Steve Piper drawing at Margaret Explosion Little Theater gig
Most Wednesday nights Steve Piper can be seen drawing in one of the front tables for Margaret Explosion’s Little Theater gig. He may have picked this habit up from his bandmate, Scott Regan, who rarely goes anywhere without a sketchbook. Or he may simply be responding to Frank DeBlase’s City Newspaper review of the band. “Their esoteric wonder paints pictures in my head nonstop.”
Steve’s drawings are expressive and border on abstraction. Scott’s are representational and quite incisive. Frank’s observation is especially fluid and inspiring. Certainly that is what an instrumental, improvisational band tries to do.
Dead end sign on Wisner Road in Rochester, New York
Wisner Road used to lead right into the park. This barrier wasn’t here. You could continue through the park on Zoo Road and come out on Lakeshore Boulevard and I’ll bet it was quite a short cut. As it stands, it’s a deadend and you have to drive around the park. A brilliant move on someone’s part because it keeps all that traffic out of the park.
When we moved here we were told this part of the park is a hangout for gay hookups and there has always been plenty of tiny drug bags on the ground, not that those two things go together. It is mostly populated by dog walkers, people who drive to the park and let their dog run free despite the sign that reads, “Dogs Must Be On Leash.” I mention these infractions because the lettering on the sign and the road in front of it reads like someone is upset by something the police did. Probably not the dog walkers.
A fellow named John May wrote a letter to the editor that was published in today’s New York Times, a well written letter in response to the Sunday article about how lies don’t really matter anymore when it comes to politicians. With a name like that I didn’t think it could possibly be the John May in our painting class but when he walked in tonight he was wearing an especially large smile.
Amy Rigby poster for upcoming house concert gig in Rochester, New York
Our neighbors, Rick and Monica, have had quite a few house concerts over the years. We’ve been to a few but the singer/songwriter scene is not really our thing. I was playing horseshoes with Rick and he mentioned that there were still some seats left for Saturday’s show with Amy Rigby. She has played Rochester many times with her hubby, Eric, but this one is a solo show. “Still some seats left?” My graphic art instincts took over.
I grabbed a photo of Amy off the web and made a kick-ass poster to get the word out. I fired off a copy to Rick and one to Amy. Not sure if Rick did anything with it but he said he “loved it.” Amy hoped people wouldn’t show up wondering where the woman in the poster was. I am just a fan so I don’t have to be concerned with this nonsense. I’m pretending Saturday’s event is a rock n’ roll show without the racket. Here’s the real Amy.
Close up of buck on Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York
There are too many deer around here. They strip the low vegetation in the woods and wander into traffic looking for ornamental shrubs in people’s yards. You can’t hunt on park land so there are very few preditors. We have coyottes but not enough to keep the deer population in check. The zoo in Durand Eastman used to have deer behind fences. The zoo folded, took down it’s fences and the deer remain. The woods behind our house is like a petting zoo. That is until mating season.
You can smell deer this time of year. It is hard to tell if the bucks are having the time of their life or if they are just all bulked up to do business and frustrated. They roam the woods alone tracking small groups of does and chasing them straight up steep hillsides. They take on other males, violently banging their heads against the racks on other bucks in knock down duels. We even saw three going after each other in an open meadow over the weekend.
The title of Philip Glass’s “Hydrogen Jukebox,” came from a verse in Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl.” Glass and Ginsburg picked eighteen of Ginsburg’s poems as the libretto for the 1990 chamber opera and the Eastman Opera Theater performed the piece four times this weekend with two different casts. Ginsburg read his work at the formative performances and Glass is quoted as saying he tried to respect the music that was already in the delivery of the words when he wrote the score for the trained voices. It is remarkable how well the sometimes bombastic verse fits the pulsating music.
With no traditional story the decline of the American empire, war and pacifism served as the theme. The church-like set with sacrificial table, fire pit, flags with corporate logos and roulette wheel centerpiece with stops at all the countries we have declared war on was a comfortable environment for the six actors/singers/dancers. The soft beginning beautiful ending piece eased us in and out of some heady, turbulent times very much like our own.
“Young Attorney” lithograph by William Gropper at Warren Philips Gallery in Rochester, New York
William Gropper studied with Robert Henri and George Bellows in NYC and he was influenced by the graphic work of the greats, Goya and Daumier. All this is apparent when you see Gropper’s work. And there is a litho, “Young Attorney,” for sale in Warren Philips gallery right now for somewhere near 500 bucks. I love how animated the four characters are, how distinct their expressions are. I love the cop’s pose and the lumpy defendant. This thing is a steal.
While you’re there you can take in the Rochester Print Club’s annual Member’s Show. It was our favorite stop on last night’s First Friday run.
The empty chairs on our deck await the imminent arrival of Pete and Shelley. Fall has peaked and moved on in the mountains so they will get another crack at it here. Pete LaBonne will be playing the grand piano with Margaret Explosion tonight at the Little Theater Café. We look forward to the chaos that ensues.
Up here, near Lake Ontario, we have not had an official frost so this seventy degree weather cannot be called Indian Summer. I’m only making that distinction because I stayed quiet when the lady at the voting booth called it such this morning. Somehow it always seems like a nice day when we vote. It probably has something to do with our route to the booths which takes us through the woods in the park, across the creek and up into the neighborhood of small houses between Culver and the park. Why isn’t this the new hipster section of Rochester? That would probably have something to do with number of Tea Party flags flying here. And those little placards in the window that read, “This house is protected by 2nd Amendment.”
The firehouse in Point Pleasant Fire is nestled into the aptly-named neighborhood. And the best part of voting here is getting a peek of the dreamy bar in the next room. Every year I vow to rent the place for a party, one with a band and dancing. We could crawl home through the woods.
“Black Police Lives Matter” sign near he corner of Titus Avenue and Culver Road in Rochester, New York
We are all oblivious to things going on around us but I felt felt especially so when our new neighbor told me he was seriously considering not buying their house because the police in this part of town had a reputation for racism. It was shortly after they moved in when this story made the news.
So with some new found awareness this little sign near the corner of Titus Avenue and Culver Road caught my eye. Almost too small to be seen as you drive by it easily catches the eye of bike riders. I hope it has nothing to do with the nearby Art Deco house with the nautical theme but I suspect it is the work of a nearby neighbor. Irondequoit is the wrong town to be trying to take this meager campaign away from those whose lives are affected.
The sign, as seen above has had a few incarnations in the last few weeks. It started as “Police Lives Matter” in a lighter font. Someone scratched out “Police” and added “Black.” The originator came back with a bolder “Police Lives Matter” and pasted right over the amended sign and then shrink wrapped the whole sign in plastic.
Yesterday afternoon I wrote the word “Black” with a Sharpie, just above “Police Lives Matter” creating this confounding black police message. You see, I not only manage the Funky Signs website I am also a customer. Peggi and I rode by today and the sign was gone.
Apparently people feel left out by Black Lives Matter slogan because I keep hearing people say, “all lives matter.” Well, that wouldn’t be much of a campaign and it completely sidesteps the issue.
We considered going to the Halloween Bowie Karaoke event, “Bowieoke,” at Visual Studies tonight, just long enough to have “Golden Years” stuck in my head. Someone plans to to re-enact the 1976 Bowie/Iggy Rochester drug bust and I would to see that.
I was thinking we had to drop off art work for the RoCo Members show this weekend but that’s next weekend. And Peggi had set aside a coupon for Parkleigh, where my sister works, so we planned to stop by there, mainly to visit but also to take advantage of the coupon. Turns out the sale is next weekend. We’re gonna need the extra hour tonight to get our life organized.
We stopped in the new India House restaurant on Èast Ridge Road. They’re in a strip mall across from Medley Center in a place that was Chinese and then Thai and they are apparently too new to have any customers yet. We were the only ones in the place and we were ordering to go. We told the waiter we were in the mood for something hearty. He said, “What is hearty?” We tried “substantial, meaty without meat, not light, beans” and a few others. He recommended a spinach paneer dish and it hit the spot.
On the way home we passed a group of kids in costumes. I had the idea to yell “boo” so I pushed the button to lower the window. We were around the corner before I got it down.
Janet Lipp, an artist and teacher like her father, invited Fred Lipp to talk to her class a few times over the years. In 2014 she videoed the presentation he gave to her MCC art class. I studied with Fred’s for many years and he hardly ever talked about his own work. So it is a joy to hear him do so here. He used the same thought process that he taught and it is especially powerful to see him pull it all off. I am so thankful he was willing to share what he loved.
The Creative Workshop had a celebration of Fred’s work tonight, a gathering of former students in conjunction with a show of their work in the Lucy Byrne Gallery. They were showing this movie in a separate room and in the building next door the Memorial Art Gallery had a painting of Fred’s that they bought in 1972, a big abstract called “Sculptural Fetish.” Fred would have loved it.
Paul with head in sand at Charlotte Beach in Rochester, New York 1950s
My sister, Ann, told us about a box of old photos that she found in my parent’s kitchen cupboard. I borrowed it for a night and scanned some gems like the one above. I’m guessing that’s my brothers Mark, John and Tim gathered around me and we’re probably at Charlotte Beach some time in the 1950s.
Anne Havens stopped by with her fiddle, it’s really a European violin that Colleen Buzzard gave to her, and we played a few songs in our living room. I played my djembe and Peggi played sax and the combination of sax and fiddle sounded to me like an accordion. I really loved the combination. Anne favors major key we go minor. Her repertoire is grounded in a long tradition of American folk but we played with abandon.
When we were finished I took a photo of the set list in her case. Streets of Laredo, Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie, Wayfaring Stranger, Out Of Bondage, Higher Ground, Down In The Valley, Tennessee Waltz and Faded Love. I can see why some bands skip the the whole creative trip. The book has been written.
Record Archive cake by “Cake Me Away” for 40th year celebration
Record Archive has been celebrating their 40th anniversary all year. As well they should be. Just how could a record store stay in business that long? There was some sort of shindig going on there this weekend and we made a point to stop by. Bands were playing in the back room and everything in the store was forty-percent off.
We don’t really buy records anymore but we had a short stack of albums and a bag of CDs left over from our summer garage sale so we traded them in and wound up with forty-five dollars in store credit.
We wandered around for an hour or so looking at the new vinyl and CDs and t-shirts and the mind-numbing amount of tchotchkes. We ran into acquaintances in every isle. Someone was buying every cd in Rolling Stones’ Top 100 of All Time and a woman shopping next to him was asking him why he didn’t just download the music? The checkout lines were a city block long.
Former employees Karen and Doug and Lenay and Chris and Stan were all there. Bands, made up current employees, took turns on the stage. Jason Smay, JD McPherson’s drummer, was playing with his son on guitar. Deb Jones blew everyone away with her stellar version of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
We had a beer in the back room and we tried to buy a used designer floor lamp. It was $125 but we couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. We asked the owners, Dick and Alayna, and they couldn’t figure it out either. We shouldn’t have bothered them, it was way too busy.
So we turned our attention to turntables and books and box sets. We picked up some incense and some small pocket pads and cd of Jack Kerouac reading. I ran into my niece, looking at the used clothing, and I told her to pick something out and let us buy it with our credit but we never saw her again.
Somewhere at front end of that forty years Record Archive had a record label as well. Here’s a 1982 45 rpm single from the Archive Records label by the Hi-Techs.
Hi-Techs “Screamin’ You Head,” A side of Archive Records 45 recorded by Dwight Glodell at CSE Audio 1981.
The bar at Cub Room on South Clinton Avenue, Rochester, New York
I was especially tired in Saturday morning’s yoga class. My ears were still buzzing from Big Ditch’s show the night before and the Three Heads‘ “The Kind” was still swimming around. It was our first class inside the Rochester Yacht Club facilities. The weather, now pretty much around the corner, has put an end to the outdoor adventure in the Port of Rochester. If I had to join a social club it would be this one. I don’t think you need a boat or anything.
Near the end of class, when we had been on our backs with a rolled up towel in lumbar curve for about a half hour, Jeffrey had us pretending to lift our arms. In doing so you become acutely aware of the muscles involved with such a simple act, muscles all over your body working together. Isometrics, I guess, but it stuck me as imaginary yoga. I asked Jeffrey if he could do a whole class of imaginary yoga and he laughed. That could but him out of a job.
The Cub Room on South Clinton is surely modeled on the Mad Men craze for cocktails and meat. Rat Pack photos line the walls above the booths and there is an air of glamour days gone by in the unofficial dress code. It is the city’s version of the Yacht Club. We ordered the only vegetarian dish on the menu, Crispy Chickpea Cake with roasted vegetables surrounded by a Romescu sauce. And we split an order of Grilled Octopus with Beluga lentils, grilled chicory, smoked paprika and Sherry vinegar. The octopus, like the cocktail club culture, was a bit overdone.
There is nurture and there is nature and then there is the “Wolfpack,” the type of documentary that just sweeps you away into another world. This one a site in plain sight, an tall apartment building in the lower East Side of Manhattan where six Angulo brothers and their sister were locked away by their parents. Home-schooled and deeply immersed in the movies, an oddball combination, they lived a surreal life until one of them escaped and the director became their “first friend” outside the family.
Conversations with Steve Hoy cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time with hardly a discernible path to look back on once you hang up. A science fiction buff, he somehow got around to “Illustrated Man,” the 1969 movie with a clunky Rod Steiger whose tattoos came alive for anyone who looked too close. Peggi added it to our queue. Ray Bradbury’s book must have been better than the movie. With most people running out of space for tattoos today, it is ripe for and updated film version.
Beaver damage on the east side of Eastman Lake in Rochester, New York
Away from Lake Ontario, further south but at higher elevations, the Fall colors are peaking or past. Up near the lake we are still coming on. We walked around the east side of Eastman Lake and then back along the western side of Durand Lake today. The paths were partially underwater along both lakes, unusual for this time of year. We suspected beaver action and sure enough we found it about halfway down.
Way blue sky over Fall colors in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York
“Red,”John Logan’s play about Mark Rothko, currently at Geva Theatre, is a particularly meaty discourse about art and art-making. I was totally engrossed but the guy sitting in front of us dozed off. It probably isn’t for everyone. The play as written may even be too good for the two actors but I warmed up to them and was eventually carried away by their performance.
Abstract Expressionism out intellectualized the physicality of Cubism and then the “Barbarians at the Gate” assault of Pop Art, just as Rothko was getting successful, took down the Ab Exers. Architect, Philip Johnson, asked Rothko to create murals for a new restaurant in his Seagrams Building in Midtown Manhattan and this is the time frame for this play. A studio assistant, hired by Rothko, takes on the old man. Not by out painting him but by challenging the master to be true to his own game. Rothko eventually turns down the distasteful commission down and he sets his assistant free to carve out his own life. It is a story for the ages.
Buffalo Bills inflatables on lawn in Rochester, New York
The Buffalo Bills play their NFL game in Wembley Stadium this weekend. And here I’ve been holding out for the English version of football to come this way. We just bought season tickets to Western New York Flash for next year.
I walked with my mom this afternoon. She was too tired to do a lap of the building so walked up and down the halls of her apartment building. There was a real ruckus going on in the big room so we ducked in to see what was going on. A group of woman were playing Wii bowling and we stayed around long enough to watch one of the residents pick off a mean split.
I usually put my iPad in my bike basket but about halfway home I looked down and it wasn’t there. I couldn’t imagine it falling out. I called my mom when I got home asked if she saw my iPad near her chair. She never took to computers and she doesn’t really know what an iPad is so I found myself saying things like, “It’s black and thin and and it has glass on it.” My mom has a little problem with her hearing and lately with her vision so our conversation went something like a Burns and Allen routine. I drove back over there and by the time I got there she had found it.
Rick came over this evening for a few games of horseshoes. We always play best of three and it usually takes the three to determine a winner. Rick’s two and my one. I feel as though I could win more often if I could concentrate on what I’m doing. In a few more years we’ll be sitting in chairs, playing Wii Bowling.
Old gas station in Johnsburg, Adirondack Mountains, New York
Arthur Dove’s father ran a brick making plant in nearby Geneva, NY. There were as many as ten brickyards in the Rochester area at one time. Henrietta’s town historian invited my father to give a talk on bricks. Specifically, the Brighton Brick yard, which used to sit on Monroe Avenue near 12 corners.
Peggi and I helped by proofing his slides. Peggi caught a measurement labeled with “(inches) rather than ‘(feet) and of course we had to tell my father about the scene in “Spinal Tap” where Nigel does a sketches for some Stonehenge props. I exported my father’s Keynote presentation to his first generation iPad and I sat with the iPad and projector, advancing the slides at my father’s pace. I went the wrong way a few times but we worked pretty good as a team. This was not the first time and my father is getting really good at this. His slides contain the pertinent information, not too much, and he is able to talk to the slides in a comfortable way bring the graphics to life.
Yesterday’s 2PM presentation was held at the Senior Citizens Center on Calkins Road. Last time I was out this way we saw Captain Beefheart with Frank Zappa at the Dome Arena. It was not a good period for either. The Henrietta officials started the presentation with the Pledge of Allegiance, which caught me completely off guard. I should know the words to that damn thing by now. And it was followed by an announced but unexplained “moment of silence.” The florescent lights were washing out the opening slide so I asked the town historian if she could turn them off and she obliged. They gave my father a wireless mic and when he turned it on it screeched with painful feedback. The speakers for the PA were immediately overhead, built into the ceiling, a no-win situation. I asked them to turn the PA down and my father proceeded to use the mic as a pointer so the only time we really heard it was when he touched the screen with it to point something out. “Thump, thump, thump.”
The audience here was really into it. Peggi and I were as well. The guy sitting next to me was taking notes and scrambling o keep up. Ingeniously, my father used a handful of existing photos and early illustrations to pick up scale and measurements of the equipment involved in the brick making process. He used Google’s 3D illustration program,”Sketch-Up,” to create drawings of the buildings, kilns, machinery, molds, transportation systems, rail tracks and even the housing for the workers. And he employed his fanciful side to illustrate with his paintings what these plants must have looked like. He overlaid his to-scale drawings on old maps recreated the past for us. No small feat!
Marsh behind Pete and Shelley’s property in the Adirondacks
Nothing like a couple of days off the grid to get your priorities straight. The “No Service” alert in the upper left hand corner of my mobile device was actually comforting. No emails, texts, news, Google searches or nasty Geo-tagging of my photos. Pete and Shelley made Hominy grits, puff balls and aborted entoloma mushrooms, beet greens and garlic toast over an open fire for breakfast. And I made the French press coffee extra strong. If you were an en plein air painter you would have your work cut out for you up here.
