Category: Lopsided Observations

This beautiful grey/brown palette won’t last so I’m making the most of it. We went off trail today, (it is so much easier to do that this time of year) ducking under branches and stepping over fallen branches and looking for sheds. Thats what our local deer authority calls them. Deer shed their racks this time of year. They become uncomfortable and deer bang their heads against trees to knock them off. Our neighbor Monica found both sides of a ten pointer yesterday and that got us going.

Funny how many people still haven’t picked up their phone books. Nobody wants those damn things anymore and they’re still sitting in the white plastic Frontier bags at the base of mailboxes a week after they were delivered. I put ours directly in the the recycling box.

I miss downtown. I worked at a few ad agencies down there and loved hanging around midtown at noon. This photo from the mid seventies looks pretty bleak in black and white but it was quite lively and a lot more interesting than it is now. Can we get that Inner Loop filled in and just start over?

I have one of our old computers set up in the painting room that streams music from a drive in another part of the house. It’s on shuffle and I love it that way, random with a one big control factor, it only plays stuff that I put in to the library in one form or another. Of course I ripped most of the cds we had before selling them and some lps and I’m not above borrowing cds from friends and giving them back in five minutes once they’ve been ripped. I’ve taken my laptop over to my brother-in-law’s and ripped while we celebrate a holiday and I occasionally buy downloads from Amazon or the Apple Store. And then there were those Napster years and the news groups so there are plenty of surprises in there. If I stumble on something I don’t like I hit the delete key and it’s gone forever.

But the coolest thing about this setup is the moods that iTunes gets into. It’s been on a Joni Mitchell kick lately. This afternoon it really hit a sweet spot and got on a good run. I was struggling with a drawing and iTunes was as gentle as could be. Think Afro Harping or Below The Bassline. It started with a modern loungy Tango Club thing (cover has woman’s fishnet stocking legs crossed) and then a Gypsy King instrumental and then the real gypsy king, Django Reinhardt, a slinky Cuban piece from Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban, a spacey piano thing by Bill Dixon, something from Kronos Quartet’s Early Music release, Miss Peggy Lee, a beautiful chamber jazz number with cello from Chico Hamilton, Pete LaBonne’s quiet anthem, “Arouse The Thunder,” a Nino Rota piece from Amacord and Bill Frisell, Ron Carter & Paul Motian doing a very slow number called “Introduction” and sounding a lot like Bob Martin.

This set got me where I wanted to go and when I got there all hell broke loose with MX-80’s “Face Of The Earth.”

On the way into Manhattan a well dressed, middle aged, black man walked through the door of our subway car and started singing an acapella version of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” He was wearing a small mic and he had a small PA in his backpack with a great reverb setting. We changed trains and a group of three musicians got on. They too had a black singer and they did a beautiful version of “Hooked On A Feeling,” a song I thought I never wanted to hear again.

On the way back to Rochester we were one stop out of NYC when a couple got on the train in Croton on Harmon. We held our breath as they walked by. I tried to give off bad vibes but they sat down across from us anyway in the one seat in the car that faced the opposite way the train was traveling so they faced us. I tried not to look directly at them but she had died blonde hair and dark glasses. He had a pot belly and hearing aids in both ears and he was wearing a faded Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt. They talked non-stop to the people next to them and we quickly learned they had been babysitting the woman’s granddaughter while the child’s parents took a Carnival Cruise. Apparently the two year old is brilliant and this couple had the time of their life babysitting her.

He was in the National Guard and has diabetes so the woman scolded him for buying a big bag of chips from the snack bar. She was drinking a large Diet Pepsi and reading a magazine called HELLO! which had a picture of Elton John and his partner holding a little baby on the cover. Growing up with six siblings I got pretty good at tuning out a crying baby but this was something else altogether. They said whatever popped into their heads to whoever would listen and they acted like this was completely normal behavior. Peggi suspects it was some sort of performance art.

Just imagine what will go on in a new white room.

When the snow is this deep it takes a while to get through the woods. And then, of course, it takes a while to get back through the woods but I’m not really keeping track of the time, I’m just trying to figure out where the day went. And a funny thing happens around here, guaranteed. When you go north and you go downhill. If it was the other way around Lake Ontario would overflow. Still, it’s flat enough to be a one speed bike town.

We were at my brother’s house outside of New York in late 2009 and planning to take the train into Manhattan and then eventually out to Duane’s place in Brooklyn. I was reading the NYT over coffee. (My brother makes it strong, so strong one of my other brothers had an anxiety attack down there.) I spotted an Roberta Smith penned announcement for a show at the McKee Gallery of Philip Guston’s Small Panels, paintings he did between 1969 and 1973 when he switch from the abstract to figurative. I was ecstatic. That was a while ago but I am still ecstatic about these paintings and they are still up at the McKee site. Be sure to click though on the enlargements for even larger enlargements.

Pete Monacelli, who has been helping us with our project, has been creating work that explores the the connection between a a small group of the abstract expressionist and the spiritual realm. Pete mentioned that Guston is in that group but he said he didn’t know that much about him.There is no book on the Small Panels so I went to Amazon to order a book I thought Pete would like called “Philip Guston: Roma.” I bought it for 29 bucks or so but it’s now 225 And the retrospective book I have is just gone! Oh well, just gonna have to savor the McKee website.

Guston painted the KKK while he was living in LA. They were active there and didn’t like Jews any better than blacks. When he returned to figurative work the hooded figures became stand-ins for bumbling humans of all stripes including himself. I love how animated this conversation (above) looks even though we can’t see their faces. He is my favorite painter but then I have probably said that before.

The abandoned Central Bank building on State Street is an absolutely perfect venue for “The City Is Asleep And Dreaming,” a building wide set of installations and performance art organized by Jason Bernagozzi and Evelyne LeBlanc-Roberge. We had a little trouble getting in the door last night. That too may have been part of a performance piece. A piece of red duct tape on the lock had worn thin and the dead bolt was keeping the door shut so we knocked for entry. This formerly grand section of town is still creepy but I have faith that it is only sleeping. Jason’s piece is stunning, the setting, the sound, the movement, the whole package. Evelyne’s two video projections on glass doors in this same chamber are otherworldly and beautiful. Remember Init Two?

Onward. First Friday comes but once a month. My father told us about a show at the Axom Gallery on Anderson Avenue of recent paintings by Kurt Moyer entitled, “The New Arcadia.” Kurt’s oil paintings of bathers in woods-like settings combine touches of early Picasso chunky figures, Cezanne’s bather paintings and Maxfield Parrish’s color sense with luscious paint handling. My father had run into Kurt in the woods off Westfall. Kurt was painting Mayflowers and my father, who often paints and sketches in the woods, was cataloging leaves and tree types.

A few more stops and we were home in time to watch “Gerhard Richter Painting.” We were prompted to watch it by an Angel Corpus Christi’s post. I knew I would love this because I love his paintings. I did a portrait of him a long time ago when I was painting my favorite artists. I threw his away because he looked like Henry Kissinger. Whether abstract or near photographic, his paintings are jaw-droppingly beautiful. I was struck by how he paints, blank canvases hung on white, gallery-like walls, and the way he works on multiple paintings at once. I loved his answer to how he knows when to stop. “When there is nothing wrong with the picture.” I don’t really care about the man behind the work but Gerhard seems like a likable chap. I loved his German assessment of the American openness, how they tell you exactly what they think.

Hard to believe how many mouse turds we found in an insulation packed short knee wall under the stone ledge in our living room. A short brick and mortar wall carried copper pipe that circulated water from our boiler but it pooped one winter when the heat went off while a previous owner was in sunny Florida. We heard all this from the neighbors after we we bought the house and after I opened a shut-off valve in the basement below and quickly spotted water gushing from the ceiling.

I talked to Clarence, the man that built our house in the late forties and who recently died at 100, and he said it should be a pretty simple job to fix this thing. Simple for Clarence maybe but a circular saw, chisel and shop vac can really make a mess in your living room. With encouragement from our heating guy and the can-do willpower of Pete Monacelli we were able to find the weak spot where the copper popped. That ledge by the big window, the coldest spot in our living room, will once agin be the warmest spot in the house, the way Jackie and Jill, who grew up in our house, described it.

One of our neighbors converts his mower/tractor to a leaf picker upper in the Fall. He sucks up the leaves and makes an incredible racket but he complains about his neighbor who takes every opportunity to get out there with his gas powered leaf blower to keep his lawn spotless while surrounded by woods. And there I am up on the roof with our electric blower. I wear headphones with no cords coming out of them to cancel the noise. They pretty much silence the world except the ringing in my ears.

Pete Monacelli is my favorite drummer in Rochester. He has a gentle touch and he is at home on just a snare if need be. He plays three times a week in three different groups but his favorite gig is the one he does on Sunday evenings at the Beale. This guitar-less quartet plays standards and swing. Ethan Lyons plays tenor, Mike Patric plays bass and Gian Carbone from John Coles Blues Band plays piano. We stopped by last night with Jeff and Mary Kaye and ordered three servings of collard greens . They came with pork in them and Peggi and were the only ones who would eat that. I brought the rest home but it didn’t look too good this morning. The band sounded really great and Custom Brew Craft’s IPA was nice.

At nine we checked out the Compline at Christ Church. I had never heard the word compline before but I trusted Jeff’s intuition that this might be good. The compline was originated in the fourth century as a monastic custom of devotion before retiring and it is now described as a service to the community where art and liturgy are seamlessly interwoven. With all of the beautiful reverb in this hall I would say the art easily outweighed the liturgy. OK, I did recognize the English language Lord’s Prayer but the rest was something beyond words. The candle light service was about forty five minutes long and was closer to meditation than performance. The choral group, made up of parishioners as well as faculty and students of the Eastman School of Music, specialize in Renaissance and Baroque music so the weekly program changes. This could become a habit for us.

We hear through the grapevine that a bow hunter shot a deer in the nearby woods. This deer didn’t die immediately so the hunter tracked it to Conifer Lane off Hoffman Road where a cop spotted him and arrested him. We suspected it was someone we know who lives down there but when we asked him about it he said he was fifty miles away bow hunting legally. Shooting at deer around here is not even hunting. This area is like a petting zoo.