Red vine on tree in Hoffman Road marsh in Rochester, New York
Brad Fox told me he used to get depressed every year at this time when the days get cooler, shorter and grayer. He moved to California to remedy that situation. My good friend and neighbor is also affected by light deprivation. And Anne Havens goes south in the winter but thankfully always returns for productive art-making, something that she is sharing by appointment only before she hightails it out of here. You can contact her through her site.
Me, I get overwhelmed in the summer and look forward to hunkering down in the winter months.
Coffee/Bead signage on Java Joes’ building at the Rochester Public Market
I love the new signage above Java Joe’s and the bakery at the Public Market. Looks like it has been there forever.
I’ve always felt that I have some sort of knack for spotting hit songs. I mean I’ll hear a song for the first time somewhere and think. “damn, that’s catchy” and sure enough it becomes some sort of hit. Maybe everybody feels this way but it is not all a good thing. I get stuff stuck in my head all the time, stuff that I don’t want there. We were out somewhere when we heard “Lady” by the Little River Band. Maybe it was dinner at JoJo’s. They had a satellite station on paying Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Matt & Kim, Elton John and maybe “Lady.” Have you ever called your girlfriend or wife “Lady?” This thing is a relic but it lodged itself in my brain for two or three days.
So lady, let me take a look at you now You’re there on the dance floor, making me want you somehow Oh lady, I think it’s only fair I should say to you Don’t be thinkin’ that I don’t want you, ’cause maybe I do
Yesterday we stopped in to Home Depot to pick up a bag of cement. 80 pounds for $3.75! What do you think came on their sound system?
Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theatre Café tonight at 7;30. If I’m lucky I’ll get something else lodged upstairs.
Listen to Margaret Explosion “Juggler” with Jack Schaefer on bass clarinet
Margaret Explosion 45 RPM “Juggler/Purple Heart” (EAR 16) on Earring Records, released 2011 on black vinyl.
Last night in painting class my father showed me a picture of the spy satellites that Kodak developed cameras for. I remember at some point he couldn’t tell us exactly what he did at work because it was top secret but these “Corona” and “Big Bird” projects have been declassified now there is quite a bit of information online about them. My father drew me a little diagram of how the satellites captured shots of Russia and then dropped the film package as they orbited so that a plane flying below could snag it and bring it in for processing. Pretty hi-tech stuff for a company who’s stock is now selling for a dollar a share.
While walking out the Charlotte pier on Labor Day weekend I kept looking over at the funkier, slightly shorter Summerville Pier on the other side of the Genesee River. On Sunday we rode our bikes over to the east pier and walked out past the warning signs, “No Hand Rails, Uneven Surfaces, Deep Water.” There were a handful of fishermen and woman out there, plenty of trash and really uneven surfaces. It was a mini vacation.
We stopped in O’Laughlins to go to the bathroom and the Bills were down 21-0. We heard cheers coming from the homes along Rock Beach so assumed they were catching up but we were really surprised to hear they won by the time we got back home.
We expected a slightly more irreverent send off for Barbara Stewart but her funeral service was quite beautiful. She had more sides than we knew. We first met her when we did a website for her government consulting consortium, SWI. And then we found out about her kazoo side and lifelong efforts to make the kazoo the national instrument. Along the way we learned she had won an Olympic gold medal for pole vaulting, appeared on Conan O’Brien, worked with Tony Randall, held a violinist chair in the Philharmonic and Dave Ripton was her handyman.
At first we found it hard to shut her up and get down to the work at hand but she had so many fantastic stories to tell and she was so much fun that she won us over and we’d look forward to her visits no matter how much time they ate up. She planned her final service and it was an eclectic mixture of classical and camp with an operatic closing number, “Climb Every Mountain.”
Kenny Garrett Quartet with Benito Gonzalez on piano, Charnett Moffett on bass and Marcus Baylor on drums at the 2011 Exodus to Jazz Series in Rochester, New York.
We were pretty excited about seeing Kenny Garrett’s quartet again. He was sensational at the 2006 Jazz Fest and we hadn’t yet seen any of the Exodus to Jazz shows so we bought general admission tickets at Wegmans and showed up at the Hochstein School of Music about a half hour early to grab a seat in the balcony.
Benito Gonzalez was on piano again but this time he was wearing a sharkskin suit and long pointed shoes. Charnett Moffett was on bass and Marcus Baylor was on drums, all four of them individual powerhouses. Together they tore the roof off the church. Too bad my camera is still in the shop. This was music on a very high level but I took a low res video of their encore with my old NIkon.
Detroit’s Johnny O’Neil opened the show and brought he house down with a beautiful version of Eubie Blake’s “Dollar For A Dime.” They do not write songs like that any more.
Dead tree in marsh off Hoffman Road in Rochester, NY
Took our last dip in the street pool on the last day of summer and finally set aside time to watch the Western New York Flash beat the Philadelphia Freedom. Our neighbors had taped the championship game and kept it on their Tivo for us. We had our first and last (while we’re living anyway) garage sale the day they played. If this Women’s Professional soccer league survives and Marta comes back we’ll get season tickets next year. It was a sensational game.
White flower weeds lining the path in Spring Valley
As a long time one movie at a time Netflix customer I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about when they jacked up their rates to cover the Instant Play movies that weren’t part of the package when I signed on but the announcement of the two separate companies seems plain crazy. At least they didn’t bring Meg Whitman on board.
On Tuesday we watched the Alice Neel movie from our Instant Queue. She is one my favorite painters so all they had to do was fill the screen with her paintings and I was happy. The movie was made by her grandson and he tried to come to terms with how Alice put her painting in front of family as if it follows that great artists should also have stellar parenting skills. Alice put her all into her work and her paintings testify to this. She was mostly ignored by the art world until well into her seventies. The story of how her sensational paintings could ever have been overlooked would have made a better movie.
The same art world embraced Mark Kostabi, the subject of Wednesday night’s movie, “Con Artist.” This one came in the mail in a red envelope. Kostabi did some really cute little line drawings early on and then decided to stop getting his hands dirty. He out flanked Warhol and hired a staff to not only churn out the work but come up with the concepts, mostly ugly, noisy paintings. They were snapped up as fast as he could sign them. Kostabi reminded us of Bob Ament, the muckraking candidate for our town supervisor. He rubbed his fakeness in the faces of the art establishment and demand continued to soar. So this really is the movie about how the art world ignored Alice Neel and it really isn’t all that good a movie.
Brian Williams was talking about all the gigs he’s done over the years with John Mooney and Bob Henrie. He was saying how he wished he had taken the time to jot down the the specifics of each gig. Tom Whitmore from Watkins and the Rapiers was there. He lives in Geneseo and Brian asked him if he remembered a place called Gentleman Jim’s. I said I had played there with New Math and someone stole Gary Trainer’s guitar after the gig. Brian said he was on that same bill playing with the John Mooney band. It seems like I have always know Brian but I guess not.
Let’s see, I played in a working C&W band in Bloomington, Indiana and then a New Wave band in Rochester called “New Math”. Both of those lasted a couple of years and then I started playing in a band called the Hi Techs which sort of morphed into Personal Effects. Those bands lasted for most of the eighties and somewhere in the nineties we started playing as Margaret Explosion. Time flies. Tonight we play at the Little Theater Café.
Junkyard cars off Lyell Avenue in Rochester, New York
It’s hard to tell what people do downtown. I mean what kind of work goes on in an office these days that couldn’t be done by an automated program or by someone at home with an internet connection? I drove out West Ridge Road this morning and then south on Mount Read over to Lyell Avenue where I picked up some stainless steel rods from Triple A Welding. Out there it’s pretty easy to see what people do for a living. Mount Read is full of trucks moving equipment and supplies up and down. Large manufacturing facilities line both sides of the street. Although a ghost of its former self Kodak still has cars and trucks moving on its internal highway and smoke billowing from its stacks. AAA Welding has great big stainless steel food processing tanks out in their lot. People make things out here.
View across Genesee river from High Falls district in Rochester New York
LED lightbulbs, electric cars, handmade soap and organic local produce was all represented at this weekend’s Greentopia Festival in Rochester’s High Falls District and the gorgeous weather ensured a great turnout. Hard to square the pepperoni pizza vendors in the ideal green future but the view of the Pont de Rennes Pedestrian Bridge was pretty green.
I was happy to see that Lucinda Storms and Ann McCracken won exhibitors awards at Sunday’s Public Market Artist’s Row event but my favorite vendor was Polixeni Theodorou. I bought one of her recycled Poloroid greeting cards (mine is a shot of Lake Ontario where it is impossible to distinguish the horizon line as grey green blue water meets grey blue sky) mounted on hand made cards. The penciled text on my card reads, “It is too much – Polixni. The card came packaged inside of a pamphlet entitled “How I Met My Lover, a flow chart: my path through Japanese cinema of the 60’s and 70’s.” There’s a small photo of the Japanese new wave film star, Tatsuya Nakadai, in a heart shape on the cover and the “the amazing music by Toru Takemitsu” mention in the flow chart got me tracking down some amazing video clips with his sound tracks.
We concluded our Greentopia weekend at an old fashioned garden party as Jim and Marie Via celebrated the 100th anniversary of their California bungalow style home.
I feel lucky that I am still in touch with friends from high school. Jeff Munson, Frank Paolo and John Gilmore were all at the Wednesday night Margaret Explosion show at the Little Theatre Café. Even Marty Schutt, owner of Schutt’s Apple Mill, was there but he didn’t realize it was me in the band until he was on the way out. Later that night Colin Pinkney emailed me that Whitney Schutt (no relation to Marty) had passed away.
Whitney was so cool they gave her a full page in the yearbook (click on the photo above). Frank sent me her newspaper death notice and it is fittingly poetic.
The Hopland woman who died in a solo-vehicle crash on Highway 20 Tuesday night was identified Thursday as Whitney Schutt, 61.
Schutt was pronounced dead at the scene where her silver 1999 BMW convertible rolled over on the dirt shoulder of the highway, according to the California Highway Patrol.
She was driving west on Highway 20 just east of Potter Valley Road at about 8:20 p.m. when she allowed the car to leave the road for reasons still under investigation, according to the CHP. The car slid out of control on the dirt north of the road and overturned. Schutt wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, according to the CHP.
Drugs or alcohol are not believed to have been factors in the crash, which remains under investigation.
Jason Bernagozzi sound installation, part of “Transitions Rochester” exhibit at Visual Studies Workshop
Even vital cities can be revitalized but gallery shows centered around this theme can make for some pretty dreary art. The program notes for “Transitions, Rochester” at Visual Studies Workshop lay out the facts. “Rochester’s days as a company town are over and urban sprawl and ineffective city planning have left a disabled core surrounded by middle-class wealth.” Curators Rick Hock of Visual Studies Workshop and Alison Nordström of Eastman House have put together a show that drenches dreary in urban beauty. This is a sister show or (maybe the parent) to Rochester Contemporary’s “In The Loop” and there is an upcoming, related show at the Eastman House.
At the VSW I especially liked Dan Verenka’s video shot from a slow moving car as he cruised Rochester’s so called Urban Renewal projects. And Jason Bernagozzi has a room devoted to the sounds of underground Rochester, recordings he made downtown below street level. This piece looks and sounds gorgeous.
Visual Studies is an underutilized space and Rick Hock is determined to change that. He has put out an All Points Bulletin. They are at an exciting juncture over there as the city tears up the street in front and ArtWalk extends it’s strolling grounds. They’re sitting on a fantastic trove of visual resources, a worldclass collection of photo publications and a box with Robert Frank’s shoes (he did a workshop here in ’72 and donated the shoes he wore while photographing the “The Americans”). Who knows we may even see init.three over there.
Mark Fox “Untitled (Fence), 2010 at the Culver road Armory in Rochester, New York
How did everybody know about last night’s opening at the newly refurbished Culver Road Armory? A solo show of an unknown artist in a brand new space on a Saturday night and the place was packed. Free drinks were offered to us before we had even signed in on the iPad mounted to the wall near the entrance. Valet parking, prices starting at 6000 without the frame and plenty of red dots on the wall. “This is not an artist crowd, this is a money crowd”, said the first artist friend that we ran into. It’s true, I don’t know many artists who wear suits or spiked heels.
I was bowled over by the crowd and I was thinking this must have been a social media fueled event because I feel more isolated now that everyone is so connected. I only knew about the show because Martin Edic told us about it at Wednesday’s Margaret Explosion gig. I started asking people how they knew about his event and I got the story that an art dealer, Deborah Ronnen, who lives in Rochester, arranged the show, for the building’s owners who must have rented the lights, constructed the temporary walls to show the work, bought the drinks and invited the in crowd. The former armory already has a law firm as a tenant and restaurant on the way from the Black & Blue people. This art show was a brilliant ploy to get potential high rent tenants to see the space as a happening spot. This may not be the case but it all sounds plausible.
And then there was Mark Fox‘s art. I loved it but not all of it and not all of it as much as some pieces. I liked the two dimensional work better than the piles of cut out handwriting. I loved “Untitled (Black & White Pools)” and “Untitled (Pools 2)” but my absolute favorite was “Untitled (Fence)” (is it untitled or not?), graphite and acrylic on paper with metal pins (shown above). This three dimensional piece was cut from painted paper and woven like chain link fence and then suspended on pins so it would play with the shadows from the light.
Half Price Ice Cream Cones sign in Hammondsport, New York
I took my Nikon P7000, a point and shoot that David Pogue described as “like carrying a brick in your pocket”, out to the UPS Store yesterday to have Nikon repair the lens cover again. It is less than a year old and it spent a full month at the Nikon plant in New Jersey about five months ago when they repaired this problem for the first time. Little black blades spin open to uncover the lens when you push the power button but over time they only open part way and you wind up with Lomo style photos. I have the camera in my pocket at all times and feel naked without it. Maybe I should wait for it to return and put it on eBay.
Our big garage sale was a real eye opener to the underground economy. The dealers who stormed the gates in the two hours before the sale began and the Craigslist “Curb Alert” responders at the end of the sale are the unseen American worker bees. And of course the casual garage sailors are the backbone of economy. My brother-in-law sold our old 8-tracks on eBay.
We were too exhausted after the sale to fully appreciate our neighbor, Rick Simpson’s, performance art. All our neighbors had watched us fuss with the boxes of stuff in our garage for weeks leading up to the sale and little did we know Rick was hatching this plan to bring us back to earth, clown style. He is a professional clown after all so while we manned the tables in Alice and Julio’s driveway Rick filled our empty garage with his stuff, a boat, lawnmower, bicycles and a couple stacks of old tires. When we popped the door that night we were stunned!
Out of water lilly pad like weeds near ponds in Durand Eastman Park
I can’t tell new music from old any more. Is everything coming back at once or is nothing really new? Was that old disco or new disco that the staff in the Little Theater Café were playing last night? When our Netflix queue ran dry last month we asked our friends, Rich and Andrea, for some recommendations. Rich sent his list along with a request for new music recommendations. I’m still listening to sixties’ jazz so I couldn’t possibly oblige but it was nice to be reminded how out of it I am. I do know I like Matt & Kim.
Martin Scorsese’s “Public Speaking” found it’s way in to our queue and I like that.
The soundtrack to Wednesday’s ride home from our gig used to be The Maestro’s show “Dig This” but time does not stand still in college radio land. Last night in the same time slot it was “Femme Fatale” holding court with the queens of R&B. I just “liked” her page.
The weather changed right on cue over Labor Day weekend and the last few days have been dark and gloomy. Sade sounds particularly good on days like this. I don’t let it get to me, it’s great weather for hanging around with friends. Duane‘s in town for a few days and it’s perfect weather for Margaret Explosion. We begin a long run at the Little Theatre Café tonight at 7:30. We’ll be there every Wednesday until the end of the year.
I spotted two giant puffballs down in the woods while riding by on my bicycle and mentioned them to Shelley when I got back to the house. I knew she knows her mushrooms. They have been eating mushrooms all summer up in Adirondacks. We hiked down across the creek and over to where I had seen them but they were a little past prime. We spotted five or six different varieties along the way but nothing for dinner. I feel better getting my mushrooms from Wegmans.
When I was a kid the ride down Lake Avenue to Charlotte Beach seemed to take an eternity. And that final crest where you got your first look at lake and the tall flag pole was so dramatic. It still seems like a trek even though you’re still within the city limits.
We took Pete and Shelley to see the “Subterranean Surrogates” show at RoCo and then cruised down Lake Avenue to Abbots. They have so many locations now but the Chocolate Almond custard still tastes the best down there.
