Knickerbocker

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After my mother died when I was ten years old, my father quickly re-married and we moved to 363 Knickerbocker Road Tenafly, New Jersey. It was a Brady Bunch type of situation with two families quickly merging. Sons and daughters in both families were of the marrying age so not every sibling moved into the new house.

One of my older brothers stayed in the basement of our former home in Dumont, New Jersey. That home was rented out and the renters completely demolished the place from what I heard. One of my older step sisters was having a shouting match with her mom the first week we moved in. Shortly after she moved to California. All told, there were ten brother and sisters including myself. I don’t think all ten ever lived in the home together. If I remember right, an older step sister lived inn the attic while my step brother, who was just about my age, and I shared a bunk bed. My younger sister had her own bedroom.

There was another bedroom at the top of the stairs and an older sibling must have been there. I took that bedroom while I was going to the School of Visual Arts in NYC. After commuting to college each day by bus, and working at a mail sorting facility to pay for it, I had a bit of a meltdown and had to leave home. I bought a tent, panniers, a sleeping bag and a bike and started camping in the back yard to test out the tent.

In the middle of winter, I left to bike across the country. My older brother had gotten a job out in Seattle and that became my final destination. This was my way to leave the nest and take flight. It wasn’t an easy flight, but now every choice was my own. If I could make it across the country I could accomplish anything I set my mind to.

SS “Lost” Texts

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The US Secret Service (SS) erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, shortly after they were requested by oversight officials investigating the agency’s response to the US Capitol riot, according to a letter given to the House select committee investigating the insurrection and first obtained by CNN.

The National Archives and Records Administration is investigating the “alleged unauthorized deletion” of a large cache of text messages sent by Secret Service officials in the days surrounding the attack. There are only two explanations for the deletions, one is stupidity and the other is malicious intent to hide evidence.

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general, who is charged with overseeing the Secret Service, has criticized the agency’s handling of the matter and said some of the messages were deleted after he requested them in February 2021.

The SS ushered then-Vice President Mike Pence to a secure loading dock beneath Capitol grounds while the Jan. 6 attack was underway. Pence aides have described efforts by his detail to get Pence to leave the Capitol in his motorcade, which Pence refused to do, contending that he wanted to remain in the Capitol until the counting of electoral votes was complete. The vice president’s motorcade retreating from the insurrection would have been seen world wide as a symbol of defeat. Was the SS complicit in wanting to achieve that defeat?

The Homeland Security Department’s watchdog has opened an investigation into the loss of Secret Service text messages. The January 6 committee is seeking missing text messages from 24 Secret Service employees related to Jan. 5 and the day of the Capitol attack. The committee has subpoenaed the texts for clues to what happened that day, including reports of then-President Donald Trump being blocked by agents from accompanying his supporters to the Capitol.

Senator Gary Peters, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, called the allegations “concerning” in a statement August 11, 2022. “We need to get to the bottom of whether the Secret Service destroyed federal records or the Department of Homeland Security obstructed oversight. The DHS Inspector General needs these records to do its independent oversight and the public deserves to have a full picture of what occurred on January 6th,” the Michigan Democrat said.

Phantasmagoria Photo Shoot

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I went to the magnificent Sanford home of Phantasmagoria founder and director John DiDonna to sketch photo and video sessions to promote the upcoming season. A black drop screen was set up behind a single stool with multiple lights to get a warm ambient lighting effect.

By the time I arrived all the actors were in costume and in make up. They were gathered in the kitchen and dining room waiting for their turn to perform solo for quick character videos. John DiDonna stood behind the iPhone camera and he would count slowly to 15 for each video performance. Each character would slowly notice the camera and then gesture towards it in a menacing or seductive way.

John is always so proud of his performers. He told me about how he met one actress when he was performing in Shakespeare‘s King Lear. There were only 3 rolls for women, so this actress performed as a male page and did so magnificently. Another newer member of the cast had just graduated from Julliard.

I was a bit nerve wracked since I knew I only had 15 seconds to complete any given performer. I asked Dion Leonhard DiDonna how many more performers needed videos shot. Time was flying by. The thought was that my question might mean I was growing bored, but quite the opposite was the case, I was desperate for enough time to finish the sketch.

A commotion broke out in the kitchen among the cast. A mouse had been spotted and there were excited squeals as they tried to corner it and capture it. One actor explained to another about how a mouse can squeeze through the tiniest of crevices. The Phantasmagoria cast tell the most horrific of Victorian horror stories. On this day the tiniest of demons squeezed in and caused chaos.

50 Oldest Churches of NYC: St Peters – St Paul’s of

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In September 1836, Irish immigrant, Cornelius Heeney donated a portion of his land for the site of a new Catholic church that had been proposed for residents living on the southwest side of Fulton Street. When the new St. Paul’s Church was built, it occupied a large field on the corner of Heeney’s farm, now the corner of Congress and Court Streets.

At 234 Congress St, Brooklyn, N.Y., much of St. Paul’s church at Court and Congress Streets was designed and built about 1838 by Gamaliel King, one of the architects of Brooklyn Borough Hall, allowing the claim that this church is the oldest Catholic church in continuous use in Brooklyn. Dedication of the completed edifice took place on January 21, 1838, with the Bishop of the Diocese of New York, John DuBois, presiding. Less then ten years later, on May 3, 1848, Heeney passed away. His body was buried in the back garden of the church.

Over the years, there have been so many additions and renovations that very little remains of King’s original design. The steeple was added in the 1860’s, and other enlargements were made. The church fronts on Court Street, the chapel and former rectory on Congress Street. For a while, the parish had three names: St. Peter (from the church on Hicks Street that is now a condo), Our Lady of Pilar, and St. Paul. The signs now name it as the parish of St. Peter and St. Agnes, with services alternating between the two church buildings.

 

50 Oldest Churches of NYC: Church of the Ascension

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The Church of the Ascension was incorporated as a Protestant Episcopal parish of the Diocese of New York on October 1, 1827. On April 15, 1828 the cornerstone for the new church was placed in a lot on the north side of Canal Street, just east of Broadway. This first building resembled a Greek temple. in 1839, a fire started in the lumber of a carpenter’s shop at the rear of the Church of the Ascension and smoke and flames appeared during a Sunday service. The church and adjoining Sunday School building were destroyed. The Dutch Reformed congregation at East Ninth Street and Astor Place, east of Broadway, made their church available for the homeless parish.

The new Church of the Ascension, designed by Richard Upjohn, was consecrated by Bishop Onderdonk on November 5, 1841. The parish house designed by McKim, Mead and White took a previously existing building and turned it into a Northern Renaissance-inspired building of yellow brick with bottle-glass windows. President Tyler, a widower, married Julia Gardiner, daughter of David Gardiner, at the Church of the Ascension on June 26, 1844. He was the first U.S. president to marry while in office.

In response to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the rector Donald Bradshaw Aldrich opened the doors of the church 24-hours a day for prayer and meditation, earning the church the name “The Church of the Open Door”. This policy was in effect for decades: about 30,000 people visited the church in the 1960s. Although the doors are not still open around the clock, the stained-glass windows are illuminated at night.

On September 11, 2001, New Yorkers, coated in ash from the buildings’ collapse, trudged uptown past the church. The rector, curate and staff rushed water and paper towels to use as makeshift dust masks out to the front of the church. The church doors were opened and people who were dazed, exhausted and in shock rested and took comfort in the church before heading further on their way uptown to find some way home.

The church became a National Historic Landmark in 1987. Both the church and parish house are part of the Greenwich Village Historic District, designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1969.

PhantaZoom

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I will be doing a series of sketches during rehearsals for the upcoming season of Phantasmagoria which is a critically acclaimed Victorian horror troupe, celebrating 11 years of performance. Since about 2009 I have been documenting their performances, but this year as I emerge from COVID isolation, I will document with sketches, every stage of their creative process.

John DiDonna invited me to join in their Zoom meeting where he discussed with the cast the upcoming season. So much respect was shown for the cast as plans were made for the slated rehearsals. In past seasons, the stories were written individually of given members of the case and then those stories were laced together to build a whole. This year a script is being written overall that focuses more on the characters themselves and their relationship to their macabre fate of reliving these stories. I am only guessing what this might mean, but it sounds exciting.

Many of the cast I have sketches before, so it is always a joy to see them again. Being an outsider looking in, it is hard for me to distinguish them from the characters they play. This zoom meeting gave me a glimpse of them as everyday actors relaxing at home. I enjoy sketching the odd angles that computers get of people as the laptop cameras look up at the giants seated in front of them. So many ceilings and oblique views up walls.

I knew time would be limited so I had to catch the 12 screens with as few lines as possible and quick splashes of color. There was no time for second guessing. This should be an adventure. I haven’t documented every stage of a production companies process since 2009 when I sketched every rehearsal of War of the Worlds.

Spout

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I was teaching students how to do contour drawings and in the Zoom classroom everyone showed their pups to fellow classmates. I explained that I always share aspects of my life with sketches. So I took my iPad classroom into the living room and started to sketch Sprout who was napping on the couch. I was afraid he might be hard to draw since he isn’t used to my being in the living room during class, but her was a trooper and gave me plenty of time to sketch him.

The main point of the sketch was that each line that went on the page was drawn while I stared at the subject. I never watched my hand as it put lines on the page. This is critical to allow the lines to meander and remain open ended. The one temptation to look at the page is to close off a shape. A contour drawing will often not have closed off shapes.

Since my student work a little slower than i do, I went ahead and added some color.

OMA Fundraiser

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I was at a fundraiser at the Orlando Museum of Art (OMA)in the week leading up to the FBI raid to sieve the 325 fake Jean-Michel Basquiat painting that were on exhibit. I had heard a rumor that at a similar event in the museum lobby, that a dead rat had fallen out from a ceiling panel and staff quietly worked to remove it during the party.

Our house guest was working as a volunteer for the museum summer camps and came face to face with an FBI agent as he entered the museum. The exhibit was slated to close much earlier that the June 2023 date due to the controversy surrounding the works in question. The owners wanted to move the works off to another exhibit in Italy. The OMA exhibit might have given the paintings some semblance of credibility making it possible to sell them for millions. The raid came a week before that truncated exhibit closing. According to staff accounts provided to the New York Times, more than 12 FBI agents entered the open museum on Friday, June 24, 2022 and took the paintings down from the exhibition walls and into cars waiting outside. The museum was promptly closed to visitors.

The provenance of the paintings fell apart under close inspection. The owners claimed that the works on cardboard had surfaced in an abandoned storage unit of a California screen writer named Mumford who is now dead and can not confirm the story. The claim was that Basquit had sold the paintings for $5000 and today they would be worth hundreds of millions. In a 2014 meeting with Mumford, FBI special agent Elizabeth Rivas learned that he did not purchase the paintings, did not know about their existence in his storage unit, and was pressured into signing documents that stated his ownership.

Another oddity is that one painting was done on a Fed Ex box. The FedEx logo was designed six years after the artist’s death from a drug overdose.  The museum director Aaron DeGroft was fired by the board.

In a statement, OMA board chair Cynthia Brumback said the trustees are “extremely concerned about several issues with regard to the [Basquiat] exhibition, including the recent revelation of an inappropriate email correspondence sent to academia concerning the authentication of some of the artwork in the exhibition”. Brumback adds, “We have launched an official process to address these matters, as they are inconsistent with the values of this institution, our business standards, and our standards of conduct.”

Should the board also be held accountable for allowing such a travesty? OMA lost all credibility as an institution. The museum has become the laughingstock of the art world. Can they ever regain some credibility?

 

 

Larch Basement

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I was born in the 239 Larch Avenue, Dumont New Jersey master bedroom. I lived here for the first ten years of my life. The basement is where visiting family would gather on holidays. A folding table would be set up along with folding lawn chairs to allow seating for everyone. The thing I remember most vividly were three paint by number clown paintings that I believe were done by my oldest brother. I suspect I may have done a paint by numbers painting in my youth as well. I remember the small of the oil paints that came in tiny little plastic cups. I remember stirring the paint with a tooth pick. I however cant recall what I might have painted. It certainly never stood framed in the house. Chances are I painted outside the lines or mixed up the numbers.

I remember seeing a picture of myself as a baby getting a bath in the basement sink. I don’t know where that photo went. I remember being really impressed with a biology project of my older brother. He dissected a frog and glued all the bones together to make it look like the skeleton was jumping. He also once did a detailed drawing of a knight on a horse covered in armor which impressed me.

In the back half of the main room of the basement I arranged the furniture and hung a large black sheet to create the bridge of the star ship enterprise. Friends came over and I sat in the cushioned chair as the captain of the enterprise while friends sat at folding card tables and acted as the crew working the bridge controls. Cutouts of Klingon star ships would be moved o the black sheet as we were under attack.

My mom was great about bringing the family together. After she was gone, the families drifted apart. Photos exist of extended family seated around the basement.  I remember sitting on the couch and being told by my grandmother that a doctor had left one of his surgical tools inside her when he sewed her up. She was prone to telling tall tales. In one Christmas photo, I can spot a Major Mason astronaut that I had been given. He had a helmet with a sliding visor. I could bend his arms and legs but they tended to spring back until I broke the inner wire armatures. I used to suspend him in the duct work, so he could explore the home’s inner passages. The string broke and he fell down an air shaft. He might still be there today.

Larch Upstairs

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The Thorspecken family lived at 239 Larch Avenue, Dumont New Jersey between 1955 and 1971. The family grew and then grew a bit smaller as daughters and sons got married. The upstairs bedrooms were set aside for children. There was also a nursery on the ground floor that doubled as a dining room. At time there were five children in this small house. So where did they all stay? It turns out there were two bunk beds in the back bedroom. Kids were constantly being moved from room to room over the years.

I only remember staying in the upstairs front bedroom at the top of the staircase. I remember this since I once crawled out the bedroom window and scooted down the roof and sat on the peak of the garage roof. Apparently my two brothers were in the back bedroom. That bedroom has a large fan that looked like it was from a World War II aircraft. That huge fan would keep the home cool in the summer. It exhausted the hot air out of what doubled as a closet.

One of my older sisters remembered also sleeping in the front bedroom upstairs. She remembered since she had little privacy any time my brothers wanted to run downstairs. My other older sister got married a year after I was born, so the house was the most crowded for that year. New borns must have stayed in the nursery downstairs or in the master bedroom. No photos exist of the upstairs bedrooms so exact placement of furniture is a guess.