Leroy, New York is only forty five minutes away but it feels like another world. Like so many small towns it has seen better days. The Jello Museum is still here. Donald Woodward, the son of the original owner, bought Amelia Earhart’s airplane, the “Friendship”, in 1928, and Amelia Earhart drove here to visit her airplane. The airport is being revived. And the Creekside Tavern, built in 1820 on the banks of Oatka Creek, has been completely redone by Billy Farmer. He has bands out back on the weekends and we’ve driven out here twice to hear the Debbie Kendick’s project. I recommend the band for sure and I’d take route along the river. We took 490 the second time and it is deadly how boring that stretch can be. Maybe if you were shopping for an RV it wouldn’t be so bad.
Our neighbor thinned out some pachesandra and offered it to us. We decided to plant it along our driveway. That project took up the better part of day, digging little holes and winding up the roots to poke the plants in. To do something like this now you have wear your tick armour, socks, pants and long sleeve hoodies soaked in Permethrin. While I was suited up picked a handful of blackberries from the vines growing in mini forever wild area.
I don’t usually read the food section but I do look at it. I found myself pretty deep into an article about some guy, about our age, who really like the food at a particular restaurant but couldn’t stand the music that they played. He asked the owners if he could do a set list for them and they said yes. Turns out the guy, Ryuichi Sakamoto, was in Yellow Magic Orchestra, a group we followed in the late seventies.
I recreated his playlist in Apple Music and added one at the end, a Philip Glass piece that I stumbled on it while mistyping a song title. The playlist might not work for you but here is the link. I was unfamiliar with most of the music but instantly feel in love with this Bill Evans track called “Peace Piece.”
Ted and Janet Williams at the Bug Jar Margaret Explosion performance in 2001
“Primordial Fleamarket: Sometimes the communist household object strikes you as having been made in geological times, rather than some manufacturing era. Glorified objects . . . rarefied.” Wendy Low echoed this quote from Janet Thayer Williams when she asked, “Who can look at a whisk broom and not think of the stitching in Janet’s painting?”
Friends of the William’s family gathered on Laburnum Crescent today to remember Janet. Someone made a convincing argument that Janet was still with us. Her paintings were were on display throughout the house and once I found this one, “Wite Out” from 2006, I stayed put beneath it. I first saw it in the tunnel between the new downtown library and the old building across the street. They often display art there and this painting stopped me dead on my tracks. The typewriter keys sang and leapt off the canvas as if some fantastic story was unfolding. It wasn’t on the page. It was somewhere between the mind, the keys and the page. I told Janet how much I loved it.
First of all, like all the photos in this blog, there is an enlargement available if you would like to see the whole picture. In fact, I invite you to look at the whole painting before reading my gibberish. I would like to hear what other people think is going on in this late Cezanne. Fred Lipp first brought it to my attention but as was his way he did not tell me what to think about it.
The painting is in the Guggenheim’s collection and I took the next few sentences from their website. “Cezanne’s work was motivated by a desire to give sculptural weight and volume to the instantaneity of vision achieved by the Impressionists, who painted from nature. Relying on his perception of objects in space as visually interrelated entities—as forms locked into a greater compositional structure. The strangely distorted, proto-Cubist view of the sitter—his right eye is depicted as if glimpsed from below and the left as if seen from above—contributes an enigmatic, contemplative air to the painting. ”
Cézanne is considered the precursor of Cubism. You read this all the time when people talk about Cezanne and I don’t particularly like Cubism but I love this painting. There is so much space in it that I never tire of looking at it. The wood trim on the wall below the sitter’s left elbow is coming at us and it wraps around the sitter. The wall is far from flat. The way the wall is painted it creates real space around the sitter. His left leg is coming out of the painting at us and the right falls away. The left side of his body is turning toward us while the right arm, which is actually closer to us, turns away. The chair under him shown only to his right, accents the turn in his body. With his left eye lower, much lower, than the right his head is almost spinning. His upper body is unusually long, he is way present. Cezanne has created so much volume in this painting with what some people dismiss as distortion.
I think the painting is a marvel. The card players are over the top with spatial illusion. I see aspects of these features in most of his portraits and yet when a new book, Cezanne Portraits from a show that was recently at the National Gallery, arrived there was hardly any spatial discussion. I would like to hear what others think. We will write our own book.
Our wedding was kind of loose compared to today’s productions. We had been living together for three years so it wasn’t a surprise or anything. And we had just moved to (in my case “back to”) Rochester so it was kind of small. My parents friends and relatives made up a bigger portion of the attendees. We had a few friends in Rochester and a bunch came from Indiana where we had previously lived. Most of them stayed at our apartment where they slept on the floor.
We had an anniversary the other day and I got the wedding photos out. We asked my brother to take photos and I remember him saying he had some problem with his light reading but the photos we have look great. I forgotten who all came. I remember hiring this band. Peggi and I heard them down at the lake in a place called “The Showboat.” It was right across the street from the Penny Arcade. I think they were called “Beale Street Bandwagon” or something close. They went over really good especially with the old folks. Judging by the pictures I’d say my parents’ friends had more fun than almost anyone. Peggi and I had a blast.
Our neighbor, Jared, thinks we might have another ground hog in the garden. Some of his sunflowers and squash were eaten so we will have to set the trap again. We caught a raccoon in the trap the other night. It was open and but not baited and the raccoon wandered in so our neighbor let it go. We’ve been eating kale, jalapeños, spinach, lettuce and cilantro faster than the groundhogs can, Our tomatoes are just starting to come in so we’ll need to guard the fort.
I never cared much for David Salle’s paintings but I picked up a book he wrote and read a few pages in the store. I had a hunch that he was a more interesting writer than painter and “How To See” confirmed that hunch. The book is a series of short pieces on various artists, some young, some his contemporaries, and some as ancient as Pierro della Francesca. Some of the writing was originally done for magazines like Art Forum and Town & Country but it all holds together and he talks a good game. He opened my eyes.
Salle brilliantly lumps two of my favorite painters, Philip Guston and Marsden Hartley, in the same chapter, saying “They took painting head-on, a little brutally. There’s a truculence in their attitude — why try to hide it. Wrestlers of paint. A painting is something to be grappled with, brought to the ground. It’s a promethean effort. The artist prevails, but at a cost.”
On Sigmar Polke he writes, “Polke’s pictorial inventiveness is so generous, so viewer-friendly makes you feel that, on a good day, you too could do it. His painting gets at something elemental about how we live today., and seems to whisper,’You are not locked into your own story. You could be otherwise.’ The strength of that conviction, the sheer vitality of it – I can’t think of anything more that we could ask for from art. Like all great artists, Polke was in pursuit of ravishment, and he wanted to stun, but only on his own terms. His work asks, ‘Can this be enough? What are you afraid of? Immerse yourself in his art and weep for the diminished spirit of our present age.”
Intersection of Greenlawn Drive and Brown Road in Rochester, New York
We were walking back from Starbucks on Brown Road when I looked down an especially boring looking side street. The lawns were so brown. I looked up to see it was Greenlawn Street. We need rain.
I love the ride out Route 18. Like Highway 1 in California it follows the shoreline, in this case from the Port of Rochester to Niagara Falls. We didn’t go that far. We stopped in Olcott Beach where they were having something called the Jazz Trail, one band after another all day long at various locations in the tiny town. It is just far enough away from the cities to be funky. There was a big amusement park here years ago and there still is a small one for kids. We saw a few signs on people’s lawns that said, “No Dollar Store In Olcott.” Bars change hands here and the shops are all tiny souvenir places. I looked at t-shirt with a foamy pint class on it. It read “Love and Hopiness.”
Saxophonist, flautist and vocalist Bobby Militello was playing with his quartet on the stage in the middle of a park. He was a member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Maynard Ferguson’s band. They sounded great. We walked around town and watched a fishing charter take off. Olcott was hit hard last year when the lake levels were so high. They had to line the beach with concrete slabs to keep the sand in. The lake had turned over last night. The water temperature was 48 but there was a few kids in.
We stopped at a few farm stands on the way back and came home with cherries, peaches and corn.
William Keeler, Librarian & Archivist at the Rochester Historical Society, gave the featured presentation at the annual Gideon Cobb Day Celebration in Brighton. His talk, “Rochesterville on the Rise,” started with the Native American trading post near Indian Landing a couple hundred years ago. The British controlled the waters of Lake Ontario before the War of 1812. A reenactor can be seen in the photo above along with John Page and Brighton’s Town Supervisor William W. Moehle.
Tryon, where the bike park is now, was where all the action was, a boomtown on the move until the sandbar at the mouth of Irondequoit Bay filled in, cutting off access to the port of Tryon. Carthage, on the other side of the Genesee River, the next biggest nearby settlement collapsed when influenza swept through town. Rochesterville, just south of the High Falls, was nowhere as big as Geneva, Bath and Canandaigua. Gideon Cobb was one of its first inhabitants. He ran a brickyard where Cobbs Hill is today and my father restored Cobb’s folk hero status.
Early Gideon Cobb days were celebrated at Mario’s where the new Whole Foods is going in. Ray Tierney, former Brighton councilman and Historic Brighton board member, has organized the last two and they now feature an award presentation, the “Leo Dodd Heritage Presentation Award.” Last year’s went to Sandra Frankel and this year it went to John Page of Bero Architects. I’m happy Historic Brighton has carried on but I couldn’t help but feel the void left in the organization. They need someone with the desire to dig through the past, willing enough to attend the meetings, lobby the politicians to preserve the remnants, someone who likes taking pictures and illustrating a story and someone who likes to share what they have found. They need someone as enthusiastic as my father was.
Personal Effects ‘”A Collection” CD on Earring Records released in 2008
Personal Effects – “Boom Boom Town/Violince” from “Personal Effects – A Collection”
Wards of Time: Photographs of Antiquities by Larry Merrill
We had tickets to the MAG opening on Saturday night. We talked about going that afternoon and when the time came we completely spaced it out. So we tried backtracking and went over there yesterday. We started with Bill Viola’s video installation, a piece with four monitors, one at each quarter hour devoted to one of the four elements. Called “Martyrs,” Viola says: “The Greek word for martyr originally meant ‘witness.’” (where have I heard that word before?) In today’s world, the mass media turns us all into witnesses to the suffering of others. They also exemplify the human capacity to bear pain, hardship, and even death in order to remain faithful to their values, beliefs, and principles.” It is quite stunning if just a bit too precious.
The summer MAG show features three local artists, a substitution for the old Finger Lakes or Biennial shows. The Nancy Jurs exhibit is fun. The video was unnecessary but the dryer lint piece really drew us in. We took a break for lunch at the Brown Hound. I liked that place better when they had art from the MAG’s collection on the wall instead of all that dog stuff. I don’t find the cheap dog images all that appetizing but the Bistro Salad with Tofu was really nice. After lunch we spent some time with “The Surreal Visions of Josephine Tota.” Her work is small and it would have worked better if someone hadn’t put it in all those loud clunky frames. It was really hard to see the paintings. The white wall tags and signage didn’t help either. The woman has an interesting back story but let us see her work. Her paintings look better online. Larry Merrill’s “Wards of Time: Photographs of Antiquities” could never be as good as the real antiquities but they looked great mounted on the brown walls of the Lockhart Gallery. This poem on the wall in Merrill’s show really struck me. But how does a translator get something this old to rhyme in translation without just rewriting it?
Age is the heaviest burden man can bear,
Compound of disappointment, pain and care;
For when the mind’s experience comes at length,
It comes to mourn the body’s loss of strength.
Resign’d to ignorance all our better days,
Knowledge just ripens when the man decays;
One ray of light the closing eye receives,
And wisdom only takes what folly leaves.
– Pherecrates, about 430 BCE
Richard Cumberland, translation
1966 Cadillac convertible in driveway up near the lake
I will talk about politics here just enough to say that following it is really eating into my day. My comfortable middle class life is being impacted by just trying to stay abreast. And imagining the damage being done to the less fortunate is completely draining. It seems you soil yourself by just bringing the divisiveness up. Ignoring it all is certainly an option, an irresponsible option, so we’re stuck. Let’s change the subject.
What is the best looking car on the road today? They pretty much all look alike. We were having dinner with my parents, near what turned out to be the end of their lives, and I asked my father if he thought things were getting better or worse. My father was progressive, an optimist and forward thinking, an early adapter and enthusiast of new technology. I was certain he would say things are getting better but his answer wandered into what I would characterize as a longing for the time when the parish priest knew what you were up to, what kind of trouble you might be getting into. There was accountability. Things were not allowed to run amok.
At my age I want to believe that things are getting better but Im worried. Maybe this is what the trumpster has tapped into with his “Make America Great Again” slogan. Maybe this is why so many bands are content to play roots music – comfort food. Cars were pretty cool in the sixties but nostalgia is killing us.
Eleven o’clock seemed a little early for a beer so I passed until halftime but then gave in when Croatia scored. We watched the World Cup Final down at our neighbor’s place. They had a few of their Jamaican friends over and we all pretty much cheered for Croatia. They played a better game but lost. The only statistic that really counts is the number of goals. There was quite a bit of food and the match flew by. I wanted it to last forever. One of the guys brought cod fritters (cod, broccoli, batter and habanero peppers). They were killer! We brought two home for dinner and had them with a fresh salad, arugula, kale and cilantro, all from the garden.
We picked up our 6×6 purchases this afternoon and I photographed three of them out in the driveway. I’m really happy with these. The first one, probably done by a kid, is every bit as cool as Hans Hoffmann’s push pull stuff. It commanded the main wall as you walk in the gallery. The beachball is an irresistable knockout. Just a bit of the air has escaped and the three primary colors heroicly define the form while the white circle on the top of the ball is just small enough to make you question it all. And that hotter than July ground! As my neighbor pointed out “La Avocat” should really be “L’avocat” but it is not. The painting is not the fruit either even though it says it is. We had to bring this home.
We needed coffee, both beans and a cold brew cup, so we stopped in Canaltown Roasters and had Pete package up 2 five pound bags of “Rochester Choice.” We took our cups down East Avenue to Rochester Contemporary where the annual 6×6 show was in the last weekend of its run. The San Francisco based, Symmetry Labs, were still installing their sculpture, “Tree of Tenere,” in the garden next door. Inspired by the Hindu legend of the most isolated tree on earth, it was first realized at Burning Man in 2017. The director, Bleu Cease, said Margaret Explosion was on a short list of people to perform under the outdoor tree which is sensitive to sound.
They have finally run out of room over there. Next year Bleu says they will go down to maximum of three per person. I remember when it was ten. I was happy to see that mine had sold. I’ve been using my submissions in an ever more minimal direction. And I was thrilled to find that three small paintings that I liked the most were all still available. That says something about either my taste or everybody else’s. Peggi found one as well. She brought me over to look at it and as luck would have it the artist was standing nearby. Kishan Pandya told us they travelled to South Carolina to see the recent eclipse and he took this amazing photo. It reminded me of a Sol Lewitt.
We plan to watch the World Cup final at our neighbor’s down the street. Two teams with a lot of finesse. We are going down pulling for the underdog, Croatia, but I could easily switch camps and scream for France. I just hope it is a good contest.
Chuck Prophet at Abilene in downtown Rochester, New York
We offered to let Eric stay at our place. He had played in Cleveland the night before and got held up fulfilling the checkout list at his Airbnb so he arrived just as we were heading out for dinner at Kerry and Claire’s. When we returned near midnight Eric was playing his Alvarez on the couch. He showed us the wafer thin spot above the F hole that he had worn down on this tour. Rochester was his last stop.
Peggi and I intended to watch the last half hour of the England-Croatia match before going to bed. We had recorded the game and then the two shows in the time slots after the game in the event that the match went into overtime. It did but something went awry. Judge Judy, the first show we recorded after regulation time, started at the 117th minute and Croatia had already scored the go ahead goal. Eric isn’t much of a football fan but he told us his friends in England were all bummed out.
I had a premonition that Amy would show up and sure enough she walked in minutes before Wreckless Eric took the stage at the Bop Shop. Eric’s set was sublime, a sonic adventure where new and old songs were supercharged, interrupted and amended and footnoted like a David Foster Wallace novel. Eric looks a bit like a priest with his white hair, black sport shirt and bolo, black jeans and shoes, a priest who can get a monstrously crunchy sound from an acoustic guitar. Between songs he went off on a hunch that his guitar wanted to do a solo album without him and his fuzz tone and boxes were just conspiring to get him to drive them around. I loved the rich contrast between his old songs, pop anthems really, and his wry, world weary new ones.
Chuck Prophet was playing at the same time, downtown at the Party in the Park, on a bill with G Love. Rumor had it that he would also do a late set on the deck out back at Abilene so we headed downtown. We had heard him with the band when they opened for Sharon Jones a few years back and we weren’t really buying it but it was such a beautiful night.
A five dollar cover, a seven dollar beer and we found a spot up front just as they started. Prophet has a great band and he is a really good entertainer in a charming, sort of goofy way. His first few songs were ok but then came the covers, one carefully chosen song after another. They all sounded great. Pipeline, Telstar, KC’s Boogie Shoes, Shake Some Action with Amy and Eric on backups and then Tom Petty’s American Girl with Amy Rigby doing the middle section, a rip-roaring version. Of course they did an encore, Alex Chilton’s Bangkok. It was a perfect night.
Spanish postcards from the 1970s., a gift from the O’Hara/Sullivan side of the family.
I certainly wasn’t cheering for Belgium when they went against Brazil but once that ended badly I was convinced Belgium were the stronger team and a deserving finalist. In fact, I even entertained thoughts of the end of the so called beautiful game. Brazil’s finesse and ball control was no match for the strong, physical Belgium side, sort of the way it was when I was playing for Webster Thomas. Our coach wore a beret and drove a Citroen. He taught us an early version of the light touch, European style. (He’s currently serving life in prison for molesting kids.) Our rival, Penfield, had a football player die the year before so they did away with their football team for a few years and all those big lugs played on Penfield’s soccer team. It was a nasty matchup but I think we prevailed.
So, I had resigned myself to the new world order. No Neymar, no Marcello, no Brazil. Spain, with seventy per cent possession had gone home. Germany, last year’s untouchable champion, was home. Argentina, with the world’s best player, was home. I tried to warm up to the Belgium side. They had the possession. They kept putting it in the box. It was only a matter of time and then, after a few dazzling fast breaks, France scored on a corner. Belgium had the big guy lurking in the box but he couldn’t get a touch on the ball. France was nimble, quick on defense, very few fouls, and when they got the ball, the whole team moved toward the goal. They passed (my favorite part of the game) beautifully. Mick Jagger was in the stands. They are the youngest team in the tournament. Their star player is nineteen. If they can play this well in the final England will be going home.
Somebody stole our neighbor’s Buddha statue. A hollow black plastic thing that sat about twelve inches tall on an old stump in their yard. Talk about bad karma.
I grew up with Warner Sallman’s 1940 picture of Christ, one of 500 million reproductions of the image from the Chicago Offset Printing Company, so this garage sale Christ with short hair and mousse really struck me. We were out walking and stopped at an estate sale, one that had been going on for a couple days so everything was half price. This picture was hanging on the wall and it had a one dollar price tag on it. Small print at the bottom read “Christian Education Press 1955” and it was signed by Barosin. I looked it up and found the image was painted by famed Holocaust Survivor Jacob Barosin. I plan to give this to a friend.
Janet Williams oil painting “Lamp Left On All Night” from about 2008
I knew Janet was sick but I didn’t think she could possibly die. In my mind she was immortal. Janet was always a delight to see and foremost to talk with. Insightful and funny, each encounter was memorable. She was also my favorite local painter.
I fell in love with a painting she had at the High Falls Gallery, the one with her brother in a vortex entitled “Ooops!” It had a $200 price tag on it and I will forever regret not taking it home. For years I maintained a web page of her paintings. Ten years ago she sent jpegs of her latest batch along with this note. I never got around to posting them.
“The whisk broom and dust pan are from my Primordial Fleamarket Series. I allow one object per canvas, life size. I want them to appear to be in process of being made, like in a geological rather than a manufacturing process, with the varying layers of paint mimicking aeons. The typewriters, lamps, sewing machine and guitar are also in this series. I’m working on a 1896 Fairbanks Banjo at the moment.
Baby Bird’s title is now “Fledgeling” 2007. “Whisk Broom” 2008, “Dustpan” 2008 and “Fledgeling” 2007 are now at the Oxford Gallery Awakenings Show, until May 10. “Embers” and Ted’s Typewriter” 2006. “QWERTY 3” and “QWERTY 4” 2007. They are all 12” x 12.” “Dave’s Guitar: C. F. Martin’s D28 Dreadnought” 40” x 30” 2007
Janet”
Janet wrote the following introduction to her paintings on the site.
“I seem to always want to paint either my kitchen table, or the view out my window of Pinnacle Hill. Pinnacle Hill has been encroaching upon, interfacing with, and persistently stepping up its allurements to me as an interior artist. I’m taking it one step at a time. I only want to paint it through the windows and ceilings of my house, with all its seas and deserts and nebulae, and its population of cowboys and saints, horses, maybe soldiers, sharks and flying dogs also.
I am allowing my paintings also to “borrow,” shall we say, from the images of other artists. For example: the one of the Sea of Galilee Lapping the Shore of PS 35, shamelessly appropriates from Delacroix. But Lawrence Lazarus’ Battered Blue Cube is in there, also, in quadruplicate. School 35 is a low brick building with seemingly no appeal, yet with 4 or 5, (I really haven’t counted them) blue doors, Battered Blue Cubes! They were painted beige for awhile, a while back, and my heart sank. I was wracking my brain for a way to convince myself that my memory of their blueness would serve me just as well, as an artist who knew something and could brook all obstacles in her path, when they got painted blue again! like a miracle, in answer to a prayer I didn’t dare send up!
The one of the Fight for the Waterhole at PS 35 borrows (HA!) from, as you can guess, from Remington. But, again, the doors of school 35 are DEFINITELY Lawrence Lazarus’ Battered Blue Cube. He probably wouldn’t have seen the point of there being 4 or 5 of them, but that’s how it is.
My latest painting, Pope Cake, is the Pope and my mother at the kitchen table, with a Thiebald wedding cake on the table, and the table holding its own, if I do say so myself! It’s really a picture of my mother’s arms, I think. They express her earthy fretfulness, without giving up a bit of her translucent leaving this earth quality.
Our neighbor, Jared, emailed that he had found gopher holes in the garden. We have a plot in his backyard because we have very little sun in ours. He also informed us that the animal had eaten two of our four Kale plants. We had been picking leaves off them for salads and the damage was not fatal. There is enough of the plants left for them to rally but we had to trap the thing before his next meal. Jared said he had a rotten cantaloupe in his refrigerator, left over from the last time he set the trap, so I cut off a piece. It had black and white mold spots on it but it was still juicy. It worked like a charm and we snagged a young groundhog within hours. I called Animal Control but they had closed for the holidays so fed him apple slices and strawberries until the they came this afternoon. Meanwhile more holes appeared and our neighbor’s broccoli and squash has been pruned. I reloaded the trap and will report back.
We have watched so much soccer in the past few weeks there has been little time for anything else. Except walking, of course, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice,” which we watch three times. The 1986 Swedish film is astoundingly beautiful. The long shots and limited cuts draw you in and won’t let you go. Erland Josephson’s character, after renouncing religion, makes a bargain with God, (a common Catholic tactic, one that promises you a vague eternity) if God can stop the impending holocaust of WW3.
Despite a numbing possession rate Spain let Russia beat them overtime with penalty kicks. I intended to wear my my Spain jersey for the match but it was too hot so I went shirtless. And Japan, playing the delicate, quick passing in thick situations type of game that is irresistable just couldn’t hold on to their sixty minute 2-0 lead over Denmark. Mexico, our default home team, took it to Brazil but couldn’t finish. We gave that match our all but we’ll now route for Brazil. Is it just us or is this the best World Cup ever?
