Sense and Sensibility

Art Can Be Funny, Can’t It?

Humor hurts.

It stings worthwhile targets – hypocrisy, vanity, licentiousness and pride. But the bite that sends the rest of us into paroxysm of laughter generally comes at someone else’s expense.

Fortunately, they usually deserve it.

“A Touch of Humor,” now on exhibit at the William Benton Museum of Art at the  University of Connecticut-Storrs, is a peculiar assortment of prints and paintings that are, if not rip-roaring funny, at least amusing and occasionally worth a chortle or two. This limited exhibit includes works from the 17^th century to the 20^th and is particularly rich in the work of Adolph Dehn, a print artist whose arch, cutting works appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

Not all of Dehn’s work focused on fat nuns and dimwitted priests, but that’s what’s on display here and, in light of recent disclosures of sexual abuse, seems particularly pointed.

The line between satire and humor is a bit like the line between wry and ribald, and the exhibit tends to float clumsily between the two. Its first images ‑17^th century French engravings of a Frecnh woman beating her husband and, its companion, a Frenchman beating his wife, are unsettling enough to underscore the disturbing current that runs through this exhibit and its companion, the more sinister “Punch & Judy: Handpuppets, Politics & Humor.”

Violence is a disquieting companion to humor‑ whether Punch is clobbering Judy to death or a lodger is dumping his chamber pot onto William Hogarth’s disreputable English crowd below. No exhibit on humor would be complete without Hogarth, but his misanthropic perspective is so unyielding that it can be souring. Old biddies sneering superciliously at flamboyantly dressed Frenchmen is one thing. But Hogarth scoffs, too, at the prudish French Hugenots filing soberly out of their humble church as he does the black man fondling a white woman. Even the starving urchins ravaging pie crumbs from the street fall under his censure.

Daumier, with his brilliant, sardonic flair, had a far less damning sense of humor. He was helped in that by his brilliance at caricature – and by the era in which he lived, so flush with flaneurs. He makes great sport of one here, getting smacked in the eye by a snowball, but it’s all in fun. One wishes the exhibit had a bit more of Daumier and a bit less Hogarth and Dehn.

Dehn, at least in this incarnation, saves all of his derision for the Catholic Church. His humor is less ironic than sarcastic. Nuns and priests paint in the outdoors, blind to the beauty of naked women or satyrs around them. Two clerics in the Bois de Boulogne attempt to advise two luscious vixens, steeling themselves for temptation or ready to pounce (with Dehn, these things are unclear).

Outside of religion, the most fertile (ahem) topic for satirists is sex and there are a few good representatives here, including Dane’s image of a lanky, maladroit teenager with an equally gawky girl, with the caption, “You Know My Dad Seems To Know Quite A Lot About Sex.” Today, that’s a caption with a frisson of “American Beauty” attached. But George Hughes’ painting “Company Arrives Early,” is much funnier and less disturbing. Hughes bisects the painting vertically in this image of a split-level at twilight. Downstairs, a boy on a black-and-white tile floor calls up to his parents that company has arrived. From the thick-waisted, staid appearance, it looks like the boss in his wife. Meanwhile, following a black, snake-like banister toward a scarlet red upstairs, a wife in her black garters and a just-showered man in his rather louche bathrobe, react with horror.

This piece, like Frank DiGioia’s “Wedding Feast,” which looks like a still for “My Big, Fat Greek Wedding,” reminds us of the great human appetite for silliness. Camp works.

But not quite as well the gratuitous cruelty of Punch & Judy. Nearly every European country has its version of Punch & Judy, which emerged from the Italian Commedia Dell’ Arte in the 17^th century, which says something about the public’s appetite for impenitent villainy. The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry has lent several dozen gorgeous, colorful Punch & Judy puppets, all vividly creepy. There’s Punch, with the pointed Renaissance hat, crooked nose, jutting chin and hunchback, dropping his baby to his death. There’s his wife, Judy, rapping him about the head for the murder, to which Punch responds the only way he can, by stealing the stick and clubbing his wife to death. He then goes off philandering with his paramour, Miss Polly.

All of that might be iniquitous enough – to say nothing of Scott Peterson-esque ‑  if not for the slew of authority figures who try to penalize Punch. The fact that Punch subverts all of them – the cop, the judge, the devil, death and even the hangman – says something about our vexatious relationship with authority. The fact that Punch & Judy has been making people laugh for more than three centuries says perhaps more than we want to know.

 Contact: Tracey@TraceyOSh.com.

Dan and Sadie’s Magnificent Journey

No, it’s not your imagination.

That bicycle was hauling a dog. Sadie, a 3-year-old golden Labrador retriever, is enjoying the cozy accommodations while her owner, Dan McCrady, bikes 850-miles from Annapolis, Maryland to Portland, Maine.

The pair has been pedaling through Connecticut this week.

McCrady,, a 61-year-old federal government retiree, is riding a recumbent bike, complete with a commodious trailer typically occupied by toddlers, from his home in Annapolis, to Portland to raise awareness for the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which links major cities between Maine and Florida, often using old rail or canal lines, like the linear path in Cheshire, where McCrady biked Wednesday. While the Greenway is a recreational boon for fitness buffs, McCrady’s goal was not to be the poster boy for the Greenway Alliance. Not at first, at least.

McCrady, who was an Information Technology specialist with the government, is simply a guy who likes to challenge himself. Since his retirement from federal service at 55, he has returned to college to get his bachelor’s degree, run a marathon, obtained his pilot license and become a magician. And, oh, yes, he also took culinary classes at his local community college so he’s chef to his wife of 33 years.

Biking from Maryland to Maine just seemed another challenge. And what better way to do it than with man’s best friend?

“She learned how to get in the trailer instantly,” says McCrady, a medium-built man with a short-cropped gray beard. “But it took her about a week to get used to riding in it.”

Lest anyone imagine Sadie is just a trailer potato, McCrady notes that Sadie jogs alongside the bike for at least 10 miles of what is typically a 55-mile daily ride.

McCrady, who has biked a three-day, 200-mile ride with a friend every year for the last several, expects the entire bike trip will take 22 days, with two days off a week to rest. After all, he says, “I’ve never done anything like this before. The first time I got off the bike I slept for 22 hours.” Initially, McCrady figured his challenge would just be a bonding experience for him, his dog, and the bike. But he figured that it would cost more than $2,000 for accommodations alone. So he contacted the Greenway Alliance, and suggested his ride could help raise awareness of the East Coast Greenway. Only 20 percent of the Greenway is off-road; the Alliance would like to make it 100 percent.

The Alliance agreed and supplied post-card size informational cards, which McCrady hands out to interested observers, as well as flags and a shirt emblazoned with the Alliance’s name. McCrady’s recumbent bike which was donated by Sun and Solvit products donated the trailer.

McCrady travels with a computer and blogs about his experience daily at www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie. That site also allows supporters to make donations to the Greenway Alliance. Since he began his ride on May 23, McCrady says he’s raised nearly $4,000. He hopes to raise $10,000 for the organization by June 13, when he expects to finishe in Portland. On Wednesday, McCrady stopped in to Cheshire Bike and Repair Shop to adjust his bike and true his wheels. Sadie ambled over to the sidewalk, where she slept, her chin resting on the cool cement. “The first week was awful,” McCrady said of the ride. “It was hot; it was humid; there were hills. By day eight it was fun and it’s still fun today.”

While riding through a sketchy section of Bridgeport earlier this week, McCrady said he noticed a toothless, gesticulating man running toward him, shouting. “I seen you!” the man hollered. “I seen you.” McCrady was alarmed but the man said, “I seen you on the 12 o’clock news.” McCrady stopped, shook the man’s hand and let him pet Sadie. As the man walked away, McCrady heard him mutter, “I done caught me a celebrity.”

For more information, visit www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie.

 

 

 

 

 

Hudson River School’s Unsung John Frederick Kensett

In the summer of 1872, a feverish sense of possibility infected John Frederick Kensett. In what would, fatefully, be his last summer, the Hudson River School painter seemed to perceive landscapes with a clarity and precision absent in his earlier Hudson River School canvases. His prodigious output that summer– nearly 38 works – glisten with a purity and lucidity that borrows as much from the emerging Barbizon school as it does from his own powerfully unfettered vision.

One of those works “Sunset on the Sea” is as clean, crisp and pellucid a landscape as Kensett produced. It is one of three Kensett works lent to the New Britain Museum of American Art by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while it renovates its American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries. The Met has lent New Britain seven of its prized Hudson River School works and while most eyes will gravitate to Frederick Edwin Church’s “The Parthenon,” it is the late Kensett works that should command attention.

That’s not to deride Church’s grandiloquent achievement. The six-footer “The Parthenon” is a majestic achievement, particularly if you prefer your art at high and xenophobic decibels. New Britain’s own, earlier Church, “West Rock, New Haven ” is a far more compelling and well-balanced work, devoid of Church’s overwrought lionization of the Ancients.

But the most stirring works here belong to Kensett, the Cheshire native long saddled with the moniker “second tier” Hudson River School painter. The distinction is unfortunate, but apt. Kensett never had the bravura of Church or Alfred Bierstadt and he lacked the innovation and sublimity of Thomas Cole. But Kensett possessed a captivating sense of the tranquility, as opposed the muscularity of nature.

Even in his works from the 1850s, like “Hudson River Scene,” (1857), Kensett balances the sense of nature’s power with a Claudean sense of pastoral serenity. The crusty hillocks on the banks of the Hudson become curtains that unveil the still, pewter river sprinkled with sailboats. In the dense, richly textured foreground, lichen-coated rocks secure tall, mottled oaks that lunge thirstily toward the water.

This is a more placid, less brawny work than the works of Durand or Cole, nearby. While Durand was able to give his work a pious potency, Kensett’s luminosity, which grows purer with time, reaching its apex in Kensett’s stirring “Eaton’s Neck, Long Island.”

Inaugurated by Englishman Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School saw in the country’s vast grandeur a sense of divine providence. Wilderness moved from the haven of deviltry to the font of holiness. Artists like Cole, and Asher B. Durand, who believed art was meant to promote “the moral perfection of mankind” invested their landscapes with a sublime sense of providence – the gargantuan icecaps of Frederick Edwin Church and the august benevolence of Kensett’s White Mountains – were signposts for the omnipresence of God.

Of course, with that tacit blessing of the Almighty, came a sense of political sanctity. A country so abundantly blessed could do no wrong.

Except, of course, that it did.

The Civil War brought Americans sense of divine providence to a crushing coda. The bombastic, deified landscape not only did not play in a country bloodied by fratricide; it looked ridiculous. Perhaps realizing the absurdity, Church took off for more consecrated grounds and came bounding back with al sorts of images from the Andes to the Acropolis.

But artists like Kensett, and Winslow Homer, whose magnetic “Harvest Scene” has also been loaned to New Britain, stayed put. Like many Americans, he began to search out a private retreat as a kind of balm for the physical and psychic mayhem the war engendered.

That is what brought him to Contentment Island in 1867. Kensett’s friend, artist Vincent Colyer, had bought land along Long Island Sound the year before. The years spent by the Sound had an almost redemptive effect on Kensett; his paintings grew more luminous and limpid, and his output more prolific. His resplendent “Sunset on the Sea,” a reductive and radiant image of the dimming tangerine sun dissolving into the calm, caressing waters of the Sound epitomizes the still, ruminative peace we seek along the water’s edge. It is one of the 38 images Kensett painted in that productive summer of 1872.

In November of that year, as she was crossing a causeway to Contentment Island, the carriage that carried Colyer’s wife overturned. Her skirts were caught in the wheels of the carriage and she struggled under the weight of her dress in the icy waters. Kensett, who never married, came upon the scene and, horrified, plunged in after her. His efforts were in vain; Colyer’s wife, Mary Lydia, drowned. Exhausted by his efforts, Kensett contracted pneumonia. Recovering enough to return to New York, he set up a studio in the YMCA, and died later that day of heart failure. He was 52.

The exhibit continues at the New Britain Museum of American Art through 2010.

The Gentelmen Who Lunch

Talking with the gentelmen who lunch

First time he met Ernie, he was flyin’, I’m telling you, flyin’ down Bennett Avenue in this race-car contraption he made out of a pair of roller skates and an orange crate. Kid’s a nut, he’s thinking. Kid’s an absolute nut. Steering this thing with two wooden sticks. Couldn’t have been more than 10.

Dominic Mauriello guffaws, a big, gasping, phlegmatic laugh that bounces his pal Anthony Pecukonis around a little. At 85, Pecukonis is the baby of the group, a short, triangular-shaped man wearing an ecru short-sleeve shirt with an image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe pinned to his chest pocket.

Seven decades ago, these five guys were growing up in Waterbury’s Town Plot neighborhood, shooting craps against the walls of Tinker School, ripping pieces of aluminum off junked cars and hunting for mushrooms at Morris Dam. For the past four years, they’ve been getting together every Tuesday for their weekly lunch — two Tuesdays at Domars and the other two Tuesdays at a Chinese buffet whose name no one can remember. The entourage includes a couple of canes, about six hearing aids, a few dietary restrictions and a hunk of memories not printable in a family newspaper.

They call themselves the “Over The Hill Gang,” and Mauriello is the ringleader. Four years ago, this eighth-grade graduate who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day looked around his immaculate, lonely Prospect ranch and said, “What the hell’s the matter with me? I gotta get these guys going.” He picked up the phone and began dialing a few pals he knew from the old neighborhood. He hadn’t seen some of them in 40 years, but it didn’t matter. “These are my friends,” Mauriello said. “I got to get them motivated. They’re getting stale.”

Ample booths, sandwiches

So twice a month, they head for the robins-egg blue and cherry-red back room at Domars on Watertown Avenue in Waterbury. It’s an old place that used to be the American Legion Hall, where Mauriello was married more than 50 years ago, with Galante as his best man. Here, the blue vinyl booths are as ample as the Italian combos — which the guys get with ham, salami, capicola, Provolone cheese, American cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and roasted peppers. It’s the kind of sandwich, Galante says, you have to pick up with a mitt.

Mauriello’s desire to bring his friends back together may be, as he says, inexplicable, but research suggests that friendships play an important role in longevity. Last year, an Australian study found that older people who have close friends and confidants live longer than those who don’t. Conversely, the same study found that having close family ties had no discernible effect on survival.

All these guys — Mauriello, Galante, Pecukonis, Pat Spino and Chuck Bredice — are first-generation Americans. With the exception of Pecukonis, their parents were all born in Italy. Every now and again an Italian phrase slips out, like “mangia e statti zitto,” or, loosely, “shut up and eat.” All the men, except Spino, who was given a deferment, are World War II veterans. Their tattoos — which Mauriello and Galante both got from a Texan with a forehead full of them — have faded to the color of carbon paper. A few of the men, like Galante, have pieces of shrapnel in their bodies. None of them, except Pecukonis, went beyond the eighth grade. Pecukonis graduated from high school. They call him the professor. He’s been engaged for 60 years to the same woman. “Her father used to get after me,” Pecukonis says about his hesitancy to name a date. Asked when the big day will be, Pecukonis winces and gives the same answer he’s given for 60 years, “Pretty soon.”

He gives a similarly equivocal answer about success. “I come into the world with nothing, and I’ve got most of it left,” he says.

The rest of the men are widowers. “Nobody wants me,” says Galante. “I just got a maid who hangs around.” Next to him, Bredice, a beefy man with a long, broad face and basset hound eyes, guffaws. “Know any rich widows?” he asks a visitor.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Bredice was a Class A bowler, racking up victories at 20th Century Lanes on Phoenix Avenue, which sat just up the street from the Jacques Theater, a burlesque house. “Let me tell you something, honey,” Bredice says. “If you hung around on Phoenix Avenue, you were no angel.”

“Oh! That dive?” Spino says, tossing his head back, remembering the Jacques. “I used to sneak in there as a kid.”

No full nudity, though. “Oh, no,” says Bredice. “If you wanted them to take it all off, you had to P-A-Y.” Not that it bothered Bredice. “To me, the most homeliest thing in the world is a naked woman.”

“Ah, I don’t buy that,” Mauriello says.

“Then, when we graduated from the Burlesque, we went to New York,” said Bredice, who hustled money at a third-floor bowling alley on 6th Avenue. “I saw Gypsy Rose Lee. She was beautiful. I would’ve asked her for a date. She could’ve said no. Wouldn’t have bothered me. I’m Italian. I got a lot of bananas.”

On summer days, Galante and Mauriello would head for Hop Brook Lake, where they’d swim naked and then hop in their cars and race all the way to Lindy’s in New York City. There, they’d wolf down a strawberry shortcake for 25 cents and then race back to Waterbury — Dominic in his 1931 Oldsmobile convertible and Galante in his ‘32 Chevy. Once, at Lake Quassapaug, they were thrown into the Middlebury Jail for taking the paddle boats out longer than they had money for.

And these guys had big, Italian families. Bredice had six sisters and three brothers, in addition to his parents and grandparents, living at 20 Bennett Ave. On Sunday mornings when they walked to Mass, the whole street was redolent with spaghetti sauce so aromatic it would make them drool. “When you’re feeding 10 kids, plus a mother, father and grandparents, you don’t get spaghetti every day, you know,” Bredice says.

No, most days, you’re pulling peppers from the garden and eggs from the chicken. Once or twice a week, the fish guy puttered down the street with a crate full of fish on ice, tooting a horn to attract customers. All the men grew up with kitchen gardens and often slaughtered a rabbit or broke the neck of a chicken. “Keep the blood,” Spino says. “Fry it up.”

“They knew how to cook,” Galante says of the mothers on his street. “Could make a meal out of anything.”

Bredice folds his hands across his ample belly, knits his sausage-size fingers together and shakes his head. “Oh, you don’t get soup like that any more, no sir.”

These days, the minestrone at Domars will do. For an hour, the men reminisce about their Ford Fairlanes and Plymouth convertibles, of the circus coming to Brassco Park, of coasting down hills with an empty tank of gas and sneaking into strip joints and dice games.

They talk about Florida and Foxwoods and share the tiny little stray thoughts that creep into a man’s mind when he’s reached a certain age and lost the gaggle of pals he once took for granted. They talk about everything and nothing at all, until next week, when they’ll do it all again.

c. Republican American, 2008

The Fine Delicacy of Mangiapane’s Wine

The grapes are early this year. They droop lazily in the afternoon sun that sinks in deep perpendicular slabs across Anthony Mangiapane’s backyard in Waterbury’s South End. Mangiapane sits under the arbor and waits for them. He is a patient man.

People ask Mangiapane what makes his wine so sweet and he could tell them many things. He could tell them about the 50 years of pruning and tending. He could tell them about the lessons he learned from his parents, who squeezed thick, succulent plum juice into old oak barrels. He could tell them about the little leather notebook where he keeps all his secrets.

But he has the time and the heart to think poetically, and so what he tells them is this: “The vines are grown in the shadows of St. Anne’s Shrine. And at the end of the day the setting sun gives the grapes a light kiss before it descends into the horizon.”

That, he says, is what makes his wine so sweet.

Anthony Mangiapane is 83 years old and has lived here in the South End of Waterbury, for more than 50 years. He is short and stocky and wears Army green cotton shorts held up by matching suspenders clipped to an elasticized waist band. His black shoes shuffle across the narrow, neatly trimmed grass and he slumps into a white plastic deck chair under the arbor he has grown nearly too old to tend. He speaks in a gravelly whisper and his wry observations are so gingerly delivered that they are easy to miss.

Everybody made wine in his day. Now it’s a high-tech hobby, taught in college-level classes and embraced by young entrepreneurs. Mangiapane doesn’t make his wine for sale or for profit but there’s a certain pride in the process. He may be the only inner-city vintner left, which would be a peculiar distinction.

“I learned by observing my parents,” says Mangiapane, sitting cross-ankled, his short, stubby hands knitted neatly over his ample belly. “They had their own theories. They did it the old-fashioned method in open vats. Everything was by guess and by gosh.”

Mangiapane, a machine designer and draftsman for the bulk of his working life, moved into this tall, narrow house, with its old-fashioned oil stove and oak icebox, in 1948, after marrying his wife, Angeline, and moving into her parents’ house. His in-laws had a grape arbor, but most of his Italian relatives bought their grapes from the six or seven street vendors who sold the products from roadside stands or the backs of trucks. Nobody thought much of Connecticut grapes. But Mangiapane figured he could make a go of it and began tending to the thick, ropey vines that canopy over the green wood arbor.

In the back corner, Mangiapane points out the faded white letters he painted on the green pole that supports the arbor. “Fredonia,” it reads, to indicate the type of grapes planted there.

The tall houses around him snuggle close together, so close you can hear the neighbor’s conversations, and touch the clothes they hang on the line. When Mangiapane was growing up the area was mostly all French Canadian. Families lived in multi-generational triple deckers behind the city’s robust brick factories. Now the factories are gone, and most of the French, too. The area is largely Hispanic and transient.

But nobody steals his grapes any more, which was a problem back then. And his wife, Angeline, has nobody to give her homemade jam to. In the old days, she had plenty of neighbors who would return the glass pickle jars to her after they had finished the stuff. Now she saves the jam for friends and family, and guests, for whom she offers a saltine coated with the sweet jam.

Mangiapone limps up the narrow stairwell of his home. Upstairs, on a folding table in the kitchen, a wood frame holds a glass jug half full of amethyst-colored liquid.

Mangiapane grabs a plastic straw twisted in several roller coaster-like swirls. He sticks the long, thick straw into the jug and begins to suck on one end. As he does, the wine inches upward. Mangiapane places a glass beaker to his lips and tongues the straw into it. The wine snakes through the straw into the beaker. From a tattered, narrow box, he procures a thermometer-like stick, which measures the liquid’s sugar content. He aims for a 14 percent alcohol content. When it is nearly done, he pours it in plastic fruit juice bottles before he corks it in a wine bottle and labels it with his own particular code.

Every year, Mangiapane makes about 15 gallons of wine. He gives his wife first stab at the grapes because her jelly is a priority. He gets the leavings, which is fine. His wife never developed a taste for wine; but Mangiapane figures he’s been drinking it since he was five. Once or twice he’s had store-bought wine. But what’s the point, he figures.

“I think I’ve reached perfection with the wine you can make from backyard grapes,” he says.

Publication date: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 c. Republican-American