Category: Dear Diary

This Is Like Really Mundane

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Playing Possum

Small possum in cage
Small possum in cage

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.

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Call Any Vegetable

Cat on counter at Case's Garden Store Norton Street in Rochester, New York
Cat on counter at Case’s Garden Store Norton Street in Rochester, New York

It has been so warm this year we could have had our plants in a month ago but we just got around to it today. No excuse or anything, I’m just saying. We usually go to Cases’ on Norton and it was good to see them so busy today. We bought some tomato plants and some Jalapénos (our staples) and basil bit they didn’t have the Italian basil so we bought Lebanese. It has smaller leaves and tastes a little spicier. We sampled some of their lemon basil but that was sort of intense. We bought a small box of eggplant plants and some zucchini and I looked at a oregano plant and don’t remember putting it in our cart but we came home with it. We seem to have red bell peppers at every dinner in one dish or another so we bought twelve of those plants. Now we’ll hope to keep the rabbits, ground hogs and chipmunks at bay.

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Dogs Run Free

Fort Schuyler in Elison Park, Rochester, New York
Fort Schuyler in Elison Park, Rochester, New York

We stopped by my parent’s place to visit on Mother’s Day and went out for a walk in nearby Ellison Park. We ran into Dee Dee and her dog. She told us she had been here every day for three years now. She said she imagined my parents’ neighborhood as an ideal place to live, so close to the park. Little did she know my parents moved there to be close to the park and then were both chased out by dogs whose owners let them run off leash despite the signs that state “Dogs Must Be On Leash.” We must have seen fifty or so dogs running free. Apparently Parks Director, Larry Staub, does not work on Mothers Day.

A log cabin in the park called Fort Schuyler, a 1938 recreation of the 1721 trading post where Senecas and the French swapped for furs, has the smallest windows I have ever seen on a building, maybe just big enough to shoot an arrow through. That’s one of the windows on the far right of the photo above. I took a flash picture of the pitch black inside and came up with the shot you see when you click on the photo. I had an urge to post a nasty photo after Angel Corpus Christi gave me this shout-out and this blow-up fits the bill.

My brothers and sisters and their families came and went yesterday and eight of us wound up down at Vic & Irv’s for dinner. We tried squeezing in one booth but split up when an adjacent booth opened. My mom and I each had a vanilla shake and split an order of onion rings. Vic & Irv’s changed management over the winter and was closed for a bit but Lynn is still behind the grill and I’m happy to say the food is every bit as good as ever.

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Good Egg

Robin egg on the trail in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
Robin egg on the trail in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY

I couldn’t get my Nikon to focus on this Robin egg. Of course I was in “Auto” mode so I can’t really complain. The camera does have a manual focus but that would take me ten minutes to figure out. Imagine how difficult it would be for an auto focus mechanism to find a surface on the egg on which to focus.

I occasionally buy the organic eggs at Wegmans. They clearly taste better than the regular Wegman’s eggs but at almost four times the price they are a real luxury item. And I don’t like the little red Wegmans logo stamped on top of each of the brown eggs. The packaging is bad enough but it really bugs me when they put their mark right on the produce.

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Vapourspace

Tree roots 0n bike paths in Tryon Park, Rochester, NY
Tree roots 0n bike paths in Tryon Park, Rochester, NY

We still had some credit left on the gift card that Heather gave us for doing her web site so we stopped into Good Luck for dinner last night. Their red lentil, sweet potato soup is incredible so we ordered that again and then split shiitake mushroom, bok choy and red onion salad with barbecued trout and soy. It was as good as the best tapas we had in Spain but of course we weren’t surrounded by dozens of equally enticing options and there weren’t any giant hams hanging overhead and we weren’t standing at a bar with an assortment of interesting characters.

At some point I realized I had not transferred my wallet from my painting pants to my out-on-the-town pants so not only did I not have the gift card but I didn’t have our credit card either. Peggi felt pretty confident that she could recite our credit card number so we continued eating. I guess the pressure of coming up with the number when it really counts got to her and she transposed two of the groups of four numbers so it didn’t go through and they brought the manager out to our table. Peggi decided to call our neighbors. Rick was off doing his radio show. I had played horseshoes with him earlier in the day and he told us he was going to play a Margaret Explosion song in a juggling themed set with The Incredible String Band and Waylon Jennings. Monica gave us her credit card number and our debts were settled. We were off to Geva for a one woman show about the black experience. Other neighbors who both had the flu gave us their theater tickets. Mark Gage was in the lobby but we didn’t have time to chat. He seems to have slipped into Vapourspace.

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Sitting, Thinking

White popcorn tree in bloom on March 16 in Durand Eastman Park
White popcorn tree in bloom on March 16 in Durand Eastman Park

I’m not sure what this tree is but it is in an area of the park where they have all sorts of fruit trees. The nearby pink flowering tress are identified as apricot trees so maybe it is in that family. It looks like a Popcorn Tree. Everything is coming on so fast in this summer like weather. We received some mail from the daughter of the former owner of our house. I dreaded opening the envelope thinking it must be a death notice but it was an invitation to his 100th birthday. Imagine how fast time is going for him.

The Spider and the Fly

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Frozen Salamander

Salamander on trail in early February Rochester, New York
Salamander on trail in early February Rochester, New York

It was fairly cold today, just below freezing but nowhere near typical February weather for this part of the country. The daffodils in our back yard are up, maybe four or five inches. We’ve only skied a few times and are still waiting for a good storm. We spotted this salamander in the middle of a trail and thought he was was dead. I rolled him over with a stick and he started wiggling his vestigial looking legs so I rolled back and he slinked away.

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LA SAD

Cyprus trees at sunset in LA
Cyprus trees at sunset in LA

We flew Delta but I’ll bet all airlines share a similar game plan in their race to the bottom. They took our bottled water at the gate and gave us a short lecture for having it in our bag. Bottled is $4.50 at the concession stand on the other side of the gate. There is a charge for the disposable headphones and the monitor on the back of the seat in front of us works fine when they’re showing you ads for Lincoln Continental and Coca Cola but you have to swipe your credit card for movies and special programing. The plane is equipped with WiFi but it costs $12.95 for the flight. We paid $31 for two sandwiches and a drink and they wouldn’t take cash. Tiny bags of salty peanuts are free, just like in bars where they want you buy more drinks, but on our flight the attendant announced “we were traveling with a passenger who is highly allergic to peanuts so in order to ensure that passenger has a safe trip we will not be serving peanuts.”

My nephew is considering a move to New York to continue making his top tier chef inroads. We asked if he could handle real weather and he said it was a concern. LA is unreal. You forget. My sister-in-law said, “If I lived in Seattle or a place like that I would kill myself.” That is SAD or seasonal affect disorder in a nutshell. I’m a minor key kinda guy so I don’t even notice when its cloudy. If fact I found it hard to take photos in LA because there is too damn much sun. You need a polarizing lens to minimize all that glare. My skin gets so dry out here that my feet pop open and wearing a hat and all that sun screen in eighty degree weather is whacky. But I do love LA and I was sad to leave.

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Back To Earth

Half Price Ice Cream Cones sign in Hammondsport, New York
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!

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Magic Mushrooms

Puff ball In woods near our house
Puff ball In woods near our house

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.

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Everything Fits

Painting of Pasta Villa owners in bar of Pasta Villa in Rochester, NY
Painting of Pasta Villa owners in bar of Pasta Villa in Rochester, NY

How this all fits together, I’m not sure. Maybe it doesn’t. We decided to eat out tonight but we wanted to go somewhere close. There’s Osteria overlooking the lake and Shamrock Jack’s and Churi’s Thai food or in the other direction Monte Alban or the new Puerto Rican spot or Pasta Villa. Stop. The citadel of Italian food in Rochester with the dining room frozen in in 1975 with the Ramon Santiago prints on the wall and mirror trim and marble wallpaper with two loud air conditioners cranking. We’re there. Gnocchi with greens and beans and Chicken Picata, Chianti, Dean Martin music, the painting in the bar of the Guido family owners!

On the way home we got stuck at the intersection on Culver where the owner has a couple of pressure treated picnic tables that he is trying to sell for 175 bucks each. This place is a marvel of whacked out tackiness, an American flag on the pole, a circular driveway with at least three cars in it at all times including a shiny black, Chevy 4-door Silverado pick up truck, died black wood chips in the circle and potted marigolds with an angel statue holding out an empty bowl, a deck on the front of the house with an umbrella table. Is it any wonder they have teenage age son running around with a trench coat and long died black hair in the middle of summer?

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Job Jar

Basement studs for new wall
Basement studs for new wall

I almost forgot I had a blog going here. Just as it should be. With vacation and jazz fest chalked off I reached my hand in the job jar and came up with a good one.

I spend most nights painting in the basement and it is my favorite room of the house. I like the Adirondack siding that came with the walls down there (our cat does too and uses it as a giant scratching post) but I want more white down there at least on the wall I face. So I bought some 4×8 sheets of white panel board from Home Depot and then framed in the wall so I can cover the fireplace opening. The sheets were tough to hang. Peggi and I were wrestling with them when Julio stopped by. He pitched in and had some great ideas for trimming the edges in order to cover our crude cuts.

I went to Home Depot first thing this morning and bought the trim for the top and bottom of my new wall but I didn’t go as far a julio had suggested and trim the sides. But then I changed my mind and decided to add the trim on the side so I went back to Home Depot to buy the last piece. You cut your own lengths over there and then pay by the foot. I came home and carefully cut the wrong angle on the new piece and I didn’t have any to spare so I went back to Home Depot for a third time. This is how it’s gonna be when I retire. I can see it all pretty clearly.

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Close Enough For Letterpress

Kurt Feuerherm painting "Two Romans" at Philips Fine Art in Rochester, NY
Kurt Feuerherm painting “Two Romans” at Philips Fine Art in Rochester, NY

Duane was in town for a wedding so we hooked up on Friday evening for dinner (Steve Lippicott leftovers) and then headed out to gallery hop. I dropped Duane and Peggi off at Anderson Alley and I headed over to Kurt Feuerherm’s opening at the Philips Gallery on East Ave. Kurt was my painting mentor at Empire State but last I knew he was doing abstract landscapes. This was a nice little show called “Ancient Images: Fayum Inspired Portraits.” I said hi to Kurt and reminded him I was a student of his. I remember Kurt encouraging me to go bigger and more abstract and I did that for while. I just ripped apart a pile of those old paintings last summer but I kept the stretchers. Peter Monacelli was behind the snack table at the opening. Pete taught drawing at MCC and has just retired. He’s a carpenter too and one hell of a drummer. He can make a snare drum with brushes sound like a whole kit. Turns out he went to Empire State as well and Kurt was his mentor. We finished up the evening wandering around the Hungerford building. That place was packed.

We printed the second color on the Margaret Explosion 45 sleeves on Saturday so now we’ll have to schedule a glue party. We’re planning to release it on Wednesday the 18th at our Little gig. We left the house with our earplugs thinking we’d check out SLT at a club on Monroe Avenue but the printing took forever. Actually the printing went pretty fast. It took us a few hours to get the registration right. In the end it was close enough for letterpress.

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Sounds Like A Plan

Red Magnolia blossoms in Peggi's hands
Red Magnolia blossoms in Peggi’s hands

The temperature barely got in to the fifties today but it felt warm in the woods. Last year Spring came on like gangbusters so everything was in bloom at once and it was over before we knew it. This year it’s taking its time and that’s ok with me. We cut through the park to check on the magnolias. The pink ones are dropping, deep red ones are just starting to open and the yellow ones are still tucked in their fuzzy cocoons. The colors look more dramatic on cloudy days so quit yer complainin’.

I came to class unarmed last night. That is I only had a few small watercolor/drawings to show for the week. And of all nights to be so empty-handed! Our teacher, Fred, was a little late. He’s usually a little late and I’m always early. Punctuality is not one of my traits but painting is different. When he walked in I was only one in class. A lot of people were way late or just took the night off. I showed him the paintings on paper and we talked for quite a while. He liked one quite a bit and complimented me on my brush language but I had painted myself into a corner on another and it provided the perfect opportunity to rethink my process.

Fred characterized my overall approach as conservative, trying to get the proportions of the head right, the eyes the same size and adding an ear because the model has one or two, those sorts of things. He suggested I look for the characteristics I want to paint, in my case it’s always the expression, and paint that. Forget about the ordinary concerns, the mechanics, and go for the art. He offered an analogy I could grasp in the way jazz musicians play. Make a move and improvise on that, compliment it, amplify it, contrast it, provoke it. A dialog full of surprises. Add one mark at a time and keep them all in play like a juggler. He surmised that I get into trouble when paint something without confidence so I would be better off if I didn’t paint that which I am not confident about.

I’m getting so I can talk a good game.

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Sunflower, Burdock, Rhubarb & Horseradish.

Sunflower, Rhubarb, Sun Flower and Horseradish leaves on wall at Toko Imports in Ithaca
Sunflower, Rhubarb, Sun Flower and Horseradish leaves on wall at Toko Imports in Ithaca

You don’t have to be a drummer to like Toko Imports in Ithaca. The owner, Tom, carries hats and hammocks as well as congas, djembes, gongs and every type of percussion instrument imaginable. Peggi rattled a donkey skull with the teeth still in their sockets, a primitive Vibra-Slap.

I bought some brushes and commented on the huge leaves on the wall behind the counter. Tom confirmed that they were indeed real, locally grown leaves from some common plants. He told us that we knew what these leaves were and pulled the right answers from us by giving us well rehearsed clues. Sunflower, Burdock, Rhubarb and Horseradish. The woman from Holland who was standing next to us had never heard of Horseradish.

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Staggered Entry

Witch-hazel near Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York 2011
Witch-hazel near Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York 2011

This Witch-hazel, along the road leading into Durand Eastman Park, is in full bloom now. Your nose detects it before your eyes but it but it is not as fragrant as the winter Witch-hazel which bloomed, like a miracle, up in the park in February. Still to come is the Witch-hazel that will blossom to much less fanfare in our back yard in the Fall. They remind me of Geri McCormick’s paintings.

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Virgin Wood Type

Virgin Wood Type Gilll Sans Type Display
Virgin Wood Type Gilll Sans Type Display

Bill Jones asked for a little help moving his type making equipment around. The router, the band saw and every one of those big green woodworking machines are heavy. Bill makes wood type from oversized patterns. You can’t be around all this stuff without dreaming about type projects, signs or posters that you could put together with all these little wood pieces. I’m thinking about a letterpress cover for the upcoming Margaret Explosion single.

On the way over, a ten minute ride, I scanned the college radio band and found Matt & Kim’s “Silver Tiles” on WITR, Althea & Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking” on WRUR and Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side” on WBER. I thought my iPod on shuffle was pretty good.

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Wendell’s Castle

Bleu Cease and Wendell Castle at the Makers Mentors opening at Rochester Contemporary
Bleu Cease and Wendell Castle at the Makers Mentors opening at Rochester Contemporary

We got a personal invite from Heather Erwin so we started First Friday at her place. Met an up and coming photo journalist there and told him I thought photo journalism was getting better. This opinion is only based on the number of photos I’ve cut out of the newspaper lately.

We cut through the creepy leather store in Anderson Alley and stopped in the Bop Shop. I had tried to download Billy Bang’s newest, “A Prayer For Peace”, but it wasn’t in the iTunes store and I thought I’d pick up the cd here but they were sold out. Like any good record store Rick made a persuasive argument for picking up another cd, “Tara’s Song” by Ahmed Abullah who used to play trumpet with Sun Ra. His band does two beautiful versions of Ra tunes and a amazing cover of Ornette’s “Lonely Woman.”

Onward to Record Archive where Lucinda Storms showed some brand new luscious Valentines Day paintings. Stan Merrell was onstage playing a therimin. Alayna offered us Genny Bock Beer and we settled in for some free ranging conversation. Rick Simpson who had earlier tried to sell me a down jacket that he picked up at Eddie Bauer for forty bucks and was now trying to sell the coat to Jeff Spevak. Jeff’s dad had just died and he wrote a beautiful piece on him. Stan and Brian Williams tried to help me find the black and white mode on my new Nikon and I bought one of the Dick Storm’s appropriation t-shirts. He did a tempting Warhol VU banana one but I went for the bright green “Archive Rock Beer” shirt.

It was only fitting that Wendell Castle would be holding court when we got to Rochester Contemporary for the Makers/Mentors show featuring his work. Perhaps Rochester’s most successful artist, he has influenced a generation of woodworkers.

We were looking at the other makers’ armor art with Martha O’Connor when Martha exclaimed, “Of course!” It dawned on her that Nancy, Wendell’s wife, had certainly crafted these dwarf sized amour suits to hang in their “castle.”

We discussed going to Abilene for the Spampinato Brothers but had spotted a beautiful black and white snow scene painting on the First Friday website so we headed off to a place called the Living Room Cafe on Monroe Avenue. Perfect name! A small crowd was watching “Reality Bites” on a projection tv. The screen was pulled down over some of the paintings that we had come to see but this place was comfortable. We were offered a free cup of coffee and stuck around for the rest of the movie.

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Glass Half Full

Lake Ontario and Lakeshore Boulevard in Winter 2011
Lake Ontario and Lakeshore Boulevard in Winter 2011

One of our neighbors down the street emailed us about some community pool business and she refered to “this awful cold weather” we’ve been having. We had just returned from a ski through the woods and down to the lake and we thought the weather was perfect. But then Mike Deming used to chide me that I’m a “Glass half full kind of guy” so I would see it that way. OK, it was fifteen degrees but the sun was out (click photo for full shot) and the snow was fresh and crisp. In fact it glistened.

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