Poppin Fresh

POPPIN’ FRESH In my never-ending quest to become hip, cool and trendy—and of course to feel younger and assuage the ravages of time—I have subwayed to distant Williamsburg to eat at the latest bohemian restaurant (http://everydayopera.com/mmm-mmm-good/), I have taxied to the Lower East Side to hear contemporary classical music (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glen-roven/nice-jewish-music_b_6702712.html), and I’ve even attended a concert featuring the foremost virtuoso of the toy piano, (don’t ask!), so when I read one of my favorite gallerys, American Medium, in Bed Stuy Brooklyn of course, was hosting a pop-up show in Manhattan, I simply had to go. Until recently, I didn’t know about pop-up anythings, except the muffins. I first learned about the pop-up restaurant phenomenon watching the HBO series Looking, where Dom, financed by his older boyfriend, commandeers a defunct restaurant, serves his famous Portuguese Chicken for one night and closes before the cops can shut him down. I tried to get into “wastED,” a pop-up restaurant in NYC where star chefs fashion meals from food discarded from other restaurants and supermarkets. As appetizing as that sounds, I’m rather glad I couldn’t get in. I assumed a pop-up gallery was the same: here today, gone tomorrow but hopefully without the police or edible garbage. This pop-up show was called Three Generations: Dorothy Braudy, David Fitzgerald & Travis Fitzgerald. Travis is not only the co-director of the American Medium and a fine artist himself, but the son of sculptor David Fitzgerald, an artist with whom I was not familiar; he is also the grandson of Dorothy Braudy, a painter who’s work I’ve seen and adored at galleries in Santa Monica. Thus the Three Generations. According to Travis, “With mammals there is a certain amount of learning from one generation to the next. The young adopt the traditions of those that came before while also implementing newly found implications, thoughts, and skills, continuing a line already laid out while at the same time re-acting against those traditions. Artists make this process explicit.” There is no better evidence of the creative gene being passed on than the show that Travis Fitzgerald brought to the Home Studios on 873 Broadway. By the time this piece is posted, the show will have been dismantled, and that’s a pity. “It’s an amazing thing that we all are artists,” said Braudy, “and even more amazing that the three of us can show together. Even the Wyeths never managed to pull off three generations at once.” There is no pictorial theme to this show; rather the three generations provide the theme and the underlying unity, one as profound as it is organic. Again from Travis, “The work is all quite different and coming from our very personal ideas of what art is and what we want to make.” Braudy paints with oils on canvas. Usually working from photographs, she transforms those static images with bold and dynamic color. As her grandson says, “Dorothy's paintings are more traditional, but making figurative painting from photographs was radical when she began her career.” Looking around the room, I was overwhelmed by her sensual bursts of colors which have the soaring emotional impact of fireworks on July 4th. The show opens with her Tossing, (1979, 36 inches, oil on canvas) a circular painting of a father in a large swimming pool tossing a young child up in the air. The toss is an explosion of joy as the water cascades around the pair. The father’s expression of cautious enthusiasm contrasts with the unbridled delight of the boy. The water seems warm and inviting, so unlike the cool, clinical pools of David Hockney, another artist who, like Braudy, was seduced by the strange beauty of Southern California. The father/son (or so I assume) relationship seems a direct line from the Mother/Daughter masterpieces by Bertha Morisot. Another highlight in the Braudy canon is “Leo in Italy,” a feast of Mediterranean colors—modulating ochre and sea green—with Leo (Braudy’s husband) lying asleep in a wrought iron bed, the iron casings casting their own geometric art on the wall, the shadows playing happily with the iron. Leo is sleeping deeply and heavily, perhaps spent from an afternoon liaison; I see him as a descendant of Mars in Botticelli’s famous “Mars and Venus.” http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/sandro-botticelli-venus-and-mars. One of Braudy’s signatures is her “Film Noir” series where she works from black-and-white movie stills. By subtly adding brooding colors she transforms a shot into a vivid representation of the entire movie, actually the entire world of this film genre. The dark tone of these searing but non-sentimental works contrast with the gaily colored domestic paintings in this show, highlighting the depth and breadth of Braudy’s exploratory powers. One of my favorites is Raw Deal: Ranger, (2005, 36×47 inches, oil on canvas). It features a figure in a muted orange/brown coat and threatening fedora, his back to the viewer, stalking another figure in silhouette just emerging from a structure (trees? a building?). Despite its bright Diebenkorn background, the entire painting is foreboding, producing a palpable sense of dread. I’m going to call it an oxymoron: Braudy has created a black-and-white painting in color. Another haunting work is Gun Crazy: Rain (35x46 inches 2005) — a cityscape, a sole street lamp in the background illuminating nothing but rain-drenched streets and a dilapidated Feed and Grain store. Here Braudy’s “black and whites” are rendered in muted pinks and purples with TV antennas looking like crosses on the roof of a store and on the houses in the background. David Fitzgerald, the baby-boomer of the three generations, created disturbing and frighteningly beautiful works for the show. “My dad’s work is the most inscrutable,” said his son. “And yet he's always been interested in encaustic and the figure. That's the basis for the busts, but there is obviously more there.” Obviously: the thirteen busts of women were all based on mug shots of female sex offenders. Artists have worked with encaustics for millennia; no surprise these busts have an Egyptian feel, reminding me of the famous Nefertiti in the Louvre. http://culturoid.com/2013/03/artwork-of-the-day-bust-of-nefertiti/ It’s hard to get any sort of detail from this medium so the sculptures radiate a primitive but luminous quality, very much like healthy skin. Before even I knew who the ladies were (David supplied the names and a condensed rap sheet in the artist’s statement), they all felt, well, creepy. Maybe because I am currently binging on Orange is the New Black, I felt a sad familiarity with dead-eye look of the busts, the look the actresses on the series so brilliantly portray. Some of the woman wore dime-store wigs, like the one based on Katherine Cervantes, “a 35-year-old woman from Sellersburg, Indiana … arrested and accused of drinking with a group of teens, including her daughter and her daughter's 14-year-old ex-boyfriend. Cervantes was accused of giving the boy alcohol and marijuana and having sex with him.” Some had no wigs at all. I’m not sure which were more unpleasant, perhaps “Abbie Jean Swogger, 34-year-old former exotic dancer and teacher's aide at Highlands Senior High School, who was arrested in February 2008 for allegedly contributing to the corruption of at least four minors including her own 15-year-old son.” David, who is disarmingly quiet, said, “All these ladies, I don’t what I’m going to with them.” He laughed. “You can’t put them your living room.” Travis Fitzgerald, the millennial of the group, had the most “cutting edge” work, pieces that would be in a gallery in Brooklyn. No surprise there. “My work is a direct result of running two galleries today. I don't hold myself to a medium, but rather follow the work where it wants to go.” In addition to a monumental self-portrait he drew early (!) in his career, and a painting of some evocative, quasi-realistic colorful chairs, his latest works were found cornered off in a small room, isolated from the sex offenders and the colors of Grandma Dorothy. As he and his father designed and installed the work, he clearly chose to “to go his own room,” so to speak, by placing his newest pieces in such a way. He exhibited several gorgeous but subtle tapestries and an installation of a boy’s room related and inspired by Jan Steen’s paintings, “Woman at her Toilet.” While I didn’t know these paintings off hand, I assumed they were the Dutch genre paintings made to sell to the newly formed merchant classes. AShttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Steen The Steens, said Travis, “portray prostitutes sitting cross-legged in bed in a moment of domestic intimacy with their items of comfort and objects of importance strewn about them (lapdog, chamber pot, clogs). They have an inner sexuality, and the portraits pose questions about the objects we transfer desire onto.” For his Object of Permanence I (2014, Woven blanket) Travis working with a dark blue woven background,deleted most of the woman’s body and left us with two sets of legs, one grey, one orange, along with three small articles of her toilet, a chamber pot, a glass and a pair of shoes,perhaps all that’s important to a potential John. For one of the installations, he was inspired to sculpt nine copies of the dogs in the Steens (Kooikerhondfe Reclining, 2014, acrylic paint) and position them in the center of his room so the overflowing crowd had to carefully avoid stepping on the sleeping pups, a piece of performance art unto itself. This multi-generational show was particularly moving to me. I am a musician and have worked in music now for almost thirty years, although my parents, having no interest in music whatsoever, did their utmost to discourage me. They thought I was from another planet, an alien plopped into their domestic life to torture them about orchestras, musicals and operas. In fact my 93-year-old mom still sees my career as a personal affront to her. (Ah, parents!) I can’t imagine what it would have been like with parents supporting my artistic endeavours, despite the personal and financial risks of the future. Travis explains, “I was always super supported in whatever choices I was going to make.” Wow. “It’s a wonderful privilege that I get to show with two of the people who supported me in my decisions, both artistic and personal, throughout my life.” Travis was so inspirational that I will give him the last word here: “We are all unsure, questioning as we go. That, in part, is the nature of making work. The goal is to be sure-footed, striking out with determination as you go, but it takes time and a certain perseverance to get there. All three of us work, question, rework, worry, rework. A familial cycle I am happy to continue.”

Mmm Mmm Good Meadowsweet

Mmm, Mmm, Good What qualifications do I have to review a restaurant, especially one with a Michelin star? None, really, except for the fact that I have eaten every meal out (I mean virtually every meal) for thirty years. I have spent my time and money in restaurants ranging from the much-missed diner, Big Nick’s on Broadway and 77th Street, with it’s 20 page menu and old Russian waitresses, to Daniel’s on the East-side, perhaps the best restaurant in the City. The TasteMakers project was created “for New Yorkers to check out new restaurants we see as forward-thinking and adventurous…to represent the cutting edge of food.” Thirty restaurants, bars and sweet shops are participating ranging from Canelé by Céline on the Upper East Side to the Whiskey Soda Lounge at Columbia Waterfront District (where ever that is!) When I was asked to review Meadowsweet I happily (almost happily) took the train to trendy South Williamsburg, tried to grow some ironic facial hair on the way---a completely failure--and began my life as a food critic. Paraphrasing the Bard, “If food be the music of love, eat on!” I arrived in South Williamsburg in a foul mood having barely survived navigating the underground labyrinth of the 14th Street Train station, a crowded, urine-soaked version of Dante’s First Ring of Hell, searching for the M train (M for Mysterious? Miserable?) When I finally arrived at Mercy Street (indeed, Lord have it!) there was no cell reception so I hadn’t a clue where I was. Instead of bursting into tears, I restarted my iPhone and dear Siri, genuinely surprised I was in Brooklyn, guided me down the grungy-brick road. If this is trendy, I thought, you can have it. The journey started to improve as I past the legendary Peter Luger’s Steakhouse. Ah, the light dawning, this is where the Manhattan glitterati go for meat. Then I passed the monumental Williamsburg Savings Bank, a miniature Saint Paul’s Cathedral plopped down in the middle of nowhere, although the Hassidim walking around in their black coats made me question my metaphor. Finally, in the distance, twinkling like Emerald City, was Meadowsweet (149 Broadway, 718 384-0673), and once inside, my awful journey faded into oblivion as I began an outstanding meal. The welcoming interior is a bright, airy space decorated with whitewashed pine reclaimed from a factory in Kentucky plus a 17-foot herb garden hanging form a loft over the entrance. An old-fashioned mosaic floor, original to the building’s first tenant, a printing factor, added a homey feel to the contemporary white. Polo Dobkin who was the Chef at Gramercy Tavern and guided the much lamented Dressler to its own Michelin star, is now the owner and chef with his wife Stephanie; after an extensive search around Brooklyn including Park Slope and other areas, they decided on reconditioning Dressler’s ground floor location. The people at TasteMakers suggested I order from the special 5 Course Chef’s Tasting menu (each TasteMaker participant has created an affordable one, this one is $65) and I was more than happy to oblige. The waitress asked if we had any food restrictions, any preferences, and then chef would concoct a 5 Course meal tailored specifically for us. Continuing my music metaphor, we left the menu to chance, an edible John Cage-like feast. I was with two friends, so we had the opportunity to taste 15 different dishes. Of the three starters the winner was the one presented to me (the kitchen knew I was reviewing): the Crispy Baby Artichokes with baby arugula, shaved parmesan and creamy garlic dressing, a signature dish. I remember loving another artichoke dish at Piperno a fabulous restaurant in the Jewish section of Rome, but this crunchy, creamy delight put dear Piperno’s to shame. This five-course meal consisted of a starter, a pasta dish, a seafood dish and a meat dish topped off by desert. Plenty of food, indeed, but the portions were exactly the right size (not too small, Goldilocks, not too big) to be enjoyed without feeling stuffed or worse, still hungry. Again, I think I was given the winner, a perfect pasta, the Chitarra Nero with uni, rock shrimp, crab and house-made garlic bread crumbs. Our waitress warned it might be spicy, but the seasoning merely highlighted the fish; the uni was as succulent as the uni served in the best and most expensive Japanese restaurants in the city. At the beginning of the ordering process, I mentioned I loved octopus so I was pleased (and by now, not all that surprised) that I was served the Grilled Spanish Octopus with tomato, fregola and mollica. Suffice it to say that Chef Polo’s roots are Austrian and Spanish (Catalonian) and he likes to keep the Mediterranean menu seafood centric and this octopus dish rivaled the octopus I was served on Mykonos, having just been caught by Tasos, my fisherman friend, and served to me minutes later. The only restriction I gave to our waitress was I would rather not have the Hanger Steak. I was delighted when she served the Duck breast with Tokyo turnips, acorn squash, puffed rice and mole. Even though every dished had been a treat, I think the duck, tender and pick, that seemed to melt in my mouth like a savory M&M, was my favorite. The tiny turnips and squash were farm fresh, lightly steamed, while the puffed rice added a risotto feel to the dish. Of course, every plate was shared with my friends, and Michele a genuine foodie, was rendered speechless by the delicacies. After tasting the three deserts, which I’ll refrain from writing about in case my trainer is reading this article, we were introduced to sous-chef Alex Clark, substituting for Polo on his night off. Twenty-seven year old Alex, heavily tattooed, bearded and pierced like all good Brooklyn-ites, is clearly a disciple of Dopkin’s and was all too happy to share his thoughts about Meadowsweet: “I love the rustic food style. It’s all about the down to earth flavors. The Tasting Menu let’s us play around with some special ideas, to challenge ourselves, as well as offer our signature dishes. I hate to use the phrase fine dining, but we simply want to be a high end restaurant in Brooklyn with really great food.”

EATING ART

The French writer Marcel Aymé once wrote a short story in which the population of a small town, starving to death, suddenly discovered that if they looked at a painting of food with enough intensity, they would feel nourished, as if they'd eaten whatever was depicted on the canvas. I've been working incredibly hard recently (poor me!), the winter weather weighing heavy, and like a member of Aymé's town, I needed to eat some art. So off I went to the Lower East Side seeking nourishment at the new Castor Gallery, featuring young, upcoming artists. The gallery opened in January with a blockbuster show of household names--Banksy, Damien Hirst--but this exhibition focused on their proposed mission statement of featuring younger, but blazing hot artists, Christopher Beckman, Nick Farhi and Matt Jones among others. In this terrific show, curated by Justin DeDemko, each artist created a monochrome work relying on form and medium, rather than a spectrum of colors, to convey emotion and meaning. As this was the coldest night of the year, I was hoping for a show featuring landscapes of Hawaii or the beaches of Mykonos, but strangely enough the monochromatic work generated a heat of its own. Beckman's painting began the show: painted on canvas, a large, empty room with barred window seemed to float in a sea of grey, the saturated background having a crackled texture while some mystical white/grey light tried to illuminate the room (prison?). Maybe it was a ghost ship, floating in a storm tossed sea. In any event, grey has never looked so beautiful. This was a huge departure for an artist usually consumed by color, an artist who has been experimenting with new, iridescent materials. Instead of his irreverent drawing aesthetic, Farhi exhibited one of his signature "drum head" paintings, the biggest I've seen; it had the soothing quality of one of Agnes Martin's sublime white paintings. As a musician, I always respond to Farhi's work although I often wonder what my drummer friends would think. Would they enjoy it for art's sake, or would Steve Gadd and Chris Parker need to take out their drumsticks and give it a good whacking? Brooklyn Artist Matt Jones exhibited an ambitious landscape. Lately he has been working on a series of sci-fi/fantasy works such as this outer-space view of a distant planet. The work subtly changes color as the light morphs in the gallery, which made the painting seem other-worldly. To achieve this space-time effect, the surface was first layered with acrylic paint, painted black, then covered in an iridescent pigment+urethane combo. After it dries, it's coated in resin. All in all, this trip was a much-needed solace in the middle of winter's coldest night. Filling as the Castor Gallery show was, this is the Armory Show Week so the city is a smorgasbord of tasty shows and exhibitions; I couldn't resist a good binge and the fourth annual SPRING/BREAK Art Show specializing in the up-and-coming fit the bill. This year's theme, Transaction, "which explores visions of and commentaries on exchange in all its forms, ...aims to turn observation into interaction and reimagine the trade show platform as an opportune playground, instead of the curator's exhibition ideal." To continue the metaphor (last one, I promise,) just because the menu is in a foreign language doesn't mean the food won't be delicious, and although I hadn't a clue what that art-speak press release meant, the exhibition was sensational. Installed on two upper floors of the old Post Office Building on 31st Street (soon to be condos), each office became an individual curator's playground, filled with art instead of worker drones slaving away at whatever they did before they went postal. Brooklyn artist Agustus Nazzaro exhibited directly across from the Baltimore-based Seth Adelsberger; Nazzaro's dark, anguished work with titles such as "Language 1" and "Rifle Locker II" served as a stark counterpoint to Adlessberger's sensuous, untitled pieces, each with a single color -deep blue, sea green, purple-red--modulating on a translucent, black background. Actually after seeing this room, I almost understood the theme of the show as Nazzaro's works, with their angular verticals and shadowed tonalities, subtly argued with Adelsberger colorful biomorphics. Aaron Gemmill's "To live where other pass (nest II)," lithographic ink, adhesive, and Plexiglas on cotton paper, was another highlight. I had known his brooding series of black, grey and white work with its geometric lines slicing through the darkness, but I had never seen his lighter more ethereal blue work with bolts of white dancing across the luxurious background of undulating color. No surprise these works quickly sold out. Rachel Rossin, an artist new to me, works on CAD software manipulating painting from a digital environment to reality, and although that all sounds a bit technical, her Flower Series lit up the dingy postal office, each flower working its magic, blossoming in the environment. She kindly took me behind the scenes (into an even dingier corridor) where she placed goggles on my head and I was hurled into her virtual 3D landscape; all of a sudden I was actually in one of her paintings. Amazing! Moving into the sculptural world, I loved Frank Zadlo's "Setting," cast, cracked and sanded cement with a pigment in a maple wood frame. The fractured, cement sphere in the center of the flat sculpture became a planet losing its center while a corona of white-hot energy, the energy of destruction, surrounded the sphere. And yet, all this existed in the middle of a calm sand-colored background framed by a simple maple wood frame. "Private Eye," by Adam Parker Smith was the most monumental sculpture of the exhibition. The 8' by 6' work of resin, steel, foam, plastic and wood, exploded with unbridled enthusiasm, as if enormous pieces of construction paper, purple, white, grey and sienna were bisected by a giant orange straw while explosive bits of pale blue and yellow burst forth from the center of the sculpture, a real eye-full. This work was in a room curated by Erin Goldenberger + RJ Supa and hiding unceremoniously near the back wall, well out of the gravitational pull of "Private Eye," I discovered eight disturbing but magnificent tiny sculptures by Chris Beckman, whose work I'd seen at the Castor Gallery. Beckman's "Bedazzled," consisted of melted down and then reconstructed Blackberry's, some of acrylic, some of Bisazza tile, some of cast polymer; Beckman's sculptures were perhaps a post-apocalyptic remnant of our entire society and culture: scary, intense, perverse and ultimately beautiful in their destruction: the entire modern world summed up in eight tiny works. Brilliant and delicious.