David Bouley Paella at Wegmans in Pittsford, New York
We didn’t see David Bouley, the world famous chef, at Wegmans on Thursday, but we bought some of his paella to take home. He and Roger Martinez, the Barcelona chef who worked throughout Spain but notably at Ferran Adria’s celebrated elBulli may have been hiding in the back room when we were there. They were demonstrating variations (vegetable, duck, seafood and chanterelle mushrooom) of the classic Spanish dish but the huge paella pans were were already prepared when we visited. Our to-go dishes were still warm and delicious when we got home.
Paul Dodd charcoal drawings at I-Square Gallery in Rochester, New York
On Tuesday night I gave a short talk about my art work at the I-Square Gallery near the great House of Guitars. I pretty much talked about the obvious but that is often hiding in plain sight. I made some notes and then just winged it.
From the notes: I am drawn (pun intended) to graphic, expressive art, not particularly interested in technique or artist’s statements and all that. I walk in to a gallery and follow the magnetic force of the strongest piece in the room. There is no thinking involved and this quality is what I am looking for in my own work. Life is too short and getting shorter.
My loose limbed presentation almost crashed when I tried to make an art/music analogy about “great guitar players” obscuring the song and probably wound up insulting three of the five artists in the show.
The “Passion of Saint Joan” drawing I have in the show went rather quickly but usually it is a struggle and I am learning to enjoy that adventure. They’re portraits, but not really because I’m not overly concerned with making the work look like the model.
The opening is Friday night from 7-9 and some music will be provided by the artists.
Here’s Pete LaBonne’s track “Artist Statement” from his Earring Records cd entitled “Glob”.
We wanted to change the color of a room in our house and picked out a grey color at Home Depot. We must have considered a hundred grays before we settled on the right one. The kid behind the counter looked like was skipping school but he came off like a real pro when we asked him a few questions. They have made some big strides in the paint world since our last project. He offered to mix a tiny can of our color as a sample for three bucks. That’s a nice new feature. And when we asked about priming some bare wood he told us that a primer was built right into the paint. Latex paint on raw wood. And it covered in one coat. I got some on my arm and it’s still stuck there even after swimming.
This entry sounds exactly like one of the spam comments I get for my blog. From people like john@behrpaintproducts.com.
I was reading an obit of the artist, Karl Benjamin, someone I had never heard of. He was quoted as saying he wanted to be a journalist but couldn’t find a job in that field so he took a job teaching fifth and sixth graders in a California public school. Art was a required subject so he passed out the crayons and the kids churned out drawings of trucks, trees and mountains. He found them boring so his next assignment included the instructions, “No trucks, no trees.” The kids asked, “What should we do?” Benjamin said, “Be quiet and concentrate.”The work the children produced from such simple instructions awed him.
Poster for art show at I-Square Gallery on Titus Avenue in Rochester, New York
This thing is coming up fast, like real fast. Zanne Brunner organized a show at I-Square Gallery on Titus Avenue over by the House of Guitars. Called “Sights & Sounds,” it features five artists/musicians (Jed Curran • Paul Dodd • Peter Monacelli • Steve Piper • Scott Regan). We hung the show today. There is an artist’s talk on Tuesday at 7pm and everyone is invited. The official opening is Friday, August 24 from 7-9pm and there will be some music by the artists in a small tent outside the gallery.
Back-up helicopter pad at Strong memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from the Russian performance artist’s, Pussy Riot, says, “We are happy because we brought the revolution closer!” I’m happy for that. Nothing scarier than Russia’s new alliance between between church and state.
We had the coffee all set to go. Just push the button and head downtown to wait in line for the ticket office open so we could buy tickets to the US Women’s soccer game with Costa Rica. But the headlines on the morning paper said the ticket sale would be delayed. Eleven thousand were already sold to season ticket holders. Big bummer but nothing compared to our friend, Bill’s situation.
We took him over to the Wilmot Cancer Center for his daily dose of radiation, a tactic intended to shrink the tumors in his brain that spread from his lung cancer. We found him in good spirits, a better man than I imagine I would be in his spot.
On to the days’ other pressing issues. My father got a new modem from Time Warner and when the service guy left my dad was unable send or receive email on his desktop or iPad. All his settings were right. Nothing had changed on his end. I was stumped. I tried collecting email through the browser at the Roadrunner site and as soon as I typed in my father’s email address it autofilled with “@roadrunner.com” rather than “@rochester.rr.com.” This required a call to Time Warner where a technician determined that the serviceman had never set-up the modem to go to the Rochester server.
My parents switched their land line to Time Warner about a year ago so the incoming caller is displayed on their tv and all but they never set up the feature to route call waiting calls to Time Warners answering service so when they are on the phone and I try to call them it just rings and rings. People that know them are familiar with my father’s message on his home answering machine and they have learned that if the phone keeps ringing it just means they are on the line. But people who don’t know them, like the the garage door repair man, just assume their phone does not work. So we looked on Time Warner’s site for the old fashioned option of “engaging a busy tone.” What a concept.
This was not easy. i had to call Time Warner again and a women who was clearly reading instructions from a monitor talked me through setting up an account in my father’s name and then accessing a control panel were I could “turn off call-waiting” even thought they had never set it up and then “engage busy signal” and hit “Save.”
Tree trimmer in bucket on our street in Rochester, New York
I know wood burning is not environmentally cool but solar heat is not gonna work around here especially because we are surrounded by trees. This is a “mature” neighborhood as they say. Not every neighbor burns wood but most do so there is a bit of competition for the downed trees. One of our neighbors has three dogs and she comes by with one and then the other two (they don’t all get along) everyday. She spotted a fallen tree on the next street and told us about it, even introduced us to the neighbors, so Peggi and I dashed over and came back with five loads of red oak. A good score. The people watched as we rolled the logs up in to our vehicle and later asked the dog walkers if we were “hippies”. They thought we were “very industrious”. I didn’t think those two things went together.
This morning while we were reading the paper a huge truck came down our street with a wood chipper trailer in tow. It was a tree service hired by the power company to clean up the branches growing within their airspace, four feet in any direction and ten feet above the power lines that weave their way through the trees. They used to clean up the lower hanging cable tv and telephone lines but now they ignore those and just concentrate on the electric lines. It apparently isn’t worth it to the cable and phone companies (one in the same in many cases) to chip in and have these guys clean up their lines too. That tells me what I already knew. Cable tv and land phone lines are on the way out. Modern developments have all this infrastructure underground. But what about our internet service that comes through those lower lines? Is a wireless connection in our future?
We asked the tree guys for the big stuff and they said, “No problem. It makes our job easier.” Since we asked and our wood burning neighbors didn’t, would it be ethical for us to take the wood that through our intervention was spared from the wood chipper, even if it was trimmed from their tree? How about if the branch was in our air space? Is it rightfully ours anyway? This might be a question for “Dear Rich.”
Tractor Supply Company on 104 near Rochester, New York
My father used to have a small waterfall that ran through a rock garden in his backyard. He tore it out years ago and piled up the rocks under a tree in the corner of his yard. We were telling him about our neighbor’s new pond and waterfall and my father asked if he would want some additional rocks. They were nice looking, from Masters down on Empire Boulevard near the bay. Our neighbor said yes and he offered us his truck to transport the rocks.
We were loading them in the truck and my father offered his wheelbarrow. I pulled it out of its spot in the garage and found the tire flat. I could have done without the wheelbarrow but I wanted to help my father repair his wheelbarrow so I put he wheelbarrow in the truck and drove the short distance to Bob Martin’s house to borrow some air. When I hooked up the pump the valve stem broke off the wheelbarrow tire.
So back at my father’s house my father offers a much smaller flat wheel barrel, something my mom would use for light gardening. It didn’t look strong enough for the job but I noticed it was rusting out so there wasn’t much to lose. I put a few rocks in it and pulled it toward the truck. As I rolled across the patio stones in their yard one of the plastic wheels shattered. So two wheelbarrows down.
I found a tube for the tire at Home Depot and a lawnmower wheel that was the right size for the small wheelbarrow for $32 total. But back at my father’s the tube turned out to be the wrong size for the tire and plastic wheel did not fit the axle so I’m headed back to Home Depot today to return my purchases. My brother suggested I go to the wheelbarrow citadel, Tractor Supply, out on 104 in 315 country. They had the right tube but no replacement for the plastic wheel. Grrr.
We had some of the best meals of our lives in Barcelona but the “Menu del Dia” there is a long way from El Bulli, the so called best restaurant in the world before it closed a few years ago. It was only open six months out of the year, the other six months were spent in Barcelona creating an ever changing menu. The restaurant took reservations in January for the whole season and would not seat walk-ins even if they had an empty table so as not to set a precedent.
The German documentary, “El Bulli: Cooking in Progress,” played at the Dyden Theater last night and contrary to the blurb on the Eastman House website it was not “the next best thing to dining there.” It was better than dining there. Not that I have ever set foot in the place but how good can a meal be? The brilliant moviemakers stayed in the kitchen and capture the Spaniards finely tuned attention to detail.
Watch the staff carefully place salt crystals on delicate arrangements of tiny servings (thirty five plates in a typical meal) was thrilling. And I’m so happy they didn’t go out to the dining room. It would have deflated the intense focus. Imagine watching De Kooning paint, digging the painting and then cutting to the hedge fund manager who had enough money to buy the thing. My favorite line is Chef Ferran Adrià saying that he wanted to bewilder diners.
Seagull portrait, Charlotte Beach in Rochester, New York
I was really saddened to read Robert Hughes passed away. I always like his hard hitting, thought provoking art criticism (American Visions, The Shock of the New and Goya). I often strongly disagreed with him but I liked reading him so much I would soldier on. And when I agreed with him it was fantastic. He slammed a good bit of modern art and champions Philip Guston. In the Robert Crumb he called Crumb “the American Bruegel.” Wow!
I like this quote of his on the art market. “If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts, what would happen to one’s sense of literature – the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse? What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.”
USA vs. Japan
Without cable tv we’ve had to arrange our days around finding a set for the Women’s soccer games. The games have been sensational. The semi-final against Canada was was one of the most thrilling games I’ve ever seen. I was so happy to see Christie Rampone’s brilliant shot and Heather O’Rielly come off the bench and cross that perfect ball to Rochester Flash’s Alex Morgan in the final minute of overtime. I don’t think I could handle the noise level while watching the game at Abby Wambach’s brother’s bar. We will probably go for the comfort of my parents living room.
And I’ve been celebrating Marlene Dumas‘s birthday all week.
Sam and Jerry Gallo, the owners and operators of Krenmor Garlic Farms from Scottsville New York
This was the first week at the Public Market for Sam and Jerry Gallo and their home grown garlic. I heard someone ask where they’ve been and the said they don’t show up until their freshly picked garlic has properly dried. I heard someone else ask if they had elephant garlic and one of the brothers said, “We sell garlic. We don’t sell onions. Elephant garlic has no flavor.” We bought a pound of the Italian purple and they gave us a recipe for roasted garlic. It is a bad year for local peaches, apples and even corn but we bought batches of each.
Detail from “November 22, 2003-December 31, 2008” by Evinn Neadow at Rochester Contemporary
Gallery hopping and the summer heat is not a good combination so we didn’t expect much from First Friday last night. We considered skipping it altogether and riding bikes over to Wilco and whatever the Sonic Youth offshoot was in Highland Park, not paying the fifty dollar admission but just listening from the sidewalk. I kept meaning to google Wilco and find out what they sound like but I never got around to it. So we went with the gallery plan and started at the juried Arts & Cultural Council Members Show. I entered this show but didn’t get get in so I was anxious to see it. I loved the hard edged Bill Keyser abstract and remembered seeing it as he finished it in Fred Lipp’s class.
We stopped at RoCo next for the annual State of the City show and just like last year the installation in the Lab Space was more interesting than the show. Evinn Neadow showed a polaroid self portrait from each day of her life between her 21st birthday and the birth of her son five years later. Entitled “November 22, 2003-December 31, 2008”, this time tested concept proved engrossing. I hear Jeff Munson is working on a similar project but no one has seen them yet.
We planned to stop at the Hungerford building but drove right by and took a midnight dip in the street pool.
Flower City dumpster in front of Highland Hospital
Today’s paper had an article about Rochester’s relatively high ranking as a good city for old people. I’ve noticed that hospitals seem to be the only ones in a building mode these days.
I’ve spent so much time at the hospital the last few days I’m getting really confused. I’m pretty good at finding free parking spaces and I don’t mind walking so I dropped my mom and Peggi off at the front door and then wandered around my grandparent’s old neighborhood looking for a free spot. This morning I found one on Mulberry Street. It’s alternate side parking there and at 10:15 AM there was an equal number of cars parked on both sides. So I pulled over under a sign that read “NO PARKING 11AM Wed to 10AM Thur.” I really wanted to know when I COULD park here but I reasoned it out with only one hitch. I wasn’t really sure if it was Tuesday or Wednesday. I got out of the car and considered asking a guy who was working on his house what day this was but I decided to just chance it and walked off. In the hospital I noticed that the nurse asks my father the same question just to keep him on his toes.
My father was in the hospital again, this time for vascular issues. He is somehow incredibly vital and at death’s door at the same time. When they got him stabilized and he finally fell asleep we took my mom out for lunch. She suggested the nearby Highland Diner. As soon as we sat down my mom was off reminiscing. She told us she used to come here for lunch when she worked down the street at her father’s grocery store. She swears the peanut butter and bacon sandwich on the menu was put there because she would order it back then. This time she ordered a Veggie Burger and a vanilla milkshake. I followed suit. They put the metal milkshake glasses on the table so you can fill your glass twice. Killer.
My mom said she hadn’t been in her father’s store since he retired so we stopped in. It’s an Indian market now and seems to be thriving. I remember shopping here with her and I remember the floors and the sawdust and the smell of freshly ground 8 o’clock coffee. My older cousin was a cashier and my grandfather, the butcher as well as shopkeeper, would give us big slices of liverwurst. Everything has changed but the floors.
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at the Armory in Rochester, New York
A thunderstorm forecast forced the move of Thursday’s “Party in the Parking Lot” into Rochester’s Armory, easily the worst sounding room in the city. My parents used to go to the circus here and it might still be an ideal spot for that. If only last night’s show was anywhere near as interesting as a circus. We walked in while an announcer was introducing “Chuck Prophet & the Mission Express” and you could not understand a word he was saying. The wild reverberation here swallows even a loud speaking voice. I have no idea what Chuck Prophet was singing about but the two guitar, keyboard, bass and drums was some of the most ordinary rock music I’ve heard. I am probably too old to voice my opinion but it was as if the whole punk thing never happened and rock music continued to get straighter and straighter for the last thirty years.
Sharon Jones at least sounds good with simple things like syncopation between drums and bass, rhythm guitar, not just strummed chords, and great backup singers. The Dap Kings have studiously copped the vintage R&B thing and look and sound like a studio band on stage. Nowhere near the heft and funk of the godfather but enough to pull off a good version of Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” It was good to see the crowd come alive, smell pot in the air and be in the right spot for some serious break dancing. I guess I was spoiled by some extraordinary music at this year’s Jazz Fest like Mederic Collignon, Hakon Kornstad, Terje Rypdal and Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.
The woods felt refreshed today. We had about .7 inches of rain according to our neighbor and we sorely needed it. The gloomy, overcast, humid weather is a welcome relief.
Ralph Wager photo from RL Thomas yearbook, Webster, NY 1968
After all the paintings and drawings that I’ve done from mugshots it is startling to study one of someone I once knew. My high school soccer coach was arrested a few days ago in South Carolina on sex crimes with a child in the 1980’s. I never could figure out why he left this area, he had built up such a successful soccer program.
I used to play in summer evening pickup games at the old high school and Ralph was one of the players. We did shirts and skins or sometimes brought an additional white t-shirt to discern the sides. Most of the guys were older than me and Ralph was the oldest so he was somewhat of an instructor. He was a finesse player. Light touch, European style, short pass and possession. He wore a beret and drove a Citroen and was hired by the school in my senior year as varsity soccer coach. We went to the sectionals and lost to Gates. I don’t think I ever saw him again. I talked to another teammate and he said, “I would like to believe this isn’t true but I bet it is.”
Ralph had taken some graduate courses at Indiana University and he suggested I go there. IU had a great soccer team and there was talk of a scholarship. I played one year, was the first freshman to start for IU, and then dropped out. I still love the game. We drove to my parents house this afternoon to watch the US Women’s team beat France. Abby scored on a header and on the way home we drove by her family’s place, Wambach Farms. I’m thinking now we should have honked.
