Detail of Colleen Buzzard drawing at MCC Mercer Gallery in Rochester, New York
We missed the first half of Colleen Buzzard‘s artist talk at MCC’s Mercer Gallery last week. When we walked in she was talking about infinity. Her drawings take her to interesting places because she is always asking questions. Her “what happens if I …” process takes her there.
She makes lines and then follows them with other lines and they take shape and form often leaving the page. Strings hold cutout drawings in place and three dimensional drawings cling to corners and spring from the floor. It took her two days to hang this show, a measure of the intricacy of her work. The reward is commensurate with the effort.
John Ganis photo from “America’s Endangered Coastline” show at Spectrum Gallery in Rochester, New York
Someone associated with the photographer, John Ganis, started talking to us about the concept behind the photos before we had even had a chance to look at them. That and running into people you know are some of the hazards of going to an opening on First Friday. Gains documents coastal areas that have already been affected by rising sea levels and records the locations with GPS coordinates and elevations. “Ocean Front Paradise” Rental, Bolivar Peninsula, Texas N 29.53893 W 94.41699 (shown above) is only 5 feet above sea level. This place looks like a double-wide up on stilts. Ganis’s photos are beautiful and we had a good time looking at them without the sales pitch.
It was great to see so many bikes out in front of RoCo, I guess it was free admission if you came on a bike, and then a whole show devoted to the bicycle. Someone told us Rochester was voted the most bike friendly city a hundred years ago. Don’t know if that fact was presented in the show or made up. We’ll have to come back to in this show.
Warren Philips was taking his “OPEN” flag down by the time we found a parking space at the Hungerford building so we just squeezed in. Warren has great taste and always has a nice show, this time lovely watercolors by Mary Orwen. Some friends were raiding the bowl of peppermint patties that he keeps in the back room and someone asked how he keeps from eating them all himself. He said, “I try to limit myself to one peppermint patty a day. Unless I’m feeling sorry for myself. Then I’ll have four or five.”
Charlotte pier in March, Winter 2015, Rochester, New York
We spotted some Pachysandra sticking out from under the piles of snow that line our sidewalk. We picked some sprigs of witch hazel from the bush down the street and brought them home to fully open in our kitchen. They smell rich like butterscotch. We’re two days from Saint Patty’s, our Spring marker, and we took a walk without our skis for the first time in six weeks.
Louise asked what pizzeria we liked and we told her “Nino’s.” We’ve been going there for thirty years, whenever we order pizza that is and that is only about once a year. I described why we liked it, great sauce, fresh ingredients, homemade sausage and thick crust. She stopped me at the thick crust part. “Matthew doesn’t like thick crust.”
On Friday we met Matthew and Louise at La Belle Vita in Webster, right across from the Denonville Inn on Empire Boulevard. They do wood-fired pizza, individual pizzas, and they are thin sliced. I had the “Rustico” with both roasted red and hot green peppers. It was fantastic. At dinner Matthew recommended “Leviathan.” It is currently at the Little and we had gone to see it last week but we never got out of the café and in to the theater. We sat down with Gloria while her husband was playing drums with Maria Gillard. They were stretching with with some rather complicated standards and having a ball. It was all very enjoyable.
I’m glad we got the push for the Russian movie. It’s actually based on an American story. The corrupt power theme works well in all languages. Leviathan is dark and fairly heavy but absolutely beautiful. We loved it.
Dubuffet work in “Soul of the Underground” show at MoMA
“Look at what lies at your feet. A crack in the ground, sparkling gravel, a tuft of grass, some crushed debris, offer equally worthy subjects for your applause and admiration.” That’s Jean Dubuffet writing in 1957 about his influences. A Dubuffet show, “Soul of the Underground,”of mostly works on paper is up at MoMA until April 5.
I started reading Thomas Merton’s first journal. He has seven that were published after his death. Before converting to Catholicism and becoming a Trappist monk he lived a bohemian-style life in downtown New York where he hung around with the early abstract expressionists. His free-flowing thinking, all on the page, feels very contemporary. In a passage about the New York World’s Fair I was thinking, “hey, I was there” but he was referring to the 1939 World’s Fair, not the one in the sixties that I visited with my father. He described an attraction called, “Nature’s Mistakes” where they had animals on display that were misshapen and had missing limbs.
Peggi and I did see a display very much like that at a carnival in Paducah, Kentucky. We were four hours out of Bloomington, Indiana on our way to Mexico. We eventually drove to Oaxaca in Peggi’s orange Vega but this was just our first stop. We had found a campground there and we took in this nearby fair. It got real creepy after dark and this tent with crazy stuff in big bottles of Formaldehyde was the creepiest. I distinctly remember a cow with an extra leg sewn on its backside. This was not “Nature’s Mistake,” it was man’s mistake.
The snow is so deep that the deer have been taking our flattened path through the woods. We found bright red blood in the snow next to each step of one them. I know we scare the shit out of them as we ski by and they sometimes scramble up the hills in the deep snow. They are so much more vulnerable in the white winter months. Coyotes could certainly spot them much easier. I was thinking one of them may have stepped on the edge of a short tree stump buried under the snow and skinned its skinny ankle. The deer are responsible for killing the little trees as they rub the bark off them so it is poetic justice or maybe there is such a thing as nature’s mistakes but I kind of doubt it.
When we moved out of the city and up near the lake we explored all the nearby woods, heading out in a different direction everyday. In the ten years that we’ve been here we have rarely see any of our neighbors out there. One exception is Steve Greive, a self described “rackaholic.” He both feeds and hunts deer but not in the same spot. When we see him he is just wandering around looking for deer or their discarded racks. He’s even been talking about having a Rack Party this Spring, an event at his house where we have something to eat and then head out in the woods to look for the racks that the male deer grow and drop each year.
Richard H. Goss, the author of “Deer Antlers: Regeneration, Function and Evolution” says, “The process of antler regeneration and the chemical signals involved are incompletely understood. The antlers are used for sexual display and fighting, and sex hormones play a key role, especially in the timing. Light signals from the changing day length are also involved.
Recent article in the Times Science section says, “The annual loss and swift regrowth of antlers in the buck deer is one of the most intriguing phenomena in the mammalian world, and some experts think that studying it may shed light on the possibility of regenerating human organs.”
1939 Don Hershey house at 115 Summit Drive Rochester New York,
I was thrilled to join Peggi Fournier, the webmaster of DonHershey.com, at the open house last Sunday of an early mid-century masterpiece on Summit Drive. Directly across the street from the Art-Deco house where Dick Storms used to live on the dead-end street in front of Pinacle Hill, the place has a gorgeous view of the Genesee Valley nd the Bristol Hills. I popped a few pictures of the rounded corner, second story balcony and then one of the front door when I noticed a note. The open house was canceled due to the extremey cold weather.
So we returned this Sunday and had a marvelous time. The realtor showed us this note from Don to the second owners. The place had all the classic Hershey signatures. Corner windows, floor to ceiling windows strategically placed to center the house, open plan kitchen space, curved walls, built-ins and lots of passive solar.
Mike Allen performing at the Clarissa Street Lounge
We heard Jack Schaefer, bass clarinet player with Margaret Explosion and guitar player with Hookface, was playing keyboards with Nod at the Bug Jar on Friday so that went on the calendar. The only question was what time would they go on. They cram so many bands on in one night these days and I think there were four on tap for Friday. We’ve gone out to see Nod before and had to leave before they went on. They certainly didn’t need Jack (I wouldn’t mess with their off-kilter angularity) but it was great to hear him with the band.
My high school classmate, Mike Allen, has been out of commission for a few years now. He called to invite us to a rare gig at the Clarissa Street Lounge, an early gig because, as we found out, the club turns into a dancehall later on. The bar was stocked with Guinness and Red Stripe so I’m guessing it is heavy on reggae. Mike was in good form and the band, mostly Eastman dudes, were real, so-to-be pros.
So, downtown with a void to fill before Nod, we stopped into RoCo and spent some time with the new show. While I was watching a video about Richard Hirsch, the “mentor” in the Makers & Mentors theme, Bleu took Peggi in the office to see if she could fix a coding problem they have been wrestling with, positioning photos in a slider Plug-in on the home page of their WordPress site. No luck there.
We still had a half hour to kill so we stopped in the Little to check out the band in the Café. Hard to believe but it was another Americana band. This stuff is like measles, something you thought was eradicated years ago.
If I joined Spotify and shared my country compilation there would sure to be some missing links. I only version of Tammy Wynette’s amazing “Don’t Touch Me” that I have is the one on the soundtrack to “Five Easy Pieces.” Yes, “Stand By Your Man” and “D I V O R C E” are on there but it is this song that kills me. Billy Sherrill produced it work and like so many George Jones hits it still sounds great.
This is one of the best soundtrack albums we have. And it is not available as a download. I thought, “surly it is a collectable lp” so searched it on Amazon. $3.99, the same price we payed when we bought the lp in 1971. With long bits of dialog and all of Bobby’s monologue when he visits his dying father, the album is as moving as the movie. The dark, dreamy Chopin, Bach and Mozart pieces mixed with Tammmy Wynette, Karen Black and Jack Nicholson is pure genius.
Robert Indiana Love sculpture in midtown Manhattan
“I’m reading this book. Oh, I can’t remember who it’s by and I can’t remember the name of it but if I tell you what it’s about maybe you’ll recognize it.” We were seated next to a table of four-two well dressed couples, who were maybe in their seventies, in Rooney’s where we often go to celebrate Peggi’s birthday and their conversation was almost impossible to block out.
Rooney’s is an expensive place so this sort of thing goes with the territory. Think Luis Buñuel’s “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” When we first sat down they were talking about how much money this mutual friend had. They were saying that she would need three and half million for some sort of move and the woman told them, “Well, I don’t have anywhere near that amount.” They acted surprised and then one of them said, “OK, let’s talk about something else.”
We heard how one of the couples was stuck in an elevator in NYC and the hotel gave them a free dinner and how they enjoyed running the tab up over a thousand dollars with cavier and rare wine. And then the two women started their own conversation about going on EBay to find out how much their artwork was worth so that when they died their kids wouldn’t just throw it in a dumpster.
They started running down local restaurants, the good and bad. One of the guys was in the restaurant business at some point and he said back then 40% of the business was in cash and now it all is credit cards and harder to hide. “I still use cash at restaurants, like when the bill comes to twenty dollars, I’ll leave a three dollar tip in cash.” Peggi quickly calculated that that would be mere 15% and we laughed.
On their way out we heard them lamenting the fact that the restaurant doesn’t offer valet parking any more.
Madame Cezanne painting at Metropolitan Museum of Art
“El Greco in New York” is a pretty sensational name for the show that ended today at 5:30 at the the Metropolitan Museum of Art considering the city did not even exist in his time. And the show is just as sensational but not the showstopper that the “Madame Cezanne” show at the same institution is.
Twenty four of the twenty nine known paintings that Cezanne did of his wife have been rounded up for this show. Every painter that matters cites Cezanne as the man and this is what they’re talking about. The “father of modern art” depicted form in two dimensions better than anyone and he did it primarily with color but followed it up with radical form depiction in his drawing. He is also the godfather of cubism.
He pulls out all the stops with this “Madame Cezanne in Red” (above). The bottom of her dress is being thrown at you. She is very present but only part of this huge environment. We are drawn in on the left side and come out on the right along with that curtain. Madame Cezanne’s face, which can be pretty even as she pouts in the other paintings is sacrificed here and close to distorted in a masterful show of form.
Can downtown Rochester ever get its mojo back? Just about every old warehouse, school, factory or department store has been converted to lofts for young urbanites or old empty-nesters but the streets don’t have as much life as this 1932 photo.
Thomas Grasso, president of the Canal Society of New York State, wrote a dreamy guest editorial for the Democrat & Chronicle over the weekend that proposed re-watering the portion of the Erie Canal that used to cross the Genesee River on the Broad Street aqueduct in the middle of downtown Rochester. The idea has been gathering steam for some time now and is really not any more unlikely than filling in half the Inner Loop seemed only a few years ago. It is a far better proposal than Frederick L. Olmstead’s arcade and certainly better than the bone-headed idea of putting city government subsidized shops in the former dank underground homeless refuge.
So let’s make this one happen. A simple diversion of a portion of the canal’s current path would carry water downtown and across the river. This has four season potential as a big draw, a man made marvel created almost 200 years ago, a giant magnet.
And while we’re dreaming, I read Eugene Robinson’s editorial on MLK’s call for economic justice in 1968. “One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality,” King said. “That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. . . . But as we assemble here tonight, I’m sure that each of us is painfully aware of the fact that there is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.” The speech, made just before he was shot, was brilliant but what was more striking than the excerpts was the realization that we have no politician or civic leader today that can talk like that.
Having just come back from a walk to the lake I am happy to report that I am in the Christmas spirit. Perfect timing. The water level on Lake Eastman had just dropped about a foot. You could see the high water mark on the trees that are still standing in water along the shore. We’re guessing the high winds and rough water on Lake Ontario finally budged the plugged outlets. The beavers have taken down some pretty big trees and the trees have surely worked their way down Lake Eastman toward the big lake where there is a log jam. Nature has an impressive way of taking care of business.
The wind has apparently taken our Time Warner connection out so we are without internet, cable tv or a phone line. Glad I’m not a kid looking for a connection for my new Xbox on Christmas Day.
We had a lovely dinner last night with parts of my big family. We changed the menu at the last minute and ordered greens & beans and lasagna from Proietti’s in Webster, a giant tin of the stuff with extra jars of sauce and cheese to pour on top as we warmed it up. I made a green salad modeled after the ones we used to have with Peggi’s mom out at the Bistro in the Highlands, grapes split in half with a slightly sweet vinegrette and then garnished with toasted pecans. Peggi made applesauce and we had her Christmas cookies for desert. The conversation flowed like wine and I slept like a baby.
Duane usually joins us for Xmas Eve dinner but he is already back in New York and Maureen is trying to figure out the accurate color, painting lights that Duane gave her.
Ice skirt on stump in Lake Eastman, Rochester, New York
While President Obama is on vacation I’ve been thinking about this whole “proportional response’ concept. It strikes me as rather small minded, as barbaric as the bible’s “eye for an eye,” but with a little time maybe the US can come up with a creative way of conveying how uncool the hacking and threats are. Was David and Goliath proportional?
A witty response, an idea so clever that it begins to turn the tables on the dictator would be proportional. Instead of airdropping dvd copies of the sophomoric movie on North Koreans maybe they could figure out a way to solicit Hollywood movie concepts from the North Koreans. Could the CIA be any more creative than the “creative” types at Sony?
In Louise‘s comment to my last post she pointed out that there are two sides to the sign I had shown so as I passed by today I stopped for another photo. Peggi had to explain this one to me. It is way beyond Catholicism.
A few weeks back we visited a couple of nearby funeral homes to get estimates on direct burial costs. My dad wanted to prepay for himself and my mom so the money, according to state law, would go into an M&T account to cover costs at the time their deaths. Peggi and I are thinking we should be doing this as well. Costs are not locked in, of course, so we probably have a few years if we’re lucky.
My dad made a decision on the home and called back the contact at Newcomer on Empire Boulevard to ask if he could draw up a bill and send it out. The contact said it should be done in person so he set up an appointment for this morning at 9:30. My dad had his check book and a different fellow, a big burly guy in in a suit, met us at the door. I said I had an appointment with the contact. The big guy told us he would take care of us and abruptly asked, “Names?” I wasn’t even sure it was a question but I spoke our names without using any verbs or prepositions, just the two pronouns. He took us downstairs past the showrooms with the ornate caskets and golden bibles and into a conference room with a poster of two hands clasped in prayer. A large monitor hung over the table with Microsoft Windows 7’s blue start-up screen. I pulled out my iPad and read the notes aloud from our first meeting with the contact.
The big guy asked what kind of casket we wanted and I said there is no casket, it is a “direct burial with the body in a shroud.” He said they must use some special machinery to lower the body.” My dad was squirming and raising his eyebrows. The next few exchanges were more awkward and ruder still. My dad said, I think we’ll take our business elsewhere and we got up. I turned back to the guy at the glass door as we were leaving and said, “You have a funny attitude.” He said, “Have a nice day, sir” and he looked the door behind us.
I have worked for myself most of my life and I’ve run into all sorts but I can’t think of any situation where the the deal was done, the specifics were settled on, the check was all but written for two customers and two more potential customers were in the office and the guy blows up the deal.
I’m so happy that Roz Chast’s brilliant memoir, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” was chosen as one of the New York Times 10 best books of the year. It addressed the absurdity of issues like these with mountains of grace and humor.
“Prepare To Meet Thy God” sign on Culver Road in Rochester, New York
The local American football team, “the Bills,” are on a winning streak but I can’t bring myself to watch them for some reason. My neighbor says he is “afraid to watch them” so he records the game and looks at the highlights if they win. Last weekend we watched the final Major League Soccer game of the year, a game between Los Angeles and New England. It was Donovan’s last game of his career and they won but it was a sort of sad game. We caught a Premier League game this weekend between West Ham United and Sunderland and the difference in the level of play was quite remarkable. I can see why the US’s national team coach is encouraging our player to play overseas.
We recently became aware of the Spanish activist group, “FLO6x8.” Sort of a Flamenco Flash Mob they combine incredible music, passion, performance and a deep culture while trying to affect change. Watch them disrupt the Spanish Parliament.
Pre show at Garth Fagan Dance at Nazareth Theater in Rochester, New York
Dance troops really have their work cut out for them. I’m generalizing but they attempt to animate music. Garth Fagan has especially good taste and of course “good taste” is relative. It usually means “the same as mine.” Last night at Nazareth College we saw pieces choreographed to the music of Dollar Brand, Max Roach, Bob Marley as performed by Monty Alexander, Aphex Twin, Ingoba Drums of Burundi and Jan Garbarek with The Hilliard Ensemble. The dance has to be pretty damn good to take center stage to that soundtrack. About half of the pieces out-shined the music. And that is a pretty sensational feat.
Small tree cluster on Eastman Lake in Rochester, New York
The water level on Eastman Lake was way up, so high that the little foot bridge at the south end of the trail was floating. Along the shore we spotted the stumps of a few trees that beavers had just taken down. You can see some bite marks at the bottom of these small trees above. We assumed the fallen trees had floated to the out flow of this manmade lake and had jammed it up so we tried to find the overflow drain. We walked entirely around the lake and never found the outlet. It’s somewhere down along Lakeshore Boulevard.
I was thinking about how civilized the designers of the park were, creating these beautiful manmade lakes over a hundred years ago. And then the line from “Hearts and Minds,” a 1974 documentary about the Viet Nam war, popped into my head. I think it was a clergyman, maybe a priest, in Viet Nam talking about the invasion while it was going on. Something like, The US treats us like savages. We’ve developed our civilization over 5,000 years. They’re the ones who are the savages.
Seabreeze docks at dusk in December, Rochester, New York
The yearly RoCo Members Show is always a good one. With one piece from each member it is democratic to a fault. There is not enough room to hang the work properly. Some pieces are too high or too low and many just don’t work with the nearby pieces. So you have to take your time and look at each piece as though you were wearing blinders. There are some real jewels.
We spotted work by fellow classmates and of course were partial to those. Bill Keyser, John May, Maureen Church and Leo Dodd. I put my yellow dot next to Peggi Fournier’s owl. The opening was packed, as expected, and the conversation sensational. My head will be swimming tonight.
Greenhouse Cafe on East Main Street near Winton Road in Rochester, New York
“Time keeps on slippin’ into the future.” It is amazing to me how long it takes for lyrics to hit me. I get the melody, the rhythm and the sound way before I hear what a singer is saying. I have no idea what most songs are about but they can get under my skin in a second.
At Friday’s mini Record Store Day I picked up a copy of the abbreviated “Basement Tapes Raw,” a two cd set of unvarnished treasures from the trove of demos recorded in my favorite Dylan period. Here we have perhaps the greatest lyricist of all time knocking out songs with a real band, rhythmic and rootsy and raw. Garth Hudson’s organ seals the deal. The Canadian band crystallized Americana in 1967 and lyric and sound carried equal musical weight.
This weekend we caught the second set of The High Fallin’, a group made up entirely of WXXI employees, at the Greenhouse Café on East Main. With viola, keyboards, Matthew Leonard’s guitar and an excellent choice of material, the Band’s “The Weight.”
