We helped Leo’s relatives clean out his old place over the weekend. Another neighbor pitched in as well and he described the scene as something from the show, “Hoarders.” Leo used to pick junk up from the curb and squirrel it away. He picked stuff out of our trash and we laughed as we threw the same stuff away again this weekend. Our neighbors on the other side did a little dumpster diving this morning and we joined in. I found a few choice pieces of scrap metal for Sparky and then this afternoon WM hauled the dumpster away.
Note to self: Start divesting while you still have your marbles.
Scott Regan held court in the Little Theater Café on Sunday night as he signed copies of his just released book of sketches of musicians playing live. Everyone knows Scott’s voice from his organic morning show on WRUR and anyone who regularly sees live music may have spotted him looking over his glasses as he creates these beautiful sketches. The show included a large pastel by Scott, the original art for the Colorblind James lp, “Why Should I Stand Up?” Jeff Spevak supplied the artful haikus and Scott’s wife, Sue, had a few nice drawings in there but the night belonged to Scott’s sketches. The café was more crowded than I have ever seen it, too packed to really see the art work and too loud to hear Jaffe at the piano but perfect for celebrating Scott’s work. Not all the sketches on the walls were included in the book and many from the book are not on the walls so you should really do both. Margaret Explosion made the wall. The one above, of Pete LaBonne on the grand piano, was missing in action.
The Polish Film Festival was in full swing in the theaters so we bought tickets to “The Mill & the Cross,” a film by Lech Majewski about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1564 masterpiece, “The Way to Calvary.” I have been a fan of his art since I saw a poster in the old Rochester Club Restaurant when they changed their name to Gerry’s and hired us to do a logo. No much, in the traditional sense, happens in the movie and it’s based on a book. I can’t imagine. But we were given an abundance to observe. Computer-generated effects and painted backdrops mixed with some astounding location shots and fantastic cinematography made us feel like we stepped inside one of these Bruegel marvels.
Our neighbor collects our leaves and uses them as mulch for his garden and the we use his garden so it all works like a charm. He was telling us that when they get together with their son’s in-laws about the only thing they can talk about is the weather. They are sort of opposites especially when it comes to politics and everything is political so the weather is a pretty safe topic as long as you don’t wander into global warming territory.
This Fall has been especially beautiful, unusually warm and sunny. That is probably all about to change but that’s why we live here.
Green hummingbird with red flowers and blue sky in Los Angeles
While we were in Los Angeles Peggi’s sister took us for a ride throughout the hills of Bel Air. She had the top down and it was a gorgeous day with a pure blue sky. I took this photo of a hummingbird in her backyard before we left. I made a movie of the ride but it was so full glare and sun streaks that I dumped it. In fact I can be heard complaining about the light in the movie. Such a problem! Too much light.
When we got back we downloaded the Getty app for the Pacific Standard Time exhibit. Their “In Focus: Los Angeles” photography show doesn’t open for a few more weeks but there is a video included in the app where Judy Fisken talks about how she thought Los Angeles was ugly when she was growing up but through making photos she found beauty in the photos where she was shooting into the sun. The sky would go white and the subject, houses or buildings, would be evenly lit and then she would doge the street so it too would white.
Our polling place in the Point Pleasant firehouse, a short walk away if you cut through the woods, is like something out of a Stephen King novel. It could be the teen rec center when we were kids except there aren’t any girls smoking cigarettes near the doors, only old people, election volunteers behind the tables and stray voters propped up with walkers. I keep trying to imagine how we could use the space. Throw a party, serve Genny beer, get someone to spin records, maybe get Bob Henrie and the Goners to play. But then we’d probably attract the same crowd as this season’s candidates.
Peggi’s reading the the Steve Jobs book on her iPad so I get glimpses of it as I fall asleep. I gather there is a lot of pages devoted to nurture vs nature, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate” vs open source, the merits of a college education vs dropping out and pot smoking vs the corporate mindset. I’m happy we have moved beyond all that and I’m looking forward to the cyberdelic future.
John Gary joins Margaret Explosion on bass tonight while Ken Frank joins the masses in Armory for the Pixies. I hear they open their show with a screening of “Un chien Andalou“
Mushrooms from Jeff’s yard displayed on his his car in our driveway
Our friend, Jeff, found these mushrooms in his yard last weekend and brought them over to show us. He laid them out on the hood of his car. This has been an exceptionally good year for mushrooms or so I’ve read. Maybe it’s just that we are more tuned in to them because our friends Pete and Shelley have taken to eating wild ones. The more you walk in the woods the smaller the items of interest become. You find yourself looking at lichen and seed pods and moss and mushrooms.
Dreamland Faces performing upstairs at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York for the opening of the “Extreme Materials II” show
It was great playing with Minneapolis’s Dreamland Faces at the Extreme Materials show but because they were playing at the same time as Margaret Explosion we didn’t get to hear much. We chatted before the show and Andy said they were going to do their “dissident stuff”. We heard from others that Karen didn’t sing for some reason. I caught part of one song while we were on break and it didn’t sound dissident to me. It sounded other worldly. Andy’s from Rochester so they’ll be back. With two accordions, two saws, two totally unique voices they are a marvel. Here’s a clip of Andy from Prairie Home Companion.
We have a mouse in our spice cabinet but it’s not going after the spices, it is stripping the labels of the Cream of Tarter and other containers in order to use the paper in it’s nest. That’s not so bad but the droppings are sort of unappetizing. Our cat has been looking at the walls like there is something going on in there so I’m thinking it’s time to bait the traps.
The misty white center portion of this photo, what I thought was a light leak, turns out to be dust on my lens. The lens cover on my Nikon P7000 is acting up again. Here it looks like an apparition as volunteers who help the county maintain the park hosted another of their weekly arboretum tours. The last tour of the year is next Sunday at 2pm and starts in the parking lot of the old zoo.
The shot above is from weeks ago. Yesterday’s crowd was so large they had to split it into two large crowds. Sun will do that. We went with the one that did the tour in reverse. The tour is interesting enough to do more than once. We found cherry blossoms in full Fall bloom, the once “extinct” Dawn redwoods, blue Juniper berries that smelled like gin. We learned how to tell fir trees from spruce. The cones on a fir tree point up and the ones on a spruce point down. Our guide pointed out that “fir” has less letters than “spruce” like “up” is to “down”. I remember “forks on the left” with a similar trick.
When the tour was over one of the guides urged us to vote Democratic in the next election because the “Republicans could care less about the environment.” He said they rejected spending 15,000 (that would been matched by the state) on the parks in the the last year alone.
Our neighbor, Leo, was always one step ahead of us. He made us look like slackers without even trying. Up first in the morning he’d have our paper at the door and he already be involved in a project before we crawled out of bed. He shared his garden with us, his gardening skills and then the fruit from the garden, potatoes and carrots and raspberries. Leo could fix anything. He was not only a craftsman but and an equally inventive creator, an inspiration. He was non-stop until yesterday when he passed away at 94.
Our neighbors on the other side lost their grandchild yesterday. The sweetest little girl in the world developed a brain tumor that eventually got the best of her just short of her second birthday.
Deer wander in the Canadian woods looking for food just like they do here but up there they have moose too and they are a bit taller than deer. You can see how they’ve trimmed these trees along the shoreline in Algonquin with branches eaten as high as the animals can reach. They look like manicured shrubs in an Italian garden. Philip Guston painted trees like this in his “Roma” series.
We were camping with Jeff and Mary Kaye and they’ve have been up here many times. Jeff was calling this the “browse line” and I kept thinking, “That can’t be right.” I think of animals as “right down to business”. Of course Jeff was right. This has opened my eyes to the possibility of a wide range of motives in the animal kingdom.
I can’t think of a better place to spend Indian Summer than Algonquin Provincial Park up north of Toronto. We spent the last four days there, backcountry camping and living in the moment which makes it all sort of hard to describe.
There were highlights that transcended the moment like the shooting star, the beaver we followed for a half hour or so and the midnight canoe ride to the dark side of the island where the shoreline reflected on the still lake like a wild hallucination with Rorschach attributes.
The 3000 square mile park is astoundingly beautiful and pretty much the same as it was one during the first Indian Summer.
Fall wildflowers in marsh in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
I can’t remember the last time the 5 day forecast, on the back page of the sports section, had five solid, full sun icons. So gorgeous this time of year, incredible colors and such low humidity you can see for miles. Even the deer were stunned. We came across a family in the woods and they checked us out but didn’t run. Peggi says they’re thinking, “Oh, them”.
We heard the news that Steve Jobs died while we were on break last night at the Little and we read so many obits and tributes today that it cast a melancholy spell on the day. We certainly had a soft spot for the guy that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life and then pretty much designed our lifestyle.
Ray Tierney Senior, far left, in front of his store on North Avenue in Rochester, NY
There was some sort rift that developed in my family years ago. Drinking was involved. Pa beat Ma. People took sides and today all is forgiven or forgotten, or most of it anyway. We had reunion in Webster Park over the weekend and Peggi I threw our tofu dogs on the grill along side of our cousins’ hot dogs. The daughter of my grandfathers’ brother showed us a scrapbook full of old family photos and I popped a photo of the one above. It shows my grandfather and his fellow workers in front of his grocery store on North Avenue. “Of course you’ve heard all these stories,” she said. But we really hadn’t and the time flew by as the stories unfolded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
