Category: Life Is A Spell

It was a perfect night for gallery openings. A really rochester winter night. A fair amount of fresh snow and cold enough to not be sloppy. Peggi and I bot had pieces in a show at Studio 402 in Anderson Arts Building but we seed that stop for later. We started with Aaron Winters show at the pop-up gallery near the Little. He’s out every night shooting bands and he’s up first thing in the morning shooting birds but he showed neither here. These were large Nat Geo like photos from a safari he took toTanzania.

The RoCo opening, Makers and Mentors, was great. All three artists were no-shows for the opening because of the weather and there plenty of space to study the paintings. A real painting show and something we will return to in the next few weeks.

On the forth floor of the Anderson Arts building we found a something like an open jam going on in Studio 402. The show, “Sight & Sound: Art by Musicians – Music by Artists” was asking for it so I can’t complain. Peggi and I just pictured an event with this name a little differently.

We finished the evening listening to the glorious sounds of Nod at Skylark over on Union Street where toasted to Peggi’s birthday. A big one.

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If you count the rings on this beautiful red oak you get up near a hundred. And if you asked the people who had it taken down why they did it they would probably say they wanted more sun. They could have put the money toward a moving van.

We were looking for the day when the sidewalks were clear again to walk to new Irondequoit Beer Company for lunch. We had their Shakespeare IPA and some roasted Brussels sprouts. The following day we both felt like we needed more coffee so we walked up Starbucks and once there we pushed it and walked over to Home Depot where we picked up masks like the ones they wear in China.

We celebrated 02.02.2020 by not walking anywhere. We met friends for brunch in Sodus. El Rincon was supposed to be open but they weren’t. The bistro in town was closed Sundays so we headed out to the Point and had some calamari and beer. We talked about movies and books and it hardly felt like winter.

Back home I made some guacamole and we headed over to my brother’s house for the Super Bowl. Luckily it was a good one. The hour long game takes four hours to unfold. Quite a contrast with the Real Madrid match we watched the day before where Los Blancos beat their cross-town rivals, Athletico. Two forty five minute halves separated by a fifteen minute ad break. The non-stop action was no longer than the total.

We were sorry to learn my brother and his lady friend were probably going to pull out of their upcoming trip to Vietnam Nan because of the virus.

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Just imagine if you were on the cross country ski team this year. Our dental hygentist was telling me her kids meets have been canceled. It was perfect weather for a walk up to Wegmans.

Without the snow covering you notice all sorts of debris along the sidewalks and roadways. I collected discarded drugs bags for a while. I have a project in mind for them. It keeps getting better in my mind. Maybe it will stay there.

Lately we’re noticing more and more little plastic airline-sized bottles of liquor. Not just Fireball whiskey but maple whiskey, vodka and gin. I guess you could paint them and line ’em up.

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“Swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.”

Like my brother, Mark, I would start reading the New Yorker at the back, in the Critics section, with Peter Schjeldahl’s column on contemporary art. So the news that he was unable to continue writing is devastating. In his exquisite parting essay, “77 Sunset Me,” he says, “Oddly, or not, I find myself thinking about death less than I used to.” I was happy to read that line.

And this: “I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works, five thousand years or five minutes old, that physically exist in the present. We look at them with contemporary eyes, the only kinds of eyes that there ever are.”

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It was like Christmas in LA when we would stay with Peggi’s sister or Christmas in Savannah where Peggi’s parents retired to when they left Detroit. Rochester has had temperatures near 50 degrees and blue skies. It just ain’t right. But I’ll take it.

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We skied from our front door through the woods into the park and around the golf course almost to the lake before turning around. Of course we stopped often, just to marvel at a tree that was hanging on to its color or a sign of life. Unless you have lived in this climate for say your whole life you don’t appreciate how dramatic the winter palette can be.

On our way back we stopped in the garden to find our kale still kicking. We didn’t have a bag so I filled my hat.

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Spain’s transition from the darkness of the Franco era to democracy started well before the death of ‘El Caudillo’ in 1975. This we learned on our last visit to Madrid. We saw the “Poéticas de la Democracia” show at the Reina Sofia and then talked at length to Margarita at Antonio Machón Gallery where she was having a show of Saura’s work, an artist from that time that she represents and who was also featured in the Reina Sofia show. She emphasized how the underground was coming out before the dictator collapsed. And there is no doubt that the suppression under Franco fueled the movement.

Spain’s Transition led to La Movida in the early eighties, specifically La Movida Madrileña where people coined the now famous war-cries of the city: “Madrid nunca duerme” (“Madrid never sleeps”), “Esta noche todo el mundo a la calle” (“Tonight everybody to the street”) or “Madrid me mata” (“Madrid kills me”).

The US is overdue for a correction, a transition or a movida.

Here’s a song recorded at the Little Café a few weeks back..

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We are still working our way through the photos we brought back from our Iberian Peninsula trip. Walking through so many towns, taking in streets you have never been down, affords an abundance of opportunities for seeing. And then, with some composition, preparing to take the image home so we can savor the experience a little longer.

With temperatures expected to fall below freezing tonight and white stuff falling from the sky but not sticking we tore up our garden. We brought back the rest of our lettuce, peppers and a few pale tomatoes and we pulled the plants up by the roots. The seasons crashing into one another. “We’re captive on a carousal of time.”

After at least five years on the market there is a “Sold” sign on the front of the Playground Tavern. And a small hand written sign on the side door that reads, “Closed for Remodeling.” They have taken the sign down so I’m guessing the new owners are going to change the name. The bar sits on the corner of Webster and Bay across the street from the grade school and it’s ball field. They are never going to find a better name than the “Playground Tavern.”. 

Playground Tavern BY MARGARET EXPLOSION

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The first thing Peggi did when the alarm went off was check the weather. She was excited to see that it wasn’t going to rain after all but it was going to be about ten degrees cooler than the day before. And then she realized she was looking at Rochester’s weather. 

We headed out of Pontevedra, crossing the river and thinking we were following the Camino along a tributary. We saw some official markers counting down the kilometers to Santiago and after about an hour only one sign marking the Camino as “Spiritual Variant.” That sort of puzzled us but we soldiered on. We climbed a hill that led to a church where the bell was ringing. We couldn’t find any way to get in so we stopped at the Casa Rural across the street and had a cup of coffee. The proprietor told us the bells were ringing for someone in the town who had just died.

While we were in there it started pouring rain and we prepared ourselves to head out into it but first we looked at the map and discovered we were way off the Camino. We were in fact on an additional route, one that adds a day to the journey to Santiago, one called the Spiritual Variant. 

A long discussion ensued as to how we could get back on the real Camino without just, god forbid, going back the way we came. With the proprietor’s help we identified the town of San Caetano as being both up ahead and on the Camino. We mapped a walking route on Google which was just amazing. We wound our way through tiny villages, farm fields and vineyards on the smallest of dirt paths turning left or right when Google spoke and we found the Camino. What was billed as an easy day became eighteen miles but it was nothing short of beautiful the whole day. 

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The park was especially quiet today. Odd for Labor Day weekend but then the forecast was for rain later in the day. Only one of the picnic pavilions was occupied. 

We headed for the beach and found a holiday’s worth of vehicles parked along the lake. A woman’s arm was hanging out of the first car window. She had a long cigarette between her fingers and the second hand smoke was nice. I noticed quite a few people just sitting in their car looking out at the lake. A young guy in a t-shirt was starting a fire in one of the metal barbecues. He was using Briquettes, lighter fluid and one of those long, slim, gun-like lighters. His girlfriend was taking hits off a vaping device. A guy with beard got out of a car with Maryland plates, dropped his skateboard on the path, and took off with perfectly silent bearings.

We watched some kids playing in the water while their young mothers were eating sandwiches on the beach. There was more sand than we had seen all summer so we tried walking down the beach and we made it all the way to where the big private homes of Rochester’s Gold Coast start.

We passed a goth couple sitting at a picnic table. The woman had bright red hair and she was wearing a long black skirt. A group of Indians or Pakistanis were shaking sand out of their clothes. A guy who looked like a classic hippie was sitting on one of those tree trunks of driftwood. He was all alone, long hair and beard, shorts and no shirt. We passed a large woman in a bathing suit sitting alone in one of those really low beach chairs. She looked up from the book she was reading and said hello. A man in a wet suit was in the water, up to his waist with a metal detector and net in his hands. And at end of the public beach this couple sitting on either side of their cooler. He was drinking Genny from the can and she was sipping wine.

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Chimney Bluffs, just beyond Sodus Point, is a one of the minor league wonders of the world. We hadn’t been here since a Personal Effects photo shoot back in the eighties. We met friends yesterday for a picnic and we walked the trail along the ridge where I took this photo.

I don’t now if my mother even subscribed to House & Garden. We certainly don’t subscribe but we’ve been getting it for the last couple of years. We had my parents mail redirected to our house at the end and we’ve been getting it ever since. The cover story promises to help you “Find Your Creative Spark.”

Our garden, for the past six or seven years, has been down at our neighbors’. They converted their old tennis court into a garden and it comes with a fence to keep the deer out. They get a lot more sun than we do too. The new born fawns found a way in through the gate so Jared spent the afternoon rebuilding it.

We came back with a bounty of lettuce, kale,  jalapeños, basil, tomatoes and cilantro. Tonight we watch “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”

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I updated the PopWars architecture months ago. My default template wasn’t mobile compliant and I was in the habit of posting small cropped versions of my photos, ones that would link to a larger version. After the update, my old posts looked awkward so I began chipping my way through them, going backwards in time, inserting the full sized photo into each post. I was determined to get through August 2009, ten years, and I made it last night. I read the entry from the last day of July 2009 and was struck by how familiar it seemed.

Walloping Your Dodger

The gauzy reminiscing, the Catholic baggage, another opportunity to mention Buñuel. It is all there. Peggi just finished “My Last Sigh,” the autobiography of Luis Buñuel. She read parts aloud and we dove into another Buñuel movie binge. Just watched Exterminating Angel” and “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” should be in our mailbox later today. Duane read the book as well and told us, “Buñuel may be a better writer than he is director.” “I’m still an atheist. Thank God.”

I’m realizing my life is like one big loop.

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Peggi and I brought a beer down to the pool and put the umbrella up. I was reading my Chillida book and Peggi was reading “The Collector” by John Fowles. Time slipped away and the pool was entirely in shade. We swam and and were drying off when our neighbors came in with their two grandkids. The little girl asked if I wanted to see her do a cannonball and I said I did. She is so tiny it wasn’t much of a splash. I told her, “Us skinny people have to can openers to get good splash.” I toyed with demonstrating one for her but wasn’t sure I could still do one.

Her grandfather had just come back from chemo treatment. He had a small portion of his colon removed and they found some cancer in his lymph nodes. He was wearing a bag that distributes the chemo though a port that he had put in his chest a few weeks back. He is scheduled for twelve treatments, one every other week and he already has two down.

He goes to an office and they give him a few drugs through the port. Something to jack up the red cell production and anti-nausea drugs and there may be a steroid involved. I did not follow it all and Peggi was talking to his wife at the same time so I missed some of the details. None of it sounded good but he was in good spirits. He spends a little over two hours at the place and then comes home with the bag which continues to distribute the poison for two more days. As he talked I thought I could smell the stuff. When it is empty a visiting nurse comes out to pick up the bag. I was trying to imagine sleeping with the thing on. I’m back and forth from stomach to back all night long. He said if you knock it on the floor and the tube comes out you have to call them immediately because the chemical is too toxic to clean up yourself.

I turned to Peggi and she said, “Sue (his wife) has Lyme disease. She checks herself regularly and never saw a tick, just a red rash on her knee which spread. Her doctor looked at it and sent her home. At a friend’s house she started losing feeling in the right side of her face and then found that the rash had spread. She went to a dermatologist and he started her on antibiotics right away saying you don’t want to mess around with Lyme.. He did a Lyme biopsy and it came back positive.

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This luscious painting, by Julianna Furlong Williams, presented itself to us as we stepped off the elevator at MCC. We met with our financial advisor there while stocks were having their worst day of 2019 because of Trump’s escalating trade war. Our advisor teaches Economics here and he told us “If that nut case was in my Economics 101 class I would fail him.”

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Donating blood is not exactly painless. There is a mind-numbing series of questions to be filled out on a barely responsive portable tablet. And then there is the interview, blood pressure and pulse readings. They prick the tip of your finger to determine if you have enough iron in your blood. And there is a bit of a wait regardless of your appointment time. But the toughest part is all those eighties songs that you never wanted to hear again. “We Can Dance If We Want To.” Sally, who works fifty hours a week at the Prince Street collection facility, makes all this near painless. 

Pete Monacelli has talked many times about the letters between Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt. I had them open on my iPad while I sat in the big chair pumping my fist until the blood bag was full. There is a currently a critical shortage so stop by if you can.

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My regular dentist is shy about telling me to open wider. He is so gentle it seems like he tip-toes into the room. I’ve never had a bad experience there and he has done some grisly work. In high school I went to his father in the very same building. I went out with the receptionist. His father introduced me to Novocain, a god send. 

Our childhood dentist, who worked out of the sixth floor of the Medical Arts building on Alexander, would just say, “Hold on.” And then he would grind away with his low speed drill. He would make a fist and act like it was my tooth. He’d say, “I went in here and it opened up and the cavity went this way.” He would take a break while I was in the chair and smoke a cigarette in the other room.

While I was going to school in Bloomington I went to a dentist on Kirkwood, a jovial older guy. His wife was the receptionist. I had a tooth pulled there. He gave me a sedative with instructions to take it twenty minutes before arriving for my appointment. I was on my bicycle and I barely made it there. I came to while he was struggling to extract my tooth. I remember helping him yank it out.

When I moved back to Rochester I started seeing Rocco Cupolo, a dentist my mom recommended. He remarried and had a second family so he worked a long time. Rocco’s, the Italian restaurant on Monroe Avenue is owned by his son and is named after him.

I had a root canal yesterday from a specialist. He worked furiously and continually asked me to “Open Big.” I was afraid to say anything to him for fear he would break one of those long skinny files off in my tooth. Other than asking his assistant for tools the only other thing he said was “What nice long roots you have.”

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Maybe it was the hot sun but this was a particularly strange yard sale. We were only here because we were walking right by it. I can’t figure out what the advantage of using those Perfect Push-Up handles would be. And ten dollars for the John F. Kennedy plate is crazy.

The “Kenny Rogers” photo, in a brown envelope previously used for “Paid Bills” was intriguing. I pulled it all the way out of the envelope. Kenny was photographed at the Rochester Airport wearing short white shorts. It was hard to tell whether the woman proprietor was suggesting you put it on eBay or whether she had researched the photo there and determined it was worth five dollars. The skinny old man figure at the bottom right was missing some fingers. The masking tape called our attention to them. But the missing fingers were taped to the base of the figurine.

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