We took the F train uptown on Sunday to see the Picasso sculpture show at MoMA. Picasso hung on to most of his sculptures during lifetime and I suspect he did so because they were his tangible representations of form. They were inspirational building blocks he could live with and use in his work. I think he inspired himself with these. He pushed boundaries in and out of cubism and celebrated the human form above all. My favorite was this hand.
We cut through Rockefeller Center on our way to the museum and I was surprised to see the tree had not been decorated yet. There was a giant wooden scaffold built around the tree and police with high powered rifles and dogs surrounded the structure, an apocalyptic post Paris holiday scene.
Back in Duane’s apartment I spent some quality time with Robert Frank’s “Storylines” photo book. I found this quote in there, a quote that started at the bottom of one page and continued on the next. The continuation was pertinent but the first part knocked me out.
“There comes a point when it is no longer a question of an art that is over here, in a pristine volume, or Out There, on a pristine wall, in a secure category or genre; but an art that has become part of how you see
… turn the page if you must
the world. You no longer merely look (up, out) at it; it is inside you like a lamp, which illuminates all the details spread out below in what might otherwise be unmitigated darkness. You are no longer you without its memory.”
Marsh behind Pete and Shelley’s property in the Adirondacks
Nothing like a couple of days off the grid to get your priorities straight. The “No Service” alert in the upper left hand corner of my mobile device was actually comforting. No emails, texts, news, Google searches or nasty Geo-tagging of my photos. Pete and Shelley made Hominy grits, puff balls and aborted entoloma mushrooms, beet greens and garlic toast over an open fire for breakfast. And I made the French press coffee extra strong. If you were an en plein air painter you would have your work cut out for you up here.
Utica is a day trip but we talked about making it an overnight destination,just for fun. Utica Club beer sort of soured the place’s reputation but it is a cool small city and the old brewery sign still stands tall above downtown. We were here to see the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. How did they ever amass such a stellar collection of twentieth century art?
We hadn’t even paid our entrance fees when we spotted an Arthur Dove and a Marsden Hartley right next to it. They have five Joseph Cornell constructions! They have early and late paintings by Modrian, Stuart Davis and Philip Guston. The early ones are better for Modrian and Davis, Guston’s late work is killer. There is another Marsdon Hartley upstairs, one of his late Maine landscapes. It alone is worth the drive but there is a traveling Impressionist show, “Monet to Matisse” there now as well.
The wood paneled walls of the museum are a rich setting for their collection. The upstairs entrance, shown above, features a choice Jackson Pollack, a Louise Bourgeois spider, and Andy Warhol’s Eletric Chair in one shot.
Instead of staying overnight we had a cup of Utica roasted coffee, the company’s slogan is “Wake The Hell Up,” and continued on to Pete and Shelley’s home in the Adirondacks.
Three women at crosswalk near Robert Indiana’s Love sculpture NYC
Funny thing happens when you first hit the streets in New York. You want to photograph everything. Every person you see looks interesting. Not like you want to hang with them but maybe just take their picture and stare at it when you get home. And then after a few days everything and everybody looks rather ordinary. A bit of fatigue sets in from the overload of stimuli. Maybe if we hung around for a few more days I would have just the right amount of discernment. But we had to be back for our Margaret Explosion gig.
Here’s a song from last week’s show. We have one more Wednesday night at the Little and then we’re off for the summer.
The Great Lakes are also great obstacles. As the crow flies Toronto is not that far from us but driving around Lake Ontario takes a few hours. To get to Detroit we drove around the bottom of Lake Erie. To get back we took the northerly route across Canada where we went out of our way to stop at an IKEA in Hamilton.
We didn’t really need anything but would have looked at something to replace our twenty five year old futon and we wanted to find a new entry way throw rug. The one we have is so old and frayed it has become a tripping hazard.
We had never been to an IKEA and we were pretty excited as we rounded the corner and spotted the sign. The giant parking lot was empty like they had gone out off business. It was really eerie. I typed the date and word Canada in Google and learned it was Victoria Day.
Two willows trees in Winter at the top of Seneca Lake
We spent the night in Geneva, New York and stopped at the top of Seneca Lake to ski in the park along the northern shore. It was a beautiful day but too cold for most people. On the way to Bellhurst Castle, where we would spend the night, we passed through town and spotted a new micro brewery, Lake Drum Brewing. I like the name and thought it was interesting that they named their place after something other than the the lake they were on. Could there be a connection. I googled “Seneca Lake” when we got to the room and found this wiki passage:
“Seneca Lake is also the site of a strange and currently unexplained phenomenon known as Mistpouffers. In this area, they are called the Seneca Guns, Lake Drums, or Lake Guns. These are mysterious cannon-like booms and shakes that are heard and felt in the surrounding area. The term Lake Guns originated in the short story “Lake Gun” by James Fenimore Cooper in 1851.”
At the hotel, near the first floor men’s room, I took a photo of a 1973 Philadelphia Inquirer article about one of the owner’s of the castle. I OCR’d the text in the photo:
This Gambler Is Rich
Kefauver Foe Lives in Luxury
GENEVA, N. Y.
Here in the Finger Lakes, in the wine regions of upstate New York, the big industries are tourism and wine growing. If you own a food store, you jack up the prices in the summer and spend all winter counting money. If you own a few acres of vineyard land, you’re a prosperous gentleman farmer selling grapes for $360 a ton to the wine companies that line the lakes.
But there was a time when Cornelius J. (Red) Dwyer had a third industry going. On the second floor of his huge, looming castle here on the banks of Seneca Lake, Red Dwyer ran one of the hottest gambling casinos in the east. From Saratoga to New York City, the high rollers would gather together their cash and come here to be separated from it in style ‐ all while Sophie Tucker sang in the corner. It went on for 20 years until Sen. Estes Kefauver called Dwyer before his crime investigating committee and persuaded him to find honest employment.
Dwyer turned the place into a restaurant ‐ a pretty good restaurant – and that’s what Belhurst castle is today.
Now, at 83… Red Dwyer spends his days puttering around his 30 oak-studded acres, luxuriating in splendid retirement. He has parlayed a floating crap game in a New York railroad town into a castle by the lake and in his declining years he can take pride in being one of the most successful gamblers of all time.
“I’m relaxing these days,” he says. But that’s a recent development. Dwyer was born in Lyons, N. Y., son of a dirt-poor Irish railroad family. He quit school at 14 to work as a fireman for five years for the New York Central railroad. But he found gambling more profitable. He opened a pool hall and floating crap game in Lyons and before he was done owned casinos in Miami, Saratoga, French Lick, Ind, and he ran another at Cat Cay, a millionaires’ playground in the Bahamas.
His biggest single score was a $50,000 hit from a newspaperman in Saratoga and he‘s done well enough with cards and dice to buy a new Cadillac every year since 1922. “Some years,” he said, “I’ve had as many as three: When I bought my 50th, the Cadillac people threw me a big party.” Dwyer went broke in the crash of ’29, but he bought his castle four years later with money he made running booze by speedboat into the State from Canada. His only arrest was in 1931 when the Feds nailed him for illegal possession of alcohol. He paid a $10,000 fine.
The castle itself is a monstrous, 26-room affair, ornately, carved on the inside and ivy-covered outside. It was built in 1888 by a family named Harron, direct decedents of Henry Clay of Ohio. Dwyer can’t guess at its current worth.
“It’s irreplaceable,” he says. “You just couldn’t build it again.”
Today the castle is Dwyer’s only holding. He says the politicians forced him out of Saratoga by charging outrageous sums for graft. In Geneva the local pols had less expensive tastes.
“A young man couldn’t make it today the way I made it,” he says. “There’s too much mob control in gambling now. I knew them all in my day but they never bothered me. Why not? Well, I was lucky, I guess.”
We’d had been talking about driving down to Ithaca for a week or more. Every day there was some obstacle that prevented us from leaving town. Finally we saw an an opening and took it. Weather is always a concern in mid January. We will never forget the experience of driving back from there with our car doors open so we could look down and see the road. The visibility was below zero.
We stopped in Geneva and had coffee at Opus, a cool coffee shop on Exchange Street that doubles as a sandwich shop and wine bar. The place was hip by international standards but as comfortable as an old shoe.
In Ithaca we parked in the lot near the library and of course stopped in there right off the bat. We walked through the Commons where there is some kind of serious remodeling job going on and stopped in the book store. We would always find something here but it feels more like a junk store now. Simeon’s was still boarded up after the out of control truck smashed through the front. And the newsstand, which had a great magazine rack, fresh ground coffee and rolling papers was now some sort of outdoor store.
From there we began our ascent up the big hill to the Johnson Museum on Cornell’s campus. I took this photo of the netting that is now on all of the bridges in town. I’ve read that one of the families of a recent suicide is suing the town for not protecting their offspring from a jump into the gorge.
Cornell campus from Johnson Museum
Cornell’s campus is like a medieval city with giant castle-like fraternity houses and it looks even more oppressive when the students are on break. But some of those very same Ivy League students go on to make a fortune and endow the Johnson Museum with its fabulous collection.
Giacometti’s “Walking Man” alone is worth the drive. And then there’s Geneva’s Arthur Dove, Otto Dix, Marden Hartley and Philip Guston!
It was snowing by closing time and the walk back into town was beautiful. We stopped in the health food store and the drum store where we suspected new ownership. Nothing stays the same except the Moosewood Restaurant.
Instead of settling in for dinner while the snow came down we drove out of town and stopped n Geneva again where we had a fantastic meal at Red Dove (a nod to Arthur). Geneva is the new Ithaca.
Paul and Peggi panorama iPhone shot by Duane Sherwood at Rich Serra show in Chelsea
Duane asked me if I was going to write about this and I didn’t answer. I figured I would but I kind of thought I would have been fully recovered by now.
It was dark, exactly a week ago about this time of day and we were headed out of Chelsea and back to Brooklyn. We were crossing 8th Avenue and I was talking to Peggi. I had my hands in my pocket because it was cold and I was looking for the subway stop on the other corner when my right foot tripped over a curb, part of the meridian in the middle of the road. I went down quick. I think I broke my fall with my knee and my elbow but mostly it was a body slam to the concrete. It knocked the wind out me and I found myself gasping for breath for the duration of the next light. I shook it off and finished crossing the street but felt weak so we went in the coffee shop on the corner. I sat at a stool but felt like I was going to faint. Instead of doing that I laid down on the floor of the coffee shop.
Peggi went for water and I guess the workers called an ambulance. By the time they showed up I was fine. They checked my blood pressure, cracked a few jokes and I had to sign something that said I refused treatment. I guess I had a premonition that something like this would happen. The day before I was reminding Peggi how my Aunt Isabel fell in the city when she was down for my brother’s wedding. They got married in a restaurant on Morningside Heights at the top of a building on Columbia’s campus. She was probably about the same age I am now.
I still can’t roll over in bed, or laugh without shooting pain but it could have been a lot worse. I might need a helmet or something. Duane took this shot earlier in the day on his phone.
Even though we had stayed up way too late two nights in a row with Pete and Shelley we arrived at Penn Station ready to roll on Friday afternoon. It was a beautiful day for train travel and we had seats on the Hudson side. Travel by train is so civilized, you feel well rested rather than exhausted we you arrive.
We walked downtown into Chelsea and headed west on 26th Street where we spotted a gallery with a Sigmar Polke show or drawings and photos and just a little further down a great show of Robert Motherwell works on paper. Across the street we spotted a really garish painting of dancers holding hands in a circle ala Matisse. I said something like “That’s probably not worth crossing the street for” but we did. It was a David Hockney show of recent paintings. Really quite wonderful. I loved his portraits.
Same block of the same street, a killer Picasso show at Pace, “Picasso & Jacqueline.” An artist and his model painting from the Albright Know was here. This stuff is way too meaty for the contemporary, free galleries in Chelsea. We couldn’t do the show justice before having to leave for dinner.
I had tried finding a Spanish restaurant to make reservations at while we were still in Rochester. We wanted to hook up with Duane when he finished work and both places I picked were booked so I let OpenTable suggest a place, “Txikito,” a Basque restaurant with pinxtos (small portions). What a crazy language. How would a guy from Rochester pronounce the name of the joint?
We started with a bottle of Marques de Vitoria Rioja and in succession split Pimientos de Padron, olives, Endives with walnuts and blue cheese, Cod Pil Pil, cheese and porcini mushrooms, and Pulpo con limon y paprika.
Buildings near Saxon Recording in Rochester, New York
What do they call those big rocks, really big rocks, that stick out of the ground in the Adirondacks and White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains in Vermont and even in Maine? Maybe they are everywhere. There is a name for them that I have heard my father use and maybe Bob Mahoney, a geologist. We spotted a few near the side of the road. We needed internet access to find out.
As luck would have it, Alice and Julio used the term in conversation our first day in Maine.
The Grotto of the Agony at St. Michael’s Mission House in Conesus, New York
There is no way in hell that the Evangelical group that has taken over St. Michael’s Mission House in Conesus, New York will eve restore the The Grotto of the Agony. Christians have a lot in common but only Catholics wallow in the details of Christ’s crucifixion by entertaining thoughts of or practicing self-flagellation as penance for atonement their sins or as a path to sanctity.
We were in the back seat of Jeff and Mary Kaye’s car last week, traveling south along the western edge of Hemlock Lake, on a small country road when we came across a huge abandoned complex. The former seminary for “Societas Verbi Divini” or Divine Word Fathers is the perfect setting for “ruin porn” or a horror movie. The missionary order left the complex in the mid eighties and took the statues off their pedistals.
An Evangelical group has taken possession of the grounds and a caretaker told us about the “Grotto of the Agony.” We wandered around and found concrete structures for the fourteen outdoor stations of the cross that had been stripped of the depictions of Christ’s final hours. A life size cross near the Grotto showed signs of the body that had once been nailed to it. The Grotto’s centerpiece was a stone, cave-like structure that had been built into the hillside. I took some photos in the early nineties, studies for recasting the stations of the cross, and I really need to get back on that project.
There are a few websites devoted to St. Michael’s, one official and one fan-based.
Some people only know Pete and Shelley for their dandelion wine. It is superb and only seems to get better every year. The yield is small but the reputation is huge. It richly deserves the smiley face on the label.
We know Pete to be a fabulous chef. Gumbo, fried chive flowers, vegetable stews and zucchini pizzas (sliced zucchini dredged in flour and then beaten egg, fried on top of sliced garlic and flipped to keep the garlic on top, topped with a tomato sauce and small pieces of pepperoni, green olives and cheese.) The fresh from the garden green beans on toast for breakfast, the lobster mushrooms from the woods and stew we had for dinner were all sensational but the chicken mushrooms and beet greens we had for breakfast were out of this world.
We also came home with a suggested reading list: Flannery O’Conner’s Collected Works “Wise Blood,” “A Good Man is Zhard to Find,” “The Violent Bear It Away,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Essays and Letters.” James Tiptree Jr.’s “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever,”and “The Soul Is Not A Smithy” from David Foster Wallace collection “Oblivian” and Mark Twain’s “Joan of Arc.”
It is possible to travel in New York State without taking the Thruway or major interstates. We took 104 west to 370 to 31 through Baldwinsville and across the bottom of Onieda Lake to Verona and on to 365 along the top of the Hinkley Reservoir onto Route 8 into the Adidondack Park where we eventually followed Route 9 along Loon Lake, Schroon Lake and our destination near Paradox Lake. This area is a dead zone which hardly matters to our hosts, who choose to live off the grid.
Here we talk, tell stories, take long walks in the woods and stay up way too late. Just five hours away (with the above route and multiple stops for photos) the plants and wildflowers, the lichen, moss and mushrooms are all different, not better, just different. It is so beautiful. We are so lucky.
SmallI islands in pond at Montezuma Wildlife Refuge in New York State
You can’t miss the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge when you travel east from Rochester on the New York State Thruway. You’ll spot a woods with nothing but beautiful dead trees. They’ve drowned in the carefully managed wetlands. We’ve whizzed by it countless times and never stopped to check it out until the other day.
It is a bird lovers’ paradise. We don’t know what’s what but we spotted a bald eagle before we got out of the car and we saw a couple of bright yellow Warblers. We watched herons fly across the ponds inches above the water and scoop up fish. A portion of the Erie Canal runs through here and a ranger told us they’ve been trying to keep the carp from the canal out of the wetlands because they eat up all the small stuff in the water and stir up the water so that sun can’t penetrate to the bottom, killing the vegetation. Wildflowers are everywhere but most of the park is just slightly underwater so you stay on the path and marvel at the delicate ecosystem.
There’s a few more photos from this place over here.
Isn’t it funny that a restaurant would choose smooth jazz because they think it is the least offensive format out there, the one least likely to offend anyone, when it is perhaps the most offensive type of music to us. “Suzanne’s”, on the eastern shore of Seneca Lake in the heart of the Finger Lakes, has one the the best salads I have ever had, a mix of greens from Muddy Fingers Farm in nearby Burdette with goat cheese, roasted beets, candied walnuts and Bachelor Buttons on top. The dressing was light as a feather, probably spritzed on the salad. The perfume on the woman sitting behind me conflicted but that’s being picky. To get things started the chef made a small fruit cocktail with cubed watermelon, cucumber and lively goat cheese with cherry tomatoes, red onion and fresh dill. And for dessert we had a glass of port from nearby Lakewood Winery. We drove down there for our anniversary. I counted license plates from eight different states in the parking lot.
I have no idea what kind of gun this Mennonite girl has in her hands. I didn’t even know she had a gun. I was standing on the shoulder of the road, taking a picture of this cute little, newborn calf (click photo to see enlargement) and Peggi said, “That girl has a gun” so we took off.
Terry Gross did a beautiful show devoted to Charlie Haden.
We usually take an automobile trip on my birthday and yesterday we started by looking at a google map of the southern tier. I didn’t want to drive too far so I picked Bliss, New York but we never made it there. We saw a big green blotch on the map, a state forest and thought we could stop and take a walk there. We stay off the Expressways so we drove west along the lake, across the river, and out English Road to Route 19. We had to stop the car when a lift bridge went up over the Erie Canal and then again at a train crossing.
We had lunch at the Bergen Family Diner. The specials were Meatloaf, Stuffed Peppers, Greek Lasagna, Portobello Parmesan, Liver & Onions, Crabmeat Quiche, Beef Tips with Noddles, and BBQ Pork Riblets. We went with a club sandwich and a cup of coffee. They were playing “Today’s Soft Rock.” By the time we got down near the town of Warsaw we couldn’t remember the name of the state forest. We stopped at a grocery store that was either going in or out of business and the lady behind the counter said she had been there sixty years and she didn’t know of any state forest. Kind of hard when you don’t know the name of the place you’re looking for but further up the road we managed to get directions at a Cornell Cooperative Extension.
Carlton Hill State Forest was beautiful, just beginning to blossom. We came back along the Genesee River Valley and stopped at Casey’s place on the river, the newly christened “Rochester Tap Room.” Peggi and I both had a Three Heads Kind IPA and we each won a game of bubble hockey.
Our neighbors were looking at our photos from Spain while we had dinner. I haven’t weeded them out yet so there were some real clunkers in there like the ones that go off as I try to turn the camera off and put it back in my pocket – a giant hand and a view of my nostrils.
Rick said I ought to take photos of Rochester that show this city off to foreigners. I thought about this for a while. I don’t think I take photos any differently while traveling than I do every day but maybe I do. If I was a Spaniard visiting Rochester and out walking in the Seabreeze area I surely would have stopped to grab this shot.
I have been photographing dumpsters for a few years now, not exclusively of course, just when I come across an interesting one. Our neighbors have one out in front of their house right now. We’re guessing they’re redoing their kitchen. It’s been out there for a few weeks and it is nothing but ugly.
In Spain they are always reworking buildings. Some of them have been around for five hundred years so there are many layers of crudely cut stone, brick, tile and old wooden beams. Exterior doors can be twelve or twenty foot high and maybe five or six inches thick. Living with all this old stuff, Spaniards have developed both a proud appreciation for it and an intense drive toward modernism.
The sound of grinders and jackhammers is everywhere. Dust spewing out of open windows is sometimes so thick you are forced to take an alternate route. And then there are the beautiful dumpsters left out on the street until the project is done.
Statue of Christ taken down from the cross and ready for burial
Spain is a Catholic country. Has been since Fernando and Isabela, Los Reyes Católicos, took the country back from the Moors in 1492. Streets, towns and whole cities are named after saints. In the old sections there are churches on every block. Some of them were Moorish temples before the Moors were given the boot and some were even Byzantine churches before the Moors took over so they are very old and always a treat for the eyes.
The country, cities and towns each have a patron saint and they do it up on the respective feast days. In most churches you’ll find a statue of the Virgin Mary (who is revered more than the Christ himself) and a statue of Christ in some sort of Passion-related torment. These two statues stand apart from the many others because they are the ones that are trotted out and lugged through the streets on floats during Holy Week, the last week of Lent and week immediately before Easter.
These arcane customs and the idolization of the saints were always my favorite parts of church when I was growing up. I collected holy cards like baseball cards and pick up a short stack each time we visit Spain. I still love this stuff and am happy to get reacquainted with the religion I left behind so long ago.
