William de Kooning “Untitled” 1980 at Bacon / de Kooning at Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery NYC
We walked along the park to the Beaux-Arts building on East 64th where Lévy Gorvy Dayan was showing an unlikely but revealing pairing of Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. Their swashbuckling bravura brushstrokes make them a likely duo.
Francis Bacon triptych of George Dyer at Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery NYC
I particularly liked this late de Kooning and Francis Bacon’s triptych of his muse and partner George Dyer, a petty thief whom Bacon met in 1963. Dyer’s suicide by barbiturate and alcohol overdose in Paris in 1971 came just 36 hours before Bacon’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais.
The gallery director was showing one of the Bacon’s to an elderly couple, spending quite a bit of time with them like maybe they were considering a purchase. We noticed he was wearing a black sweater with “The Last Poets” in white on the front. When he finished with the couple we told him we liked his sweater and he told us Lucian Freud’s daughter had given it to him. She has line of them.
“Hard Art” at PS1 in Queens examines the legacy of 40 Black artists working in abstraction from 1969 through the present. It builds on the legacy of exhibitions that foregrounded modernist aesthetics as a refusal to conform to representational approaches, bringing into focus abstraction’s nuanced relationship to identity and Blackness. Abstraction with soul!
“Periferia de la agonía” (Periphery of Agony) 2003, textile installation by Mexican artist Teresa MargollesEd Clark “Untitled (Paris Series” acrylic on canvas 1987
Ed Clark’s sweeping brushstrokes are so large he used a broom to paint this.
Betsy Johnson and John Cale wedding story by Betsy Johnson at MoMA PS1
I didn’t know John Cale was married to the fashion designer Betsey Johnson. MoMA PS1 happens to be a convenient stop on the E train, the train we were taking from JFK to our hotel in Chelsea. And PS1 happened to have one of the best shows in New York at the moment, abstract work by Black artists from the past fifty years, a show called “Hard Art.” We spent the afternoon here in the old schoolhouse, and we loved the show. I am studying my photos from the show now and will post a few tomorrow.
“New York Fashion at PS1, 1980–1984” was easier to digest. A side show at PS1, it revisits the museum’s Fashion Program, initiated in 1980, with reconstructions of experimental installations by Charles James and Betsey Johnson.
Johnson apparently misremembered the year they were married. It was 1968, not 1966 as her graphic shows, at New York City Hall. City Hall officials initially refused to let Johnson get married because she was wearing bell-bottom pants under a burgundy crushed-velvet tunic. Women were restricted from wearing pants in official buildings and some public spaces at the time. Instead of leaving to change, she took off her pants right in front of the judge and proceeded with the ceremony.
Johnson wore her crotch-length burgundy crushed-velvet tunic and later changed into an eight-inch miniskirt. Cale wore a black canvas suit designed by Johnson. Sterling Morrison was the best man. Lou Reed, Nico, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey and Viva were in attendance. The marriage was short-lived.
The Great Lakes water temperatures are currently warmer than ever for this time of year. Lake Ontario near Rochester is at 57 degrees. This could mean respectable snowfalls when the winter winds kick in, as they will pick up moisture over the lake and dump it in our backyard, perfect conditions for the lake effect you hear so much about. When we ski by this larch in a few months, it will be completely bare.
After finishing the dishes I took the sponge to the kitchen counter and bumped into our HomePod, one of the big, bass heavy, original models and Siri announced, “Here’s some music just for you.” Patsy Cline, Laurie Anderson, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in succesion. It’s playing Gene Ammons’ “Hittin’ the Jug” as I write this. Who would have guessed we’d have DJs in our homes some day?
“4 AM” by Margaret Explosion. Video by Duane Sherwood. Song from Margaret Explosion CD “Skyhigh.”
It was grey and breezy this morning, a film noir sort of day. The long string of sunny days has finally snapped. Something in the news took us to YouTube, and there in the margin, among the videos to click on next, was “4AM.” Duane Sherwood created the video for a song on our 2006 CD, “Skyhigh.” Some things get better with age.
Dance floor at Skylark Lounge in Rochester, New York
We’re listening to Kyle’s show as I write this entry. He plays 45s from the 50s, 60s and 70s on Sunday afternoons, a show called “Up on the Roof,” and he never fails to surprise us with songs from the prime of our lives that we’re not that familiar with. William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful for What You Got” was today’s gem, a soul song from 1974 that reached number 4 on the Billboard charts. Almost sounded like Curtis Mayfield.
Tom Kohn spinning records at Skylark Lounge
We stopped in Skylark on Friday night to catch Tom Kohn spinning records, all 45s of course, the perfect medium. He was really mashing it up with Velvet Underground, the Vibrators and Henry Kaiser doing ZZ Top’s “La Grange.” We settled in behind the turntables and had a blast watching him thumb through pristine copies of underground classics. At the end of the night he had records in piles outside their sleeves, a true sign of a good party.
Joe Painter collage in solo show “Probably” at Colleen Buzzard’s Gallery
The gallery was crowded, and I had already picked out my favorite piece, this collage, by the time we got to meet the artist. My first question for Joe Painter was “Is that your real name?” Probably not the first to ask, but Joe took it cheerfully. It is, and this is his first solo show. I told him I really liked this one. He must have too because it was hung in a prime spot.
A professional printer by day, he “let the ink, paper, and machinery have some say in what the image becomes” after hours. According to his statement, he “started printing things incorrectly. Running paper through again. Changing colors, remapping ink channels, losing details, covering things up.”
We picked our last batch of pimientos de Padrón in Wednesday’s record-breaking warmth. And we spent the best part of the last couple of days raking leaves. We were watching Barcelona play Aston Villa in the Champions League last night when Peggi felt a tick on her back. I pulled it out with tweezers, but it had a hold. She called our doctor, and he prescribed antibiotics.
This Blue Wave feels like recursive self-improvement. The same voters who put the big guy in charge for two terms used their own capabilities to design, optimize, and build a more capable successor version of themselves, creating a feedback loop of compounding improvements.
Tone Poems release at Little Theatre Caféon November 4 2026
CDs are coming back. So we keep hearing. I prefer 45s but I don’t think they are ever gonna come back.
Margaret Explosion releases “TONE POEMS” on Wednesday. My last poster for this upcoming event was too noisy. The noisiest thing I have ever done according to Peggi. So I toned it down. Chris Schepp took the photo of the band playing at the Little last month. I messed with it a bit. You can stream our new release now at the links below and we’ll have a stack of CDs at the show on Wednesday. Hope you can stop out.
On our way back from the big lake today, we followed the trail along the east side of Durand Lake, stopping to take in one spectacular mirrored view after another. We are enjoying the flip side of our “cooler by the lake” summer. Despite being about as far north as we can be in Western New York, our temperatures are moderated by the still relatively warm lake. Our autumn high lasts longer.
Beefy buck out front
You’ve heard of the manosphere. This is the deerosphere. Look at this guy, all beefed up for hunting season. How does this graceful animal transform itself like this each fall? That rack wasn’t even there a few months ago. His neck wasn’t that thick, and he wasn’t that big.
I had to use the pano lens to get all these signs in. There are some good ones, just in time for the midterms.
We had two trick-or-treaters last night. Two more than average. One of the kids had an inflated suit on. We couldn’t tell what he was dressed as but he looked hysterical. He had a hard time putting his hand in the bowl of candy we had so his sister helped him. And we couldn’t help but notice she gave him less than she took.
It’s just after 3pm on a Sunday so we’re listening to Kyle’s “Up on the Roof” show on WAYO as I write this. He’s playing Link Wray’s 1954 recording of Comanche, the blueprint for the Cramp’s entire catalog in one song.
“I’ve just seen one of the greatest talking pictures, one of the greatest cinematic works of creative nonfiction, that I’ve ever seen.” That’s Richard Brody, writing in The New Yorker, about “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.” He goes on to say, “the talk is sublime—vivid recollections, scintillating wit, sparkling rhetoric, profound reflections, rueful reckonings, the creative power of literary art on the wing—all amid an air of hard-fought camaraderie.” The sensation for us, sitting in the third row, was as if we had ingested a stimulant. The film put the audience in Duke Ellington’s apartment on Riverside Drive, and this crowd was entirely engaged, applauding and laughing along with dialogue that is as relevant today as it was in 1972.
The filmmaker William Greaves sent invitations to some two dozen guests whom he described as the “living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.” The painters Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Ernest Crichlow and Richard Bruce Nugent; the photographer James Van Der Zee; the writers Arna Bontemps, George Schuyler, Richard B. Moore and Ida Mae Cullen; the musicians Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle; and historians Gerri Major, Nathan Huggins and John Henrik Clarke made for a stimulating mix. Ellington was apparently ill and couldn’t attend the party in his own house, but we hear his “Black and Tan Fantasy” in the film.
The so-called Renaissance was, in part, the recognition of Black creativity, and it coincided with Marcus Garvey’s 1920 convention in Harlem, the 1921 musical “Shuffle Along,” with music by Blake and lyrics by Noble Sissle (both of whom are in this film), and Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which appeared in The Crisis. They reminisce but quickly show how alive they still are as talk turns to racism, lynchings, the massacres in Tulsa, East St. Louis and Arkansas, with firsthand tales of the Ku Klux Klan.
They recite poetry from memory. Who does that anymore? They argue, amiably—a lost art—over the teachings of Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey.
The movie didn’t bring me to tears, but the discussion in Little Theatre 1 afterward did. People spoke movingly about growing up in Harlem. A young woman commented on how close the people in the film sat together, how they allowed others to express themselves, how they could disagree with one another, how no one in the film was distracted by their phone. And the universal consensus was how thought-provoking the dialogue was, how important the film is.
We probably did take the lake for granted before Trump renamed it. Now there are people wearing Lake Ontario shirts everywhere you go. We walked along Durand Lake this morning on our way to Lake America. It was nearly 70 degrees by the time we got there. This has been a most unusual October.
We raked leaves when we got back, and I chewed them up with our mower/mulcher. We shoveled the leaf mulch into our wheelbarrow and took that down to the garden, where we spread it on top of the garlic we planted.
Pete and Gloria stopped by, and I put on a few jazz 45s. Pete told me I have good taste for a young guy. We opened a bottle of wine and made some guacamole. I put a whole jalapeño in because our crop has not been all that spicy. This one kicked some ass.
Pete brought one of his notebooks and had Peggi and me each pick a drawing from it. He told us he is giving away all his work. We had a batch of pimientos de Padrón before they left, one of the last of the year. Our plants are still green because we still haven’t had a frost, but the peppers just aren’t growing anymore. Could be because we haven’t had any rain all month.
We voted early. Why not? “Vote the bums out,” as my grandfather used to say.
We decided to watch El Clásico live on Sunday, and we planned our meal ahead of time so we could eat during the second half. We had high hopes for Barça, but we also had been watching Real Madrid get their act together in their last La Liga and Champions League matches, so the 2-1 scoreline was no surprise. So many reasons to root against Real, but then Arda Güler and Yan Diomande are so much fun to watch.
We would have watched Game 3 of the World Series last night if we had any of the three apps that are carrying it. I was happy to hear Milwaukee won. Maybe the series will be over by the time you read this. Milwaukee was my favorite teamwhen I was a kid. I stopped following baseball about the time the Braves moved to Atlanta but still have a soft spot for the city.
We’ve had two weeks of gorgeous fall weather, and we took advantage of every bit of it—long walks, split more than enough wood for the next two winters and planted 130 heads of garlic.
I took a short stack of Tone Poem CDs up to the post office and stood in line behind a couple of women who were taping up a big box bound for someone in the Elmira Correctional Facility. I watched two young women in hijabs ask the clerk if he had any stickers. He laughed and said, “Stickers? I’ve got plenty of stickers.” And he showed them the different stamps they could choose from.
Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri performing Transylvanian Dance at Bop Shop
And now for something completely different.
And now for something completely different.
We have one Béla Bartók LP, actually a double LP, a European import, that we bought at the downtown library for a song when they thinned their collection. Bartók (1881–1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, photographer and pioneering ethnomusicologist—a man of science. In 1904 he heard an 18-year-old woman singing songs from her Transylvanian village, and his life’s goal was established. Bartók traveled to remote villages across Eastern Europe with an Edison phonograph and wax cylinders to record over 13,000 regional folk melodies. The folk songs greatly influenced his own work.
Pianist Lucian Ban left Transylvania at 30. He and the violist Mat Maneri performed “Transylvanian Dance,” improvisations on the songs Bartók collected, at the Bop Shop on Wednesday night. We found the performance as emotional and deeply human as Bartók’s recordings. Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have recorded a few versions of Retracing Bartók—Reimagining the Béla Bartók Field Recordings for ECM Records, and this was the last stop on their recent tour.
Someone told us how our neighbor in the city earned his nickname, and it had something to do with him getting shocked when he was holding a spark plug while someone else started a car. Sparky owned the Shell station on Hudson Avenue in the Polish section back in the ’60s. We have some stories about him. I could have used his help the last few days.
With nine days of full sun and moderate temperatures ahead of us, we were all geared up to split the piles of wood we have from the fallen oaks this spring. I changed the oil in the Heathkit splitter that belonged to a small group of neighbors until they all stopped burning wood. It started right up, and I was going great guns for about ten minutes until it ran out of gas. I filled the tank, and it wouldn’t start.
I took the spark plug out and cleaned it, but it still wouldn’t start. Peggi got the manual out, and we went to the troubleshooting section. After the spark plug, there was a small section on the right gasoline and then complicated instructions on cleaning the carburetor.
I bought a new spark plug at Titus Mower and picked up a can of carburetor cleaner. They told me bad gas is a common problem when a small engine won’t start. I put in the new plug and pulled my guts out, but it still wouldn’t start, so I bought a couple of gallons of ethanol-free gas at Herrema’s.
Peggi and I spent about an hour discussing ways to get the old gas out of the tank, and then I remembered my brother Fran siphoning gas when we were growing up, so I gave him a call. It was noon, and he had just sat down for lunch, but he said he would stop over.
He came with a short hose and stuck it down in the tank and then sucked on the other end. He got a small taste of gas and spit it out, but the tank was empty in a minute. He told me he and his friends used to siphon high-test gas out of the school buses at night, back when gas was thirty cents a gallon.
The splitter started right up with the new gasoline.
Tone Poems CD Release poster for Wednesday November 4, 2026 at Little Theatre Café
Margaret Explosion is excited to announce our tenth full-length release, “Tone Poems.” Fourteen songs, all performed and recorded at the Little Theatre Café in the last year or so. The album features special guests: Phil Marshall on two tracks, Bernie Heveron on the closing song and Bennie Johnson playing Brazilian percussion on “Wiggle.” The album was mastered by the great Arpad Sekeres.
Tone Poems is available to stream everywhere now. There are also videos for four of the songs on the Tone Poems release page. Hope you get a chance to check it out or come to the official CD launch on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at Little Theatre Café.
I have no idea why this picture is so blurry. Nothing wrong with the audio!
Kids are lucky today. They have so much music at their fingertips. The musical trajectory is no longer linear, and algorithms and playlists lead them down all sorts of twisted paths of discovery.
Lately I’ve been snatching up jazz 45s anywhere I see them, stuff I would have dismissed back in the day, Miles from the ’50s and ’60s, Cannonball Adderley, Horace Silver, Ike Quebec, Bud Powell, Lee Morgan. I wish Blue Note would re-release all the 45s they put out over the years.
The first jazz album I had was Charlie Mingus’s Town Hall Concert, and that was 1969, after a whole lot of pop and rock ‘n’ roll. That left me wide open for all those seventies Miles albums. Then backward to Coltrane’s albums from the sixties. Then Weather Report, Ornette Coleman, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Archie Shepp albums in real time, as they were being released. And through it all, any Sun Ra album I saw.
I am traveling backward with “Come Sunday.” I first came across it and immediately fell in love with it on Eric Dolphy’s Iron Man album. Dolphy performs the solemn piece on bass clarinet in a duet with Richard Davis’s bowed bass. I later learned it was a Duke Ellington piece, part of his Black, Brown and Beige suite. It was first performed in 1943 at Carnegie Hall and recorded the following year on RCA.
A few years ago I found an absolutely beautiful version on 45 by Johnny Hodges, who used to play sax in Ellington’s band. And only very recently did I learn that the Duke wrote lyrics for the song and recorded an almost a cappella version with Mahalia Jackson in 1958.
I looked for a seven-inch version of this song and found seven of them with picture sleeves for sale on Discogs for only seven euros! But they are all from the Netherlands, where the song was released on Philips in 1958, there would be shipping and duty on top. Why was this masterpiece never released on a 45 in the US?
Ludmila Begley “Waiting For A Green Card” Sanctuary: Borders & Belonging in 2026 show at RoCo
In conjunction with their current show, SANCTUARY: Borders and Belonging, RoCo screened the Rochester portion of the When They Come for Me documentary last night, a short but intense locally centered excerpt from the full film. As one of the speakers said, it is not just happening out there but right here. Metro Justice, whose roots go back to 1965 when, as Friends of FIGHT, they fought to get Kodak to hire people of color, was the cosponsor. After the film, we heard from representatives of seven or eight groups who are on the front lines fighting this good fight.
Alianza Agrícola, helping farmworkers; Keeping Our Promise, helping Iraqis and Afghans who assisted US troops; Protect Irondequoit Neighbors, working to convince “local”border town” leaders not to coordinate with ICE; Worker Justice Center of New York, working to get all of Monroe County designated as a sanctuary; NYIC (New York Immigration Coalition); a group whose name I didn’t catch but who have a space near the Monroe County Jail and are looking for teachers and ESL workers to take care of kids; and, of course, Metro Justice.
Pamela Dodds from Halifax has beautiful large etchings on the front wall of the gallery. They look like conceptual art pieces at first glance, but you quickly realize these are functional border fences from around the world, most of which have been constructed in recent years, a testament to the influence of the US. We need to come back to study these.
Jim Mott has seven foursomes of black-and-white acrylic paintings of detention centers, most based on his photographs of facilities he has visited. He told us this was the first time he really looked forward to going into his studio to paint. Tom Policano has black-and-white photos of farmworkers taken all around the country after he received a New York State Council on the Arts grant. My favorite piece was in the small gallery at RoCo, the Ludmila Begley rough-and-tumble drawing above.
