut out of the newspaper lately.
We cut through the creepy leather store in Anderson Alley and stopped in the Bop Shop. I had tried to download Billy Bang’s newest, “A Prayer For Peace”, but it wasn’t in the iTunes store and I thought I’d pick up the cd here but they were sold out. Like any good record store Rick made a persuasive argument for picking up another cd, “Tara’s Song” by Ahmed Abullah who used to play trumpet with Sun Ra. His band does two beautiful versions of Ra tunes and a amazing cover of Ornette’s “Lonely Woman.”
Onward to Record Archive where Lucinda Storms showed some brand new luscious Valentines Day paintings. Stan Merrell was onstage playing a therimin. Alayna offered us Genny Bock Beer and we settled in for some free ranging conversation. Rick Simpson who had earlier tried to sell me a down jacket that he picked up at Eddie Bauer for forty bucks and was now trying to sell the coat to Jeff Spevak. Jeff’s dad had just died and he wrote a beautiful piece on him. Stan and Brian Williams tried to help me find the black and white mode on my new Nikon and I bought one of the Dick Storm’s appropriation t-shirts. He did a tempting Warhol VU banana one but I went for the bright green “Archive Rock Beer” shirt.
It was only fitting that Wendell Castle would be holding court when we got to Rochester Contemporary for the Makers/Mentors show featuring his work. Perhaps Rochester’s most successful artist, he has influenced a generation of woodworkers.
We were looking at the other makers’ armor art with Martha O’Connor when Martha exclaimed, “Of course!” It dawned on her that Nancy, Wendell’s wife, had certainly crafted these dwarf sized amour suits to hang in their “castle.”
We discussed going to Abilene for the Spampinato Brothers but had spotted a beautiful black and white snow scene painting on the First Friday website so we headed off to a place called the Living Room Cafe on Monroe Avenue. Perfect name! A small crowd was watching “Reality Bites” on a projection tv. The screen was pulled down over some of the paintings that we had come to see but this place was comfortable. We were offered a free cup of coffee and stuck around for the rest of the movie.
Winter view of Lake Ontario from Durand Eastman Park in Rochester NY
When you get as far as the lake there is no choice but to turn around. We crossed paths with another skier this morning. He stopped long enough to say, “Perfect day!” We agreed.
Snow days were better when they came out of the blue. They take all the fun out it now with sensational hype and no more accuracy than they ever had. When the weather guys are wrong everyone gets bummed. We didn’t get the “Storm of the Century” last night but we got a few inches and Wegmans got their run on. I’m not complaining. It was a perfect day.
