Winter Garden It’s not a matter of if. It’s a ma…

Winter Garden

It’s not a matter of if.
It’s a matter of when.

That’s basically how the review of Without Precedent, a book by 9-11 Commission co-chairs Thomas H. Keane and Lee H. Hamilton, ends in last Sunday’s New YorkTimes Book Review.

I think it’s a safe bet.

On Feb, 26, 1993, I took the ferry from Hoboken to the World Financial Center on the way to work. It was an extravagant thing to do, given that I was working on 57th Street at the time. Taking the ferry meant having to take a 20-minute subway ride from the financial district, as opposed to a 5-minute ride from 34th Street if I crossed the river on the Path train. There was also a Path train to the World Trade Center, but I never rode that. If I was going to end up that far downtown, I was going to cross on the open ferry.

I enjoyed taking the long way to work. A boat ride beats riding a subway under a river, and cruising up to the foot of the towers—the World Financial Center and the World Trade Center—made for spectacular sightseeing. I loved the net effect of old skyscrapers, such as the Woolworth Building, clustering with the newer glass towers at the base of the soaring WTC. On clear days, it was like a monumental glass and concrete forest. On foggy days, it was a mountain and a monolith. It was different every day.

There’s not much to look at from the windows of a Path train under the river.

My walk from the ferry landing to the uptown subway started at the World Financial Center marina—the most expensive place to park a boat anywhere, I believe. One of the more preposterous yachts had a small blue helicopter perched on its roof. Donald Trump had a boat in that water. From there, I entered the Winter Garden in front of the World Financial Center, a large glass-fronted structure with palm trees in it. It had a pricy mall on its mezzanine, and there was often a stage set up for some event or another against the glass frontage. The backdrop of the stage, therefore, included the marina, the Hudson, and New Jersey. I exited the Winter Garden on the far side after climbing the large marble staircase that spanned three sides of the polygon floorplan.

The Winter Garden was bright and wide open. A guy I worked with said climbing the stairs gave him terrible vertigo. He never went in the place.

Next, I crossed an enclosed elevated walkway called the North Bridge. It crossed over the West Side Highway to Tower One of the WTC. I would pass through the lobby of Tower One and go downstairs to a less glitzy mall than the one at the World Financial Center. At the far end of the midway was the subway—the N or R train took me to 57th Street.

That February morning, I noticed that Don Imus was broadcasting live from the Winter Garden stage. Not worth stopping, I thought. I was already pushing it for time. And it was Don Imus.

I usually stopped at night. Sometimes there would be something great, like an orchestra playing a new score to W.F. Murnau’s horror classic Nosferatu with the 1922 silent film showing on a large screen above the stage. Sometimes it was sheer spectacle. Once I saw Robert Fripp recording overlapping tape loops of sythesized guitar noise, playing the random pile up of sound to a rather large audience. This didn’t belong on a stage. It belonged in his basement. I was riveted.

No, Imus didn’t hold me up at all.

When I got back from lunch that afternoon (another bit of extravagance—I hit an art dealers’ convention at the Park Avenue Armory) , I heard about the explosion at the World Trade Center. Everyone looked out the southwest corner window of our 26th floor office. We couldn’t see much. The first reports on the radio said that a transformer exploded at the Path station, which was completely believable. I think a rattled Don Imus, right there on the scene, was the first with that speculation. I imagine him, mic in hand, looking around under the table for his cowboy hat. But, listening to the radio later, we learned that this was a little bigger than an electrical fire on the tracks.

It was a bomb. A truck bomb, as it turned out, set off several floors down in the parking garage under the towers. This suggested serious penetration—a lot of driving around underground before detonation. Six people died and thousands were injured. The evacuation of workers from the smoke-filled towers made for big drama throughout the day. It was noted that the narrow stairway evacuation route was somewhat inadequate for such tall buildings. It was snowing. On TV we saw people leaving the building, some with their faces, especially their noses and mouths, blackened by smoke. They had snowflakes in their hair and on their shoulders and terror in their irritated eyes.

At nearly 8:00 pm in Hoboken—I took the 34th Street Path train back, of course—a few people were still milling around with blackened mouths and noses. At that hour they looked like tired, late train commuters who happened to have had a Warner Brothers cartoon bomb go off in their faces earlier in the day. It was beyond strange.

The WTC opened again several months later. The entire perimeter of the building was lined with huge planters to keep all vehicles a safe distance away. The lobby would from then on be crowded with people passing through new security turnstiles to get on the high speed elevators. I’d see this pretty much every morning after 2000 when my company moved our offices to William Street, three blocks from the WTC Plaza. The ferry would become my most direct route to work.

Sometimes in the North Bridge there would be a crafts fair. There was a big one at Christmastime—I did almost all my Christmas shopping there one year. I bought Maureen’s favorite hat there. And once a year there would be a display of photographs that won Associated Press photojournalism awards. Most of the photos had to do with war, poverty, or terrorism, usually in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America or London.

A lot of people who worked in the towers said they figured lightning wouldn’t strike twice. I was of the other school. It was usually in the North Bridge, especially during the AP awards show, that I consciously thought they’d strike again at this obvious target.

Vanx

WTC : I, II, III, IV, V, VI

. Annals of the Carter Years . Chain Lightning Ji…

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Annals of the Carter Years
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Chain Lightning

Jim Day was the laughing Buddha. I met him my first summer as a counselor at Elks Camp Moore, a hilltop sleepover camp for developmentally disabled kids in the woody part of northwest New Jersey. Someday I’ll write more about my seven summers there. The point right now is Jim and his music.

It was during that heavy drinking week before the camp opened when an elite corps of guy counselors came up to get the place ready. I was in with some counselors from the year before—I was actually in their band. The whole band was up for the summer of ‘76, and we were all there for prep week. Jim and Bob Kaplan, the senior counselors, were there with us.

I didn’t blame Bob, who had the quickest, most encyclopedic mind I’d ever encountered, for looking at my 115-pound Dee Dee Ramone ass with contempt. I myself wasn’t sure I’d make it to Week One camper registration. I was at a do-or-die juncture on my first day up there, in fact. I needed, somehow, to prove myself. It had to be physical, and it had to happen fast. Bob unwittingly offered me an opportunity.

“Hey! Someone get the other end of this refrigerator,” he yelled across the mess hall as if I wasn’t standing right next to him. “How about the new guy,” said Jim, the ready provocateur. I didn’t know it, but I was about to hear Jim’s great laugh for the first time—that high-pitched “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!” that couldn’t possibly emanate from the bearded head on top of that squat and powerful wrestler’s body. His eyes squinted in delight as I, channeling the Zen of refrigerator hoisting, put the box on Bob.

“Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!”

The second act of initiation occurred that afternoon when Jim grabbed a hose that was almost done filling the pool we were swimming in. When he tried to grab me, I put up the kind of prolonged, violent fight that could only happen during prep week. Jim finally got me and shoved the cold water tube down the back of my shorts. I stared at him as the weird icy sensation enveloped my nether regions under water.

“Is that all you got?” I asked.

“…..Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!”

That summer, Bob and I would argue politics after work at the Anchor Bar at the bottom of the hill. Arguing with Bob, who is now a lawyer, was much tougher than taking on a state wrestling champion six weight categories above me in a pool. The fact that Bob would even engage me indicated that his shame under the icebox had been channeled down the path of respect.

Jim and I usually talked about music. A big fan of our band, he was always interested in learning about the new stuff. But it was that period of the mid 1970s before punk broke, so there really wasn’t much to talk about. At night and at rest period after lunch, Jim, a special education teacher working on his masters degree, would often sit cross-legged on his cot in our cabin. Sometimes he would meditate, but usually he was typing on a small typewriter. He wore a dashiki sometimes, and he would almost always be listening to Steely Dan.

That image stuck as I got into the music. An intelligent, long-haired, bearded guy sitting in lotus position on a camp bed. Typing. The lyrics were perfect:

“Are you with me Dr. Wu?
Are you really just the shadow
Of the man that I once knew?
Are you crazy, are you high
Or just an ordinary guy?
Have you done all you can do?”

and

“Agents of the law,
Luckless pedestrian,
I know you’re out there
With rage in your eyes
And your megaphones”

This is what I needed in the summer that Elton John truned to show tunes and dominated the charts.

Months later, agonizing for some reason about turning 20, I turned on the radio in my college dorm room. It was 1:00 am or so when I first heard–

“Learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues”

This was music for a particular kind of guy on a particular kind of night. It recognized my pain and longing. And, like Dow Scrubbing Bubbles, it did the job so that I didn’t have to. In fact, I found out at college that there were a lot of guys like me. Guys like Stephen Paxos, a fat Greek scholar who reminded me of John Belushi. By the time I met him, I was able to talk about some of The Dan’s source material—Brubeck, Ellington, the Be-Bop school. We talked as the confounded next door listened to some horrible crap by a new guy called Meat Loaf.

All over campus, the brothers were sitting cross-legged before their Selectric typewriters. We wrote poli-sci papers and poetry. Then there was the train from Madison to Hoboken and the Hudson Tubes across the river. We were monk-like, clinging to a thread of pop culture that bore connections to the real stuff.

It all made for a perfect connection to the future.

“And you can tell your ol’ little purty one,
That if he ain’t here tonight,
you can tell him forget it, too!” ~
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Vanx
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This post is prompted by our tickets to see Steely Dan yet again at “The Bank Place” on Wednesday.-ed.

. Definition. . 1) War “We shall not enter into …

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Definition.
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1) War

“We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a war, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: his first object is to throw his adversary, and thus to render him incapable of further resistance.

War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”.

From On War by General Carl von Clausewitz, Berlin, 1832

2) War
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From Duck Soup by The Marx Brothers, Hollywood, 1933

New York School Ray Pospisil has a new chapbook o…

New York School

Ray Pospisil has a new chapbook of poems entitled Some Time Before the Bell, published by Modern Metrics, a small press in New York.

Ray is an old friend and former managing editor of mine. We worked together at Energy User News on 12th Street in Greenwich Village in the early 1980s, a time when PCs were a relatively new addition to the newsroom. He taught me a lot about journalism in a rather old school setting that featured several ancient Remington typewriters and Golden-Age-of-Hollywood newsroom personalities. Ray himself was of the brooding sort, given to jumping up and reciting long stretches of Tennyson when the spirit moved him.

His poems are intense and personal, filled with vivid imagery culled from his years living in New York City; his childhood in Union, New Jersey; and his two-year residence in San Francisco in the 1990s. You need to go to one of his readings. He’s brutal.

I like this poem, which I heard and saw him read in New York a couple of years ago. I don’t know if it’s in the new book.

SUBWAY CRASH

For an instant after I heard the crash,
before I hit the rail of the seat,
breaking my rib cage,
I had this magnificent feeling of balance.
My feet were really still on the floor
but my weight was rising . . .

Now as they’re lifting me onto a stretcher,
EMS crews triaging victims,
cops hauling metal cylinders in,
and firemen spraying foam on debris,
I only remember that feeling of balance.

My feet were really still on the floor
but my weight was rising, rising,
and all I heard was a tune in my head,
which flowed into the voice of a woman screaming
(I could see her fillings)
and the pop-eyed look on a guy arched backwards,
feet in the air
as purses, iPods, attaches and Gameboys
flew across the car amid the fluttering papers
and smashed against the poles and windows . . .
Foot pain? . . . 1-800-ABOGADO . . . For special evenings only. . .
If you see something say something . . .Target
Doublemint, lights plaid, plastic seat rushing up to my face . . .

And as the door of the ambulance slams
I only remember that feeling of balance.
My weight is really still on the ground
but I’m rising, rising, rising . . .

~Ray Pospisil

. Planet Hell An open letter to Sally Quinn, Flor…

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Planet Hell
An open letter to Sally Quinn,
Florida Bureau, Practical Chemistry Letters
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Dear Sally,

As our NASA correspondent, you are no doubt as shocked as I am by this whole Pluto flap. And, frankly, I’m elated over yesterday’s clear victory of mythology over science. I know you are too. It’s a big win for numerology over math as well!

What significance does 8 have? Or 28? Let’s stick with 9 planets. It’s a good number to stop at and a highly significant number for a planet named after the God of the Underworld.

And how, I ask you, can something called 2003 UB313 be compared to the God of the Underworld?

Let us not forget that we launched a 10-year trip to Pluto earlier this year. Imagine living through the next 9 years believing we spent $ 700 million shooting at space junk. Who cares if it’s smaller than Earth’s moon? Pluto has three moons of its own—Cher, Nixon, and Hydra! So what if it stops twice per orbit for latte? It’s a planet, dammit!

Exulting in this unambiguous win for our side,
Vanx (at the Pharma Desk)
______
Elsewhere we find that widespread dissatisfaction with fact-based quibbles is, well…widespread:

Stephen Colbert says, “You’re On Notice!”
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Lilly and Dan When I walked into Lilly’s apartmen…

Lilly and Dan

When I walked into Lilly’s apartment, the first thing I noticed was a big, framed poster of the famous photo of Ali and Liston. Taken seconds into the first round, it captures Liston on his back, the Popeye-squinting, fist-shaking Great One towering over him. I assumed that it was originally Lilly’s poster, not her husband Dan’s. Dan is a fireman. They were newlyweds.

I met Lilly a few years earlier when she was editing a business strategy journal. Well, I didn’t really meet her. I saw her at a press conference. My impression: Here was a really effective business journalist. Smart, inquisitive, and personable. She was wearing black and had thick-rimmed black glasses and long straight blonde hair. She reminded me of Meryl Streep.

When she resigned as the editor of her journal, I applied for the job and got it. Lilly kept on writing the business management book reviews, however. I would box-up and mail her all the books we received from the publishing houses, and she would send me a bimonthly review column. The first time I made a shipment, I enclosed a bag of M&Ms with Peanuts as consolation for her having to read those miserable books. But Lilly cared enough to look for the gems in the stack. She also did a wonderful job of deflating the bad ones. Her review column was called “Stack Attack.” Lilly had a system that gauged when and where your aggravation with a book would cause you to want to throw it from a tall building– if, in fact, it were possible to open office tower windows. I thought it was an effective device.

Shortly after she and Dan were married, she agreed to sit for a portrait. Lilly had already commissioned a painting of two pheasants. She had fought and lost a battle for some heirloom pheasant painting with someone in her family, and needed to compensate herself.

[I bought two pheasants at Ottomanelli’s on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, painted them, and cooked them wrapped in bacon after peeling their feathers off along with their skin. “It all comes off like you’re taking off a sweater,” said the guy at the store when I asked him how to clean the birds. He had pulled them up from under the counter. “Now get those things outta here.” Apparently, the shop didn’t usually keep birds in full plumage and he didn’t much like my special order. My neighbor Joe, a birdwatcher, environmentalist, and guide at The Great Swamp in Chatham, saw me pull off the feather sweaters in my back yard in Maplewood. I was kneeling on the ground next to severed heads and wings. He went quiet around me for about four months after that.]

When I came to the apartment to paint Lilly sometime in 1998 or 1999, I saw the Ali/Liston poster and I met Dan, who came home when I was nearly done painting. I think he was in training at the time. Of medium build and quiet demeanor, he defied the stereotype I held of NYC firefighters pre-9/11.

I had a lot to learn about firefighters, really. I remember reading about a man who died fighting a fire somewhere in the city in August, 2001. The Times ran a headshot with him looking stern in his dress uniform and cap. He had a moustache. I remember feeling a mix of deep gratitude and admiration for firefighters and realizing that I didn’t usually take the time to read about fires in the Times Metro section.
________________
It wasn’t until late September or early October, 2001, that I, with dread in my heart, finally picked up the phone and called. A woman answered the phone and I asked for Lilly. She said she was the babysitter, and that Lilly wasn’t home. She told me that everyone was all right—I could tell she’d taken a lot of calls like mine. Later I called Lilly. Lilly talked very fast.

She told me that Dan and one other firefighter were the only two from his house who made it. Dan’s squad, based in midtown Manhattan, specialized in tall buildings. Dan and his partner went to the basement of Tower One to work on standpipes while the rest of the crew went up the tower. I think I remember Lilly telling me that the leader of the group was felled by a person who jumped from the tower when Dan’s crew arrived on the scene.

Lilly, continuing in a matter-of-fact staccato, said that Dan had been working 12 hours on/12 hours off at the pile. That’s what the the rescue workers called the site of devistation–that and, of course, Ground Zero. She said she hid Dan’s keys to make sure he didn’t drive. He was so exhausted. So was she. She told me all of this as if it were commonplace information. If anything, she seemed aggravated with Dan because of the hours he was putting in at Ground Zero. There were powerful coping systems at work. I was relieved and utterly horrified.

I last saw Lilly and Dan at an art opening I had in Chelsea in January of 2002. Lilly was entirely herself again, smiling, a pleasure to talk to. The bad thing about openings is that you have to work the crowd and you sometimes feel shortchanged on time to talk with friends. I spent a little extra time with Lilly that afternoon, however. Dan seemed no different than when I’d met him years ago. I tried not to look too probingly into his eyes or convey the awe I felt just shaking his hand. I asked how he was. He shrugged, and said, “Well, you know. Alright.” He spent his time running around the gallery that afternoon at the heels of his small daughters.

WTC : I, II, III, IV, V

. Know Thyself Through the True Science of Popstro…

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Know Thyself
Through the True Science of Popstrology
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I was born in the second year of Elvis under the song of Jailhouse Rock. This has profound implications. Only by finding it out last year have I come to know myself…and begun to deal.
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A Reading from the Book of Popstrology, (Second Year of Elvis): With the benefit of hindsight, it seems a historical inevitability that rock and roll would emerge as the sole viable force in the modern pop universe. But history is never inevitable, and if you could transport yourself back to the year of your birth, you would see just how strong the enemies of rock and roll really were. You would see how history might well have gone down another path entirely. Without question, the presence of the resplendent Elvis Presley as the Dominant Star of 1957 marked those born in just the second year of the popstrological era with his unmistakable stamp. The potential to start revolutions may not be theirs, but the potential to bring about change of a more modest sort is. Whether they can do even this without bringing the full and vengeful weight of the status quo down upon themselves, though, is another question altogether.—Ivan Van Tuyl

If you were born between 1956 and 1989 in a country where the charting is determined by Billboard Magazine (USA, and we’ll accept Canada and the UK given their contribution to the American pop music scene as documented by Billboard), chart thyself by clicking on what “What’s Your “Sign? at the Popstrology home page. Be sure to check back here with your results in the comments.

Take this very seriously, brothers and sisters. For example:

Birdie Jaworski was born in the second year of the Beatles under the song of Turn!, Turn!, Turn!, by…The Byrds. Think about it.

Vic Sevchek at the Petrochemicals Desk was born in the year of Elton John under the song of Fire by the Ohio Players. This has the deep, hollow ring of truth to it.

Larry Fix was born in the third year of Elvis under the song of Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley. Catch your breath, brothers and sisters.

We are truly guided by our stars, even if they are a former San Francisco bike gang or a smiley blonde with a guy wearing a country club sailor’s cap. Dig the charts.

In solidarity with the people of Pluto*,
Vanx

* My other sign is Scorpio. We are ruled by Pluto. You step to Pluto, you step to Scorpio.

Health note: Scorpio governs the pelvis.

. Saturday . Of Gargoyles, the Garden, Girl Inter…

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Saturday
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Of Gargoyles, the Garden, Girl Interrupting,
and…Goo Goo Dolls?

Cultural Exchange: When the stout little Express Mail package arrived, I knew what would be inside. My painting from Todd. He and I have been doing small, quick-hit paintings lately, and we decided that an exchange is long overdue. Our last trade was about 16 years ago. He got a painting of our blacksmith friend Gil at a forge. I got a painting of the front grill of a Buick. I’d been painting for a few months. Todd had been painting for years. I made out like Shaft.

Here’s the painting that arrived today. It’s the head of a rather charming gargoyle painted in oil on a four inch square piece of masonite. Beautiful, huh? Todd is a classicist in the best sense. And a real American painter. His twentieth century influences are George Bellows and the Ash Can School. I also see Edward Hopper in his work.

He will get a small sunset painting, acrylic on pine, done last year at the lake. It is currently lost in the mail, apparently on its way back to me after a two-week stay in US Postal Service limbo in Maryland. If I get it back, it will go back out Fed Ex. If not, another one will. I actually took a little insurance out on the one bouncing around in the system, but I think I will succeed in retrieving it. If I ever need to liquidate some boards and canvases, however, I now have a plan. I can’t wait to see the condition of the box.

Thanks, Todd. Yours is in the mail.

Culinary Corner: For some reason, the garden isn’t exactly krumping this summer. And the woodchuck and squirrels have conspired successfully, once again, to eat all of my pears. All of them. Gone when we got back from the lake.

But we are getting our first cucumbers, tomatoes and hot, red, twisted cayenne peppers. And of course basil, which grows well on the moon. Here is my healthy lunch from the victory garden. The mozzarella cheese slices are the only element—other than the oil and vinegar–acquired from the capitalist entity. Soon the super-hot habaneras, now green, will go orange and yellow. Then we go into production on jerk and dipping source.

Verb-Ops Review of Reviews: Hey, that’s the hot new author, Marisha Pessl, on the book review under my lunch. She’s reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, which I get Saturday. She’s 27 and she’s hot. She landed a big money contract on her first book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. They are comparing her to Jonathan Safran Foer, which ain’t bad. And did I mention she’s really hot?

Hey, I’m not the only one being silly. “It’s Not About Marisha Pessl’s Looks and Money—is it?” asks Jessa Crispin on bookie blog The Book Standard.

Well, let’s get serious and look at The Times. No, I mean serious. The Sunday Book Review has put an “art writer” on the case, and maybe she’s a little too won-over. So let’s check out the actual weekday Times review by Janet Maslin.

It seems kind of bleak: Pessl, a liberal arts maven who studied writing at Columbia, emerges from academia to write a book about academia, marshaling heaps of obscure references to all the English Lit she’s crammed. She delves into the repressed sexuality of the elite liberal arts academic.

Come on, admit it. You have such a manuscript in your sock drawer, too.

So, Janet?: “A fledgling author who invokes Shakespeare, Flaubert, and Allen Ginsberg for a tale of boarding-school intrigue had better live up to her grandiose aspirations.”

Our thoughts exactly. And it looks like trouble, as Maslin tells us how Pessl parenthetically links every thought her main character (named Blue van Meer!) has to something in Great Literature, thus: “I decided to take control of the situation (see ‘Emma,’ Austen, 1816).”

“Ms. Pessl,” writes Maslin, “shoehorns so many of these asides into Special Topics in Calamity Physics that her narrative unfolds in a state of perpetual interruption.”

It is also problematic that the book has been compared to Nabokov’s Lolita based on the opening pages’ road trip featuring Blue and her dashing professorial dad. Maslin describes him as a lady-killing academic who looks like George Clooney. Pessl, who is also an actress, actually appeared in a surreal adaptation of Edward Albee’s Lolita, in which she played a mechanical doll.

Just as we contemplate the damage to one’s eternal soul incurred by buying a book only for it’s dust jacket author photo, Maslin throws us a curve. Pessl’s curve. Apparently, the debutante does something with this at-first-seemingly-mediocre first novel. It gets noirish and good when Blue gets to school and falls in with a group of students hand-picked to be tormented by a more unique kind of academic (who, it must be said, shows up strangled on page one). Special Topics in Calamity Physics, “becomes a whirling, glittering, multifaceted marvel, delivered in an irrepressibly smart and flamboyant new voice.”

Good. I was rooting for her.

Garden State: This evening I discovered a very effective method for finding out what’s really going on in my 17-year-old daughter’s life. Put her in the passenger seat of the minivan, pick up her four best friends and drive them to a Goo Goo Dolls (opening for The Counting Crows) concert at the PNC Bank Art Center—formerly the Garden State Art Center on the parkway of the same name. It’s amazing. The gossip gets going, and they really act as if you aren’t even there. And when this Josh kid calls Emily on her cell phone, we find out what the girls in the back think about Josh.

Father/daughter sitdown a-comin’.

It works every time,
VANX

Earth, Wind, and Fire . The only w…

Earth, Wind, and Fire
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The only work I try to do on vacation is art work. The landscape on Keuka Lake is a painter’s dream—the sunlight, the water, the mists and clouds around the iconic bluff. Sunset, especially, is very powerful viewed from the precarious clifftop property we rent. So, I paint.

The work I do there is an exploration. It is not an exercise. Still, I don’t want to spend a lot of time away from the family. I get an hour here and there. I move fast—very fast—painting in acrylics which dry in a matter of hours. Is isn’t practice–it’s not about technique. What I get are small paintings on paper, canvas, or wood that go for gestures in nature, atmosphere, and expression. I try to reconcile the earth, liquid, light, and spirits into a creation of my own. I tell myself that I will take the good ones home and scale them up on large canvases, but I rarely do. The good ones I leave alone. They speak for themselves.

Last year was my big year for “good ones.” We left the lake for an extended trip to Niagara Falls, during which my ten or so acrylics lay strewn about the minivan, some still getting in the final hours of drying time. There was one of the house, which I did scale up—perhaps the only exception to my rule of letting the good ones stand. And there were several of the bluff at sundown and during the afternoon. Last year I also worked on the north view, following the lake around a bend on the east side, and the bluff to the west as it stretches to its base at Penn Yan ten miles away. In one of these north view paintings (top) I tried to catch a hood of clouds that was was breaking up, casting shadows on the bluff and darkening the far vista as the wind pushed through the trees and chopped up the water surface.

This year, my favorite painting is a self portrait–each year I do one extended session late at night. I either paint myself or a fish that we kid ourselves will be worth eating.

It’s tough to think that I didn’t advance this year. But the ‘06 series is actually a little different and I may need to look at it in a month or two. The paintings are more naïve in some ways. One sunset, the last painting of the trip done from memory (short-term—I painted it inside after I watched it happen on the dock with Maureen and the kids), has an almost Rockwell Kent-like formal simplicity to it. It’s the smaller image on this post. Maybe it’s a symbolic fin to my years-long exploration of the bluff.

I don’t know. It’s unlilely that I’ll take up jogging by next summer.

Vanx

.les café du mal.

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les café du mal

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