Category: We Live Like Kings

My current camera, a Sony RX100, has all sorts of options, ones I really use. But I am glad I have them. The auto mode is so good I have been spoiled. I hardly leave it but I know I should. If only to control the background focus. Duane tells me he runs around town with his ISO set to 1600. There is an advantage there that I can only imagine. I remember when that speed was twice what was possible with fast, grainy Kodak black and white film.

I recently photographed the a batch of oil paintings on wood panels. The ground was mostly white but you would never know it looking at my photos. I came up with maybe a 5 on the grey scale where it should have been white. I knew I should have been setting the white point and shooting with manual mode but I knocked off the shots in auto mode. They paintings are currently hanging in a show but next time I will do it right and I have a pile of my father’s watercolors that I would like to photograph next.

I called Duane for instructions. He worked for Lowel, a lighting company, and I use four Lowel brand Tota lights. We started with my bulbs. A couple are high quality Quartzand the others are Home Depot tungsten lamps which can change color spectrum as they age. I got on Amazon and ordered 5 EIKO FCZ 120V/500W R7s Base Stage and Studio Lamp from Barndoor Lighting Outfitters.

Not only were my whites not white, they were wildly uneven. Most likely the lights were too close to the subject. He suggested I step two feet to the sides of the paintings and then step back at least six feet from the surface of the painting to set the four lights. Two lamps on each side, barn doors set open about 45 degrees. As for aiming Duane recommended that I cross light the paintings so the the lights on the left side of the painting should be lighting the right side of the painting.

To set the white balance Duane suggested I frame a shot in auto made so it is full white, the same same white as ground on the paintings, and take note of the readings (iso, Fstop and shutter speed). Then use the same settings in manual mode (where my camera allows me to capture and store that white balance).

Finally, still in Manual mode, I will try an ISO of 400, an F stop at 8 and then get the M.M. setting to zero out by selecting the appropriate shutter speed. I will report back.

We stopped up to see my mom and took her down to the coffee shop. She asked if we were swimming in our outdoor pool yet. it was good to hear her ask about the outside world.

We had lunch at Magnolia’s on Park Avenue. Peggi sat in the chair Obama sat in and she ordered what he had, a cup of soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. It dawned on me that this was the old Red & White grocery store when we lived in an apartment in this part of town. Henry ran the place. He used to work in my uncle’s store. We sat near the window looking out at KrudCo’s new place. Doesn’t seem right on Park Avenue. And I realized why they call this place Magnolia’s, so close to Oxford Street with the meridian lined with the flowering trees only a few weeks from full bloom.

We stopped at Washington Grove near the top of Nunda Boulevard and we walked through the woods up to the reservoir. My parents used to take us up here. They’d open the car doors and let us run. My mom and dad used to walk laps here just a few years ago. High on a hill, 640 feet above sea level, it’s one of the most beautiful spots in Rochester. The sign in front of the 1908 building reads, “Of unsurpassed quality, the water in this reservoir flows by gravity from Lakes Hemlock and Canadice located 30 miles south.” Peggi and I hadn’t been up here in years.

The stereo is rapidly losing its place as the gravitational center of homes. Ear buds and tiny bluetooth speakers supply sound for our personal devices so you’re not likely find a group gathered around the record player or tv set anymore. We send three signals to our stereo, a wireless stream of music from a desktop in another room to an Apple Express wired to the amp, two long RCA style plugs from our tv and the two phono plugs from our turntable. And the outbound lines go to an “A” and “B” set of speakers. There is a subwoofer wired in-line with the “B” speakers. It’s a fairly simple setup, no surround sound or HDMI connections.

For the last few months we’ve had an intermittent problem with the left channel on both sets of speakers. It gets badly distorted and then cuts out and it happens with all three input feeds so we assumed we had a problem with our amp. To confirm this, we borrowed a spare amp from our neighbor, Rick. It behaved the same way. We hired an unemployed acquaintance, a former audio specialist, someone who smoked pot in the back room and sold high-end equipment to audiophiles.

We were desperate to figure out what the problem was but this guy could care less about finding the problem, he just unplugged every connection, re-stripped the ends of the speaker wires and plugged everything back together again and it all works. This is why you hire a professional.

We visit the Getty Center almost every time we’re out here but this trip we decided to check out the Getty Villa, a recreation of a Roman house, a really palatial spread for a very wealthy Roman, someone who was as wealthy during the Roman Empire as J. Paul Getty was in his day. Getty built this place for his third or fourth wife. She’s still alive but living downtown. Getty filled the Villa with art and in the seventies moved the Van Gogh and Rembrandts to the new Getty Center while leaving the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities in the Villa.

We took an audio tour, something we usually avoid in museums preferring to follow our eyes. Our guide was a retired high school principle and brought a lot to the experience even telling us how we were dressed – togas and sandals – as we entered the dining quarters.

I love these early idealized sculptures of the human form. The one above is from 300 AD. They have an abstract fertility statue here from 3,000 BC that looks like something Modigliani would have done. Some of of the statues were repaired in antiquity and the Getty has a restoration department that has reworked some of these pieces. A placard called attention to the nose and chin of a woman’s head from 10 AD that had been rebuilt by the staff. The work looked seamless but there is something off about contributing to an artwork completed a few millennium ago. A diagram of their statue of Hercules pointed to all the work the staff had done on him. I couldn’t help but notice they didn’t reconstruct his penis.

All the big names were represented at the MAG’s Ebony Fashion Fair Show. Mostly male fashion designers, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta, Stephen Burrows, Patrick Kelly, Valentino, Alexander McQueen with their fabulous creations for women and a few fabulous women like Vivian Westwood. We were there for the opening and I found the people in the crowd more interesting than the dresses. Actually I was most intrigued by the mannequins. I’d like take some of those home and use them as models for drawings.

“She’s a model and she’s looking good
I’d like to take her home that’s understood”
Kraftwerk

Remember AV Club? Probably not. Nerdy high school kids messing with video so the picture flickered or maybe even manipulating the picture with the audio signal. No idea how you do that but they figured it out. These same kids had a completely different notion of music too. Not so much melody, harmony and rhythm but more blips and sampled noise with feedback. The kind of stuff you’d watch and listen to late at night with some incense burning and recreational drugs.

Axom Gallery last night featured visual art by John Lake, tiled black and white print-outs of a young man in the water, along with experimental music performances by City Harvest Black, Licker, Mike Shiflet and Joe + N. Not sure who we caught but it was completely engaging. There are more of these types than you would imagine. It was one of the biggest crowds I’ve seen at the gallery.

There was beer there too but I was too full to have one. We had eaten dinner at Atlas Eats where they were doing something they called “American Melting Pot. “Cured Salmon Pastrami Style with Creamer potatoes, Homemade 1,000 Island dressing and Rye Caraway Crumbs, Winter Vegetable Puree with Roasted Beets, Quark and Pommes Allumettes and Seared Scallops in Kimchee Butter with Braised Escarole and Cracklings. They could have stopped right there but there two more courses. One included a delicious, over-easy quail egg and that was nice. I can’t eat that much but I did. And it’s not so much the bloated feeling that bums me out it’s more the dread I feel with the excess of it all. And dessert just has a way of spoiling a perfectly good meal.

Yoga class was back after a holiday recess. We worked the lower back today, mostly trying to undue damage we do just walking around in a gravity bound atmosphere. At the end of class Jeffery reminded us we are building awareness with our practice. I like that.

Since the beginning of time the northern end of Lake Avenue in Rochester has been biker. Biker bars, bikers riding up and down, bikers in the restaurants. You want to stare at them and their “old ladies” but you’re sort of afraid. Only Diane Arbus could get away with that.

Lou Gramm’s (Grammatico) Band, Black Sheep, used to play the Penny Arcade, the hard rock club at the very end of Lake Avenue, more than forty years ago. The bar tenders there wore “Punk Rock Sucks” t-shirts when New Math played there in the seventies. Of course that may have been WCMF that put them up to that. Lou Gramm wrote a song about the gear-head sub culture here with the lines,
“Running all night on Lake Avenue
It’s a piece of cake
If you know what to do”

Charlotte, as this part of the city is known, is a magnet, though. The city meets the lake in dramatic fashion as Lake Avenue ends. Engineers plan to water the new marina next week. Condos in the Port of Rochester are on the horizon. And “Kneads & Wants” the artisan bakery on the east side, just north of the old Stutson Street bridge is an oasis. Olga told us about the place. We had driven by it many times but were never seduced by the sandwich sign.

We stopped after our Saturday morning yoga class and had coffee and cinnamon scones as we talked to the owner. We had been in the habit of stopping at Sips for coffee but the service there is so slow I started shopping at Herrama’s while Peggi waited for our iced lattes. I need and want to return here.

Martin Edic’s friend, Lucia Guarino, had the nicest stop on the Landmark Society’s tour this weekend. Her Capron Street condo in a former canal warehouse is fabulously decorated, has a perfect layout and a rooftop terrace with a great view of downtown. And she was there in person to welcome the throngs. The tour wasn’t as spectacular as last year’s but it did get us out to new Edge of the Wedge lofts, the Cub Room and Local Meat Market.

It was hard for me, an ex-Catholic, to appreciate the Claude Bragdon designed, Arts & Crafts, Universalist Church. Where is all the iconography, the Stations of the Cross, the heavenly aspirations? It was kind of fun to get into the old National Clothing Store where the new Holiday Garden Inn has set up shop. The National was always a step above Sibley’s and McCurdy’s. I remember my mom picking out a pretty adventurous sport coat for my Confirmation. I was nine or ten and had some input but she had great taste. This was a wide striped cream and maroon number making me the loudest note in the class photos.

Our First Friday route has to be rethought with the closing of Lumiere’s gallery. The photo gallery was one of our favorite stops. R Gallery, next door, had a solo exhibition of sculpture and installation by RIT alumni and Dedalus Foundation Fellowship recipient Cecily Culver. Her work “aims to shift viewer perspective and celebrate the mundane phenomena of the everyday” and it did that.

Pete Monacelli’s “Midtown Plaza” works on paper at Richard Margolis’s next door gallery looked fantastic. And on top of that Pete was holding court with a small crowd gathered around him in the center of the room when we got there, talking first about Midtown, his love of the city, and the changes he has seen in his years here. The conversation quickly swerved to Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons and then Thomas Merton’s letters to Ad Reinhardt. And then the many facets of Thomas Merton who was born one hundred years ago. Someone said, “he sounds like a Unitarian.” Please, the Catholics need all the help they can get. There is a show of Merton’s “Zen” photos at Nazareth College, up until November 4th.

I spent the better part of the last couple days reworking my “Funky Signs” site, installed a new template, “Hipster” by Precrafted. It’s one column, infinite scrolling and mobile friendly.”

The sign above is so good it might not even need a snarky comment. I spotted it near the cash register in Case’s Garden Store over on Norton Street and added it to my to do list. I have two hundred signs up there and about a hundred in the kitty.

Flash forward to present day: I’ve moved my Funky Signs here.

There is a guy who lives in our neighborhood. We call him the “trench-coat father” because his son walked home from EastRidge HS in a trench-coat in the days after Columbine. The kid is long gone but the guy is out in the yard quite often sporting a mullet. Their fenced in yard is sort of a mini theme park with incongruous stuff like a big black pick-up on a circular driveway with colored rocks and ornate flower holders in the center. There is usually an American flag flying on the pole in the yard and below it are two life-sized fake deer. One of them is lying down and the other is standing nearby.

I’ve always thought it would be fun to collect photos of fake deer in people’s yards but a lot of them are in back yards and they’re surrounded with hay bales. People use them as targets and these are the type of people I would rather not mess with. So this will remain a conceptual project.

If we hadn’t spotted the announcement for today’s lecture in the morning paper we certainly would have spent the day outdoors. The gas company is replacing the lines on our street and attempting to move everyone’s meter outside. There is a lot of commotion out there and it was especially sunny.

Instead we settled into a darkened auditorium and struggled to understand French scientific engineer, Pascal Cotte, as he described the multi-spectral digital camera he designed to photograph the Mona Lisa for the Louvre. His camera takes images that are 240 million pixels using less light than the painting would receive in the gallery on a typical day.

His reconstructed photos show the incredibly detailed and intricate patterns of lacework on the clothing, You can see the individual strands of hair that made up the eye lashes and what’s left of the eyebrows. You can see DaVinci’s thumbprint in several places. He used it to spread the paint just so. The virtual restoration removes the varnish and restore the painting to the colors that were available in DaVinci’s day. You would think museums would be clamoring for this camera to authenticate paintings in their collection but Dr. Cotte says, “They do not want to know.”

Leonardo started painting the Mona Lisa in 1503 and kept her with him until his death, retouching and reworking her constantly and still felt she was incomplete. X-Rays reveal a different woman at the bottom of this painting. In 1911 an Italian worker at the Louvre stole the painting. He kept it in his home for two years. He added some orange paint to the picture and then tried to sell it to the Uffiza Gallery in Florence, calling it “her rightful home. A madman threw a rock at the painting in 1956. You can still see the damage.

The exhibit, on the top floor of the Museum & Science Center, has several reproductions of Dr. Cotte’s photos of the Mona Lisa along with seventy five of DaVinci’s life-sized, machine inventions. It is rather mind-blowing. The show makes it’s case. “DaVinci is surely the greatest genius the world has ever known.”

I have lived in Rochester for a long time but I have never seen an icicle as big as this one on the side of the Church of the Transfiguration on Culver Road. It runs from the roof, two stories up, to the ground where it is anchored to the parking lot.

Just like Jerry Ludwig says in his home improvement column, the ice damning in this case is right where an addition was connected to the existing structure without regard to the pitch. They have some serious heat loss going on here, either a cathedral ceiling or just poorly insulated or possibly no vents for draft from the eaves. A little more money in the collection basket will cover the loss.

Was Frank DeBlase really born on Christmas day or is that something the writer/photographer made up? To ease the confusion his Australian girlfriend arranged a birthday party at Skylark Lounge on Boxing Day. Skylark is an Ed Repard museum and the bartender looked like a cross between Hermie and Casey. Even “Psychedelic George,” who used to come see the band but is someone we thought disappeared some thirty years ago was there. It was a joy to watch Frank hold court like American royalty.

This sign is one of the reasons I keep getting further behind with my signs to post.

When you’ve been to Home Depot and Lowe’s in the same day you know you are in the throes of a home remodeling project. We were looking for what turns out to be an slightly unusual product, ceiling tiles that didn’t call attention to themselves. The ceiling in our basement is not that high, nothing like the twelve foot ceilings in the Bevier Building downtown that is currently being rehabbed, so we don’t want to draw the eye to that feature. Plain white with a simple non-directional texture would be ideal but they are so yesterday.

The key feature of dropped ceiling panels today is “tegular.” Spell check hasn’t even caught up with it. These tiles are 2 feet by 2 feet, not 2 by 4 like the one ripped down, and they drop down because they’ve been cut with a right angle on all four sides. One half of their depth hangs below the surface of the grid. They come in all sorts of crazy styles but they look too busy to us. We would like our ceiling to disappear. They still make no-tegular but they are a special order item. And just so you both stores carry Armstrong with virtually the same line-up and price.