Category: Lopsided Observations

I went out on a limb back in ’08 but I’ve pretty much stayed away from politics here. I will say we have watched almost all the debates. Some were a lot better than others. I fell asleep in the Clinton Bernie bash last night. We haven’t gone out to see any of the candidates in person. Cruz is here today but that wouldn’t be much fun. There’s a green house around the corner that has been flying a yellow snake flag for the last few years and his neighbor just put up up a small homemade sign that reads, “Billionaires Can’t Buy Bernie.” He put it right on the edge of his property line and faced it not out at the street but toward his neighbor. New York is in play for the first time in a long time and we are having fun with it so far.

There is an old horse path that runs through the undeveloped part of Durand Eastman Park. It’s a beautiful trail that hardly gets any use although it did get a lot of attention when Bulldozer Man drove part of the trail with his earthmoving moving equipment about five or six years ago. Not a park employee or anything, just a private citizen, he atempted to clear the trial again for horseback riding. Some alert woods-walkers notified Larry Staub, the director of the Monroe County Park system. At one point this path skirts a cluster of homes and this statue stands behind a house at the edge of the woods. The base rotted out and he was laying down for a while. I probably have a picture of that on this blog somewhere. I keep track of that sort of thing.

We always had a statue of Saint Francis in the house when I was growing up and I have one today near my desk. My youngest brother youngest brother was named after him. The Paton Saint of animals and the environment, he is one of the church’s favorite saints and is usually pictured in a brown robe, sandals and a rope belt with birds on his shoulder. Born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, he is the patron saint of Italy. He is reported to have received the stigmata during the apparition of Seraphic angels in a religious ecstasy making him the first recorded person to bear the wounds of Christ’s Passion.

Peggi took the survey and then I tried but the SurveyMonkey software told me I had already taken the survey. One to an ip address. So we went to the meeting at the town hall tonight expecting a crowd as big as the coyote meeting but it wasn’t even close. Instead of a simple, straight-forward plan to lay down bike only lanes on the main thoroughfares of Irondequoit (Titus, Culver, Hudson, Goodman, Portland, Saint Paul) we found charts and maps and big print-outs of photos of certain intersections all laid out on tables. It felt like a grade school presentation.

And when we pushed the issue, striped, bike-only lanes on these main thoroughfares, with any the attendants they told us the county is in charge of the main roads in the town. The town is simply repaving the roads and then re-striping them, not reconfiguring the size or shape. The county has has stats on the numbers of vehicles and the geometry of the intersections and they configure the lanes at intersections based on that. We learned the town was only collecting data. A few bike riders will need to die before get bike only lanes.

Preferring to see the hand of the artist I especially liked seeing Jill Gussow’s current show at MCC’s Mercer Gallery, “Antidotes and Such.” She has hand sewn every object in the show. Some are clearly faces but other, unidentifiable objects feel familiar and ancient at the same time like the handiwork of a lost tribe. Equally playful and pretty, hand stitched and cut like Mexican molas with embroidery. This show is a delight.

We’re lining up our route for First Friday tonight. I know we will start with Peter Monacelli’s show at Warren Philip’s Gallery and I’d like to see Lin Price‘s paintings over at Axom, across from the strip club on Anderson Avenue. From there we will follow the wind.

The Hammer Museum on the UCLA campus can usually be counted on to deliver the goods. Their current show, “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” is made up of work from both students and teachers. The school in the Blue Ridge Mountains set the template for art schools today. Its first director was Josef Albers who had been educated in the Bauhaus School but was forced to flee the Nazis that same year. He came here with his wife, Annie, and she was a force of her own. Brice Marden has made a career of her work.

Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Rauschenberg, Ben Shahn, Ray Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Elaine and William de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Eric Satie, John Altoon and Robert Creeley all taught or were students here.

There was no house style, no uniform trend to art making here. Albers encouraged students to look longer, to see how something was made and to understand how visual information can be manipulated. Founded in the Depression and open through WWII the school had a Utopian culture of scarcity, an ethos of “making do.” I would enroll if it was still open. This show was the next best thing.

We used Uber for the first time to return to the canyon and hopped in my sister-in-law’s car for a drive to Venice in time to watch the sunset from our nephew’s office, the Swell headquarters. We had dinner at the “Tasting Kitchen” and walked the magical canals on the way home. Why do you think they call it Venice?

We were running out the door this morning, to meet with the lawyers that are handling my parents’ estate, and I had my jacket in my hand. I didn’t take the time to put it on in the house. I was too busy reading the paper. The zipper in my jacket got caught near the bottom of the door to our house and I couldn’t free it. I couldn’t open the door either and the key wouldn’t turn the lock. I tried ramming the door with my shoulder. That didn’t work either so we left. I had a hat on but no jacket in the middle of winter.

But that’s another thing. What kind of a winter is this? Imagine if you were on the high school cross-country ski team. They’ve had one week to ski. In that week I did notice that cross-country is a co-ed sport. I should have figured that out in high school.

We had lunch at Joe Bean. Ran into Fireball Jr. and Linda from Parkleigh. I was still running around without a coat. We stopped in to see my mom in her new digs and signed a contract for her room and board. When we got home I went down to Jared’s place and borrowed a pry bar to pop the door open and free my jacket.

In the dorms back at IU we used to “penny” people in their rooms. We’d lean on the closed door and push pennies into the space between the door and the door jam. Guys would be locked in for hours. Peggi and I were essentially pennied out of our house.

Gary Pudup, a former sheriff and head of the local ACLU chapter, is very active in New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. When he ran for office we tried to support him by posting a NYAGV sign on the road behind our house. Someone stole it in the first week. Gary lost his race but we are still friends. He and his wife come to every Margaret Explosion performance.

Last night the Little Theater screened “No Control,” a documentary about gun violence, and Gary brought in the head of the statewide group and a photo journalist for a discussion. Joe Quint’s photos were really powerful. “No Control,” the movie, was a little messy. They contrasted an anti-gun artist with a pro-gun, freedom loving, Cody Wilson, who was busted for making the downloadable plans for a 3D printer gun, “The Liberator.” I didn’t care for the artwork and was kind of drawn into Cody’s open source argument.

My father gave me a Kodak Instamatic in 1969. It was my first camera. Left to right, top to bottom, my mother, my brothers John and Fran, my friend Brad Fox, Joey Occhipinti with the soccer ball, another Occhipinti with the basketball, my friend Dave Mahoney, and three neighborhood kids with toy guns. Tim Meisenzahl, at the bottom right, was dad’s financial advisor. I think my dad actually started with Tim’s dad. They lived across the street from us when I took this photo. I have to bring my dad’s death certificate out to Tim tomorrow and settle an account he had with Wells Fargo.

“Hitchcock/Truffaut” played to a packed House at the Dryden Theater last weekend. The 2015 movie based on the the 1962 week-long interview François Truffaut conducted with Hitchcock. That interview, the greatest cinema lesson of all time, became a book, a “bible” to filmmakers. The movie is footage from the interview. footage from Hitchcock movies along with commentary from Martin Scorsese, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader and, of course, Peter Bogdanovich. The Hitchcock quotes are mint. “Logic is dull.”

Time to march through the Hitchcock oeuvre again.

When we were coming down to Manhattan with the band in the early eighties the gallery scene was clustered in the loft spaces of SoHo. Clothing designers moved in, the gritty old factory spaces went upscale and the galleries moved out. Today there are a hundred or so galleries in a five block area of Chelsea and although the art market is richer than ever or maybe because the art market is richer than ever the real estate values in that part of town are going though the roof. So galleries are are closing shop or moving out.

The big galleries that remain are becoming small museums with suited guards and blue chip artists. Just today we saw shows by the op art queen, Bridget Riley, the minimalist champion, Donald Judd, giant photo emulsion paintings from the nineties by Robert Rauschenberg, career spanning work from Brice Marden in three different Matthew Marks galleries, twenty five large Jeff Koons’ copies of El Grecos, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Manet and Picasso, each with three dimensional, blue reflective globes mounted directly in front of the paintings, a move that struck me as John Baldesarri without the humor.

Claes Oldenburg is still doing three dimensional, oversize, soft looking everyday objects and easily filled gallery with new work. We sat in Mary Hielman’s brightly colored chairs in the center of a gallery and marveled at her new shaped canvas paintings. I get these clunky looking chairs now. They are a port to an immensely more playful world. Beautiful Robert Motherwell collages from the seventies filled a gallery on 24th Street. Fantastic to see how he picked up motifs in scraps of paper, a discarded cigarette package, and created a dialog with it. We stumbled on a group of graphic and somewhat rude Carrol Dunham paintings. He’s always popping up on my Tumblr blog. Louise Fishman was at her own show, holding court in front of a wall of her luscious water colors. And of course admission to all these shows was free.

I’ve saved the best for last. Georgio Morandi is one of my favorite artists. He lived his whole live in the house he grew up in painting fairly small still lifes of bottles and vases that he often painted before arranging, theatrically staging actually, on a tabletop. David Zwirner gallery has mounted a knock-out show of his work. Please click the detail photo above to see the whole painting. It is near criminal to crop a Morandi as I have.

Although he died in the mid sixties his work is painterly like that of a master yet dramatically minimal at the same time. The mundane taken to extremes. He is quoted as saying, “Nothing is more abstract than reality.” He does so much with so little. Looking at his paintings is somehow a quieting and exhilarating experience at the same time.

Peggi spotted a familiar looking tall man with a white beard talking to the people behind the desk in the gallery. It was the LA art guru himself, John Baldessari!

There are very few remnants of farm life left in Brighton, a mature, inner-ring suburb of Rochester. The barns along Westfall Road, where there are now more doctors per square inch than Strong hospital, are some of the last remaining. My father, an active member of Historic Brighton, would like to see the town save them.

I met my dad the other day inside one of these barns, now a “ruin porn” site. He was measuring the distance between the poles so that he could do an architecturally true, three dimensional drawing of the barn. He uses the free SketchUp program that was developed by Google. I’m guessing he’ll submit the drawings to the town in hopes that they will be able to envision a repurposing. A long shot.

We are all oblivious to things going on around us but I felt felt especially so when our new neighbor told me he was seriously considering not buying their house because the police in this part of town had a reputation for racism. It was shortly after they moved in when this story made the news.

So with some new found awareness this little sign near the corner of Titus Avenue and Culver Road caught my eye. Almost too small to be seen as you drive by it easily catches the eye of bike riders. I hope it has nothing to do with the nearby Art Deco house with the nautical theme but I suspect it is the work of a nearby neighbor. Irondequoit is the wrong town to be trying to take this meager campaign away from those whose lives are affected.

The sign, as seen above has had a few incarnations in the last few weeks. It started as “Police Lives Matter” in a lighter font. Someone scratched out “Police” and added “Black.” The originator came back with a bolder “Police Lives Matter” and pasted right over the amended sign and then shrink wrapped the whole sign in plastic.

Yesterday afternoon I wrote the word “Black” with a Sharpie, just above “Police Lives Matter” creating this confounding black police message. You see, I not only manage the Funky Signs website I am also a customer. Peggi and I rode by today and the sign was gone.

Apparently people feel left out by Black Lives Matter slogan because I keep hearing people say, “all lives matter.” Well, that wouldn’t be much of a campaign and it completely sidesteps the issue.

Sheryl Crowe’s shaky anthem was a clunker but the Democratic debate proved to be as entertaining as the Republican two. I really didn’t think they had it in them. Bernie lit the fire and Hilary rolled with the punches. The other three one per-centers just set the two leading candidates up. I don’t see how Biden fits in here.

We missed “2-Ton-Tony.” He was at our door and we were out so he left a note on his campaign flyer. I can sort of imagine what he looks like.

While walking with my mom in the halls of their apartment building I spotted a sign “Welcome to new residents, Giuseppe and Concetta Profetta” I am looking forward to meeting them.

I ran this idea by Gary Pudup at last week’s Margaret Explosion gig and it really didn’t click. He’s a former Monroe County Sheriff and then was the head of the local ACLU. On top of that experience he is a strong gun opponent. My idea was a bumper sticker, condensed block letters, black on white, that read “MORE GUNS.” Knowing where I’m coming from he just looked at me for bit and then said, “People would take that seriously.”

How can you take anything seriously anymore?

Sam lives in a home with four other young adults. The five are classified as autistic but, as with everything, the boundaries are fuzzy. We drove down to Elmira to visit him on Saturday. At first it was hard to tell the aides from the clients. That distinction becomes clear fairly quickly. The clients are more interesting. Sam is lucky. The proportion of aides to clients is weighted heavily in his favor and the aides genuinely like Sam. How could they not? He is so sweet.

Sam lived with his parents, friends of ours, for more than thirty years and now this is his home. He is happy here. He is healthier, much thinner and calmer. Sam took us up to see his room, his computer, game console and tv with the connection ports in the front where he likes them. Sam has always been a computer buff and he calls us every time Apple has an update to make sure we know about it.

An aide gave Sam his medication and we took off. He had an agenda. First stop was Five Guys, a hamburger joint. They pride themselves on their fries. They keep the skin on and use only peanut oil. The three of us ordered grilled cheese and fries and we each had a pop. Next stop was Target where Sam bought some new headphones, a gallon of grape juice with no sugar added and a big box of Scooby Doo graham crackers. We spent a good part of the afternoon in the store and had a ball. In fact I bought a ball, one of those size 5 soccer balls.

Memo to self: Elmira, Horseheads, Big Flats, the southern part of New York is gorgeous this time of year. Wear your camouflage and you’ll fit right in.

I talked before about Jeffery’s Saturday morning yoga class at the Rochester Yacht Club so I won’t recap how beautiful the setting is. I will point out how delightfully distracting the activity on the river is. The yacht club is built out on the river. It almost feels like you are on an island and boats sail past on all sides. The view is unobstructed even when you are on your back because the railing is clear plexiglass. (You can see a bit of it in the blow-up of the photo above.) Yesterday Jeffery had us put out our legs up the wall, the clear plexiglass guardrails, and we did a series of inversions.

Jeffery improvises the practice and his classes have an effortless flow from one position to the next. Consequently the hour and a half flies by. He was telling us about someone who was helped by a particular class. The person asked Jeffery if he could recap what the exercises were and Jeffery said he could not remember. He said if he planned out a class he would be bored out of his mind. When we finished the inversions he said. “This is the best wall ever.” I liked that.

You don’t have to be a member of the club to participate in the class but many of the people are. When class was over a man who is a member, a trustworthy sort, said there was so much going on this weekend. He rattled off a few things and then mentioned the Landmark Society’s tour. My father had given us his tickets to this event and we had forgotten all about it so we thanked the gentleman for reminding us. We stopped back at the house, changed clothes and headed downtown. We found a spot on Washington Square with no problem and walked over to Claude Bragdon’s Universalist Church. There was hardly anyone around and the doors were locked. The tour is next week.

The way Rick, my neighbor and horseshoe opponent, talks, the short stakes in our pits are a disadvantage to him alone. When one of his shoes slides off and he yells I tell him, “they are just as short for me.” Well I found some longer stakes at a garage sale and got my neighbor, Jared, to help us pull the old stakes out with his tractor. We drove the new ones in with a sledge hammer. The official rules have the stakes at fifteen inches tall with a fifteen degree slant toward the opposite stake. Once the new stakes were in place we played our earliest match. Best of three, as usual. Rick won.

This is not the best picture of my father. Even he went through an awkward stage. My cousin has custody of my aunt’s (her mother’s) scrapbooks and she let my father borrow them and then he let me borrow them. This picture caught my attention. This was my first bike. My father gave me his old bike when I became old enough to ride.

We lived in the city over by School 28 on Humboldt Street and by the time my parents gave me the bike, at an age where they felt I would ride responsibly, somewhere near the awkward age of my father, I had already learned to ride by borrowing friends’ bikes. So I had to fake it when they presented the bike. I took a lot of ribbing because of this bike. Nothing that I couldn’t handle, just good natured teasing because the kickstand was something no one had seen before. The triangular stand swung down from the back spoke and held the back tire off the ground by a few inches. It was actually a pretty cool design.

At some point I got to pick out a new bike from a store on Clinton Avenue that is long gone. Seems like it had a German name. This bike was so cool. I would love to have something like it now. Medium tire width, two gears with back pedal brakes. Not a gear shift or anything. You back pedaled slightly, not enough to put the brakes on and you found the other gear.

My camera is still in the shop so I’ve been taking my iPad mini with me on walks. I tried to photograph some butterflies in bright sunlight, so bright I couldn’t see the the iPad display. Don’t know how I managed to get the shot above.

Our niece recommended Old Navy to Peggi as a good place to shop for jeans. We had a banking problem to deal with, a few checks for services written out to a company that we no longer manage, so we signed in on the big touch screen at Eastman Savings & Loan and met with Ken. He advised us to tell the clients, who have so gracefully paid their bills on time, to rewrite the checks. So off we went to the closest Old Navy.

We studied their “hi, denim” chart and determined they offered “Original,” “Curvy,” “Rockstar” and “Boyfriend” jeans in “Skinny,” “Straight” and “Boot-Cut.” And to complicate that they are offered in low, mid and high rise. found a place to sit down and I overheard Peggi telling the young clerk, “These look like I’ve been working in the dust. I’d rather have real dust on my jeans.”

I always have a good time listening to the music in stores like this. There are some styles that never go away and consequently most things sound like stuff that has gone before. Here it is all youthful and upbeat. Can you imagine shopping to Americana? T-Rex’s “Jeepster,” was the only song I recognized, sounded up to the minute to me.