Seagull portrait, Charlotte Beach in Rochester, New York
I was really saddened to read Robert Hughes passed away. I always like his hard hitting, thought provoking art criticism (American Visions, The Shock of the New and Goya). I often strongly disagreed with him but I liked reading him so much I would soldier on. And when I agreed with him it was fantastic. He slammed a good bit of modern art and champions Philip Guston. In the Robert Crumb he called Crumb “the American Bruegel.” Wow!
I like this quote of his on the art market. “If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts, what would happen to one’s sense of literature – the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse? What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.”
USA vs. Japan
Without cable tv we’ve had to arrange our days around finding a set for the Women’s soccer games. The games have been sensational. The semi-final against Canada was was one of the most thrilling games I’ve ever seen. I was so happy to see Christie Rampone’s brilliant shot and Heather O’Rielly come off the bench and cross that perfect ball to Rochester Flash’s Alex Morgan in the final minute of overtime. I don’t think I could handle the noise level while watching the game at Abby Wambach’s brother’s bar. We will probably go for the comfort of my parents living room.
And I’ve been celebrating Marlene Dumas‘s birthday all week.
Sam and Jerry Gallo, the owners and operators of Krenmor Garlic Farms from Scottsville New York
This was the first week at the Public Market for Sam and Jerry Gallo and their home grown garlic. I heard someone ask where they’ve been and the said they don’t show up until their freshly picked garlic has properly dried. I heard someone else ask if they had elephant garlic and one of the brothers said, “We sell garlic. We don’t sell onions. Elephant garlic has no flavor.” We bought a pound of the Italian purple and they gave us a recipe for roasted garlic. It is a bad year for local peaches, apples and even corn but we bought batches of each.
Detail from “November 22, 2003-December 31, 2008” by Evinn Neadow at Rochester Contemporary
Gallery hopping and the summer heat is not a good combination so we didn’t expect much from First Friday last night. We considered skipping it altogether and riding bikes over to Wilco and whatever the Sonic Youth offshoot was in Highland Park, not paying the fifty dollar admission but just listening from the sidewalk. I kept meaning to google Wilco and find out what they sound like but I never got around to it. So we went with the gallery plan and started at the juried Arts & Cultural Council Members Show. I entered this show but didn’t get get in so I was anxious to see it. I loved the hard edged Bill Keyser abstract and remembered seeing it as he finished it in Fred Lipp’s class.
We stopped at RoCo next for the annual State of the City show and just like last year the installation in the Lab Space was more interesting than the show. Evinn Neadow showed a polaroid self portrait from each day of her life between her 21st birthday and the birth of her son five years later. Entitled “November 22, 2003-December 31, 2008”, this time tested concept proved engrossing. I hear Jeff Munson is working on a similar project but no one has seen them yet.
We planned to stop at the Hungerford building but drove right by and took a midnight dip in the street pool.
Flower City dumpster in front of Highland Hospital
Today’s paper had an article about Rochester’s relatively high ranking as a good city for old people. I’ve noticed that hospitals seem to be the only ones in a building mode these days.
I’ve spent so much time at the hospital the last few days I’m getting really confused. I’m pretty good at finding free parking spaces and I don’t mind walking so I dropped my mom and Peggi off at the front door and then wandered around my grandparent’s old neighborhood looking for a free spot. This morning I found one on Mulberry Street. It’s alternate side parking there and at 10:15 AM there was an equal number of cars parked on both sides. So I pulled over under a sign that read “NO PARKING 11AM Wed to 10AM Thur.” I really wanted to know when I COULD park here but I reasoned it out with only one hitch. I wasn’t really sure if it was Tuesday or Wednesday. I got out of the car and considered asking a guy who was working on his house what day this was but I decided to just chance it and walked off. In the hospital I noticed that the nurse asks my father the same question just to keep him on his toes.
My father was in the hospital again, this time for vascular issues. He is somehow incredibly vital and at death’s door at the same time. When they got him stabilized and he finally fell asleep we took my mom out for lunch. She suggested the nearby Highland Diner. As soon as we sat down my mom was off reminiscing. She told us she used to come here for lunch when she worked down the street at her father’s grocery store. She swears the peanut butter and bacon sandwich on the menu was put there because she would order it back then. This time she ordered a Veggie Burger and a vanilla milkshake. I followed suit. They put the metal milkshake glasses on the table so you can fill your glass twice. Killer.
My mom said she hadn’t been in her father’s store since he retired so we stopped in. It’s an Indian market now and seems to be thriving. I remember shopping here with her and I remember the floors and the sawdust and the smell of freshly ground 8 o’clock coffee. My older cousin was a cashier and my grandfather, the butcher as well as shopkeeper, would give us big slices of liverwurst. Everything has changed but the floors.
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at the Armory in Rochester, New York
A thunderstorm forecast forced the move of Thursday’s “Party in the Parking Lot” into Rochester’s Armory, easily the worst sounding room in the city. My parents used to go to the circus here and it might still be an ideal spot for that. If only last night’s show was anywhere near as interesting as a circus. We walked in while an announcer was introducing “Chuck Prophet & the Mission Express” and you could not understand a word he was saying. The wild reverberation here swallows even a loud speaking voice. I have no idea what Chuck Prophet was singing about but the two guitar, keyboard, bass and drums was some of the most ordinary rock music I’ve heard. I am probably too old to voice my opinion but it was as if the whole punk thing never happened and rock music continued to get straighter and straighter for the last thirty years.
Sharon Jones at least sounds good with simple things like syncopation between drums and bass, rhythm guitar, not just strummed chords, and great backup singers. The Dap Kings have studiously copped the vintage R&B thing and look and sound like a studio band on stage. Nowhere near the heft and funk of the godfather but enough to pull off a good version of Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” It was good to see the crowd come alive, smell pot in the air and be in the right spot for some serious break dancing. I guess I was spoiled by some extraordinary music at this year’s Jazz Fest like Mederic Collignon, Hakon Kornstad, Terje Rypdal and Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.
The woods felt refreshed today. We had about .7 inches of rain according to our neighbor and we sorely needed it. The gloomy, overcast, humid weather is a welcome relief.
Ralph Wager photo from RL Thomas yearbook, Webster, NY 1968
After all the paintings and drawings that I’ve done from mugshots it is startling to study one of someone I once knew. My high school soccer coach was arrested a few days ago in South Carolina on sex crimes with a child in the 1980’s. I never could figure out why he left this area, he had built up such a successful soccer program.
I used to play in summer evening pickup games at the old high school and Ralph was one of the players. We did shirts and skins or sometimes brought an additional white t-shirt to discern the sides. Most of the guys were older than me and Ralph was the oldest so he was somewhat of an instructor. He was a finesse player. Light touch, European style, short pass and possession. He wore a beret and drove a Citroen and was hired by the school in my senior year as varsity soccer coach. We went to the sectionals and lost to Gates. I don’t think I ever saw him again. I talked to another teammate and he said, “I would like to believe this isn’t true but I bet it is.”
Ralph had taken some graduate courses at Indiana University and he suggested I go there. IU had a great soccer team and there was talk of a scholarship. I played one year, was the first freshman to start for IU, and then dropped out. I still love the game. We drove to my parents house this afternoon to watch the US Women’s team beat France. Abby scored on a header and on the way home we drove by her family’s place, Wambach Farms. I’m thinking now we should have honked.
In the summer of 1980 Peggi and I drove down to Steve Hoy’s house in Gulfport Mississippi and got in his pickup truck which was newly outfitted with a camper. It sat three across with the option of crawling through the back window into the camper itself. Peggi practiced her sax back there as we drove through New Orleans, Texas and Arizona where temps were over 100 and there was no AC. We slept in the back, three across in the middle of a heat wave. We stopped in New Mexico where my father was working, on loan from Eastman Kodak, and from there we headed up to the Grand Canyon where Steve Hoy entertained the tourists with his daredevil antics. People standing next to us were wildly exclaiming, “Look at that man down there,” while we acted like we didn’t know him.
We drove into LA and stayed with Peggi’s sister and then got on Highway 1 up to San Francisco where our friends Dave and Kim, Brad, Rich and Andrea lived. We stayed there for a few days and drove back on a more northerly route. We drove through Las Vegas in the middle of the night and limited ourselves to ten bucks in the slot machines. That went fast and we camped in a parking lot near Lake Mead. Eventually we headed south to pick up our car and then back up here.
This summer’s heat has slowed the pace around here and I might be delusional but maybe it’s time to drive across the country again.
Sampling of signs from the all new “Funky Signs” site on Tumblr
I finished migrating my sign collection to Tumblr but still have a folder of recent photos to throw up there and I hope it will be an ongoing project. Check it out.
Hoosier car dude with pop-up engine in Sea Breeze New York
We were down at the lake, standing in front of Don’s Original down at Sea Breeze, eating chocolate almond custard when this guy cruised by. I fumbled for my camera and he patiently waited for the shot.
The sign on a giant ice cream cone along Route 31 read “Welcome LDS.” My dyslexic eye always does a double-take with those three letters. Claire and Kerry had organized an outing to the 75th annual Hill Cumorah Pageant and they only got a few takers but Peggi and I are easy. We even saw Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” in the theater.
The pageant takes place outside of Palmyra, New York, about thirty minutes from Rochester, where Joseph Smith found the golden tablets in 1838. His translations of the inscriptions on these tablets became the “Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ.” I learned all this in the Visitors’ Center and found the subtitle interesting. It is just “another testament.” What the heck. This one has Christ visiting America, just after his crucifixion, where he healed the sick and chose twelve more disciples, all-American disciples. As a former Catholic (I realize there is no such thing) I was surprised to find it no more whacky than any other organized religion.
This was the third time for Claire and Kerry and they told us the parking arrangement was all new this year. They used to park across the street and and a whole protest scene had grown up around the pageant where you had to walk a gauntlet to get to the outdoor theater. The protesters are still an integral part of the festivities. They shout disjointed, mostly right wing (further right wing) evangelical, messages through bullhorns and hold signs advertising AskWhyWeLeft.com. Someone was driving a truck back and forth with WhatMormonsDontTell.com painted on the side in huge letters. One angry agnostic was yelling, “You don’t need religion. Save yourself.”
It is impossible to shut out the protests so they became a part of the show. The open field parking lot is wired for sound with speakers mounted high on poles playing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or what sounds like loud funeral home music, all in an attempt to drown out the protests. It is a surreal experience just walking to the pageant grounds. The cast members, in full meso-american biblical costume, greet you with disarming smiles. I felt like I must have something permanently wrong with my face.
This trippy, Woodstock-gone-Stepford atmosphere makes the pageant itself a bit of a letdown. The sound system and lights were state of the art and as good as Furtherfest but the play is entirely lip-synched. The parking lot was jammed on the way out so Kerry and I headed to the woods to relieve ourselves. A protesters plea rose above the din. “Time to get off your high horse Mormons!”
Peggi and I celebrated our anniversary yesterday by taking two trips to the pool and then heading out to dinner. We thought we would check out “Cure”, the new restaurant in Rochester’s Public Market but they weren’t open on Tuesdays. We tried “Good Luck” and they were closed too so we wound up at Two Vine. We sat on the bar side, in the back and it’s pretty damn loud in there but the bar scene is a trip. We skipped the entrees and spit three appitizers, a beet salad, a kale and sausage in a fig sauce and black bean Calamari dish.
We drove down to Lima, the long “i” small town south of Rochester (everything’s south or you’d be in the lake), where Bobby Henrie & the Goners were playing in an Italian restaurant called Pastaria. They tore it up (they can’t help themselves) and then brought the house down with three part harmonies on “Memories Are Made Of This.”
Don’t Even Think of Parking Here sign in Sea Breeze New York
I’ve been squirreling away sign photos, looking for the right format to post them with for quite some time. I had a batch on the Refrigerator and I put a batch into a php/mysql database on Popwars but I got bogged down with the mechanics and then I read the article on Tumblr in Sunday’s NYT Magazine. I like the guy’s philosophy for sharing content, so much cooler than the dreaded fb.
So I set up another blog. Just what I need. I picked the simplest theme (it’s called “Simplification”), one column, no geegaws. I wanted to get the endless scrolling feature going like my nephew has on his Twitter page but I don’t think it works with my theme. I’m just getting started but I found something to eat up my spare time. With 64,000,000 blogs, I was kinda surprised no one had taken “Funky Signs“.
Some varmit has been nibbling at the fresh growth on our acorn squash plants. We were pretty sure it was a groundhog because our neighbor spotted a few fresh holes in the ground below the garden. He had already armed his Have-a-heart trap with some fresh apple slices and asked if we would bring our trap down to augment his arsenal.
I went out back to get the trap and the flaps were down indicating someone had taken my bait, a corn cob from the fresh corn Rick and Monica had given us from their Vermont vacation. I looked in the cage and caught a glimpse of this grey and white thing. I was afraid to get too close because we had been smelling a neighborhood skunk lately while we read on the porch.
I went back down and told my neighbor that our trap was occupied and I thought it might be a skunk. He couldn’t wait to see for himself and interrupted his Rubino’s sub to come up and have a look. A former farm boy, he walked right up to the cage and said, “You caught a baby possum.”
He suggested I take it somewhere and unload it and he offered his pickup. He said, “Just so you know, it is technically illegal to take animals from one place to another so just don’t let him go in front of a cop.” So I drove down to the park entrance, where all the dog people meet, and let the little guy off. As I backed up to turn around in the last house’s driveway I saw a woman in the window watching me and possibly jotting down my neighbor’s license plate number.
Jasper Johns Untitled (Skull) screenprint 1973 at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York
“To be an artist you have to give up everything, even the desire to be a good artist.” This Jasper Johns quote was on the wall tag next to his silkscreen print, “Untitled (Skull)” 1973, at the Memorial Art Gallery. I don’t like wall tags but this quote is better than the print.
We were there this morning to hear Corning artist, David Higgins, talk about his paintings in the current Rochester Biennial. He is a teacher and he has an engaging speaking voice so it was a delight to hear him talk about his work. He is a great painter and I love the paintings that don’t look so much like photos. Somebody should help him with his frame choices because the gold leaf, ornate window trim on his paintings in the show make it hard to see the paintings. You have to block the frame out.
We’re on Steve Greene’s mailing list and we learned that Steve’s band, The White Hots, was playing at a restaurant in Pultneyville, NY. In the email Steve said, “and the food’s good.” That stuck with me so when my father got out of the hospital we took a little drive out there. The hamlet is right on Lake Ontario so we took Lake Road out there with luxury homes on the lake side and orchards and farm land on the right hand side. It’s only a half hour ride but the countryside is so pretty you feel like you are vacation. The French traded with the Indians here in the 1600’s and the town was established in 1800 or so and they played a part in the War of 1812. We whizzed by the historical marker and I only caught the headline.
The closer we got, the more of these red stone foundations we saw. We stopped to photograph this one and speculated as to why the bigger stones were on the top. My mom thought maybe it was an addition. The restaurant is surrounded by marinas and we watched some big sail boats come in as we ate. Our friend, Jon, had taken us sailing here a few years ago. A small jazz band started playing as we were having coffee, small as in keyboards and drums. They were doing standards and the piano player played bass with his left hand. Barbara Fox was sitting at the next table over so we chatted for a bit. Peggi asked the waitress if there was a hotel in town. She said, “only one bed and breakfast.” My father wants to go back out there and paint some of the barns. We’re thinking about taking a vacation out there.
