Category: Life Is A Spell

We haven’t listened to our recording from Wednesday night. We left for the mountains the next morning. The gig with Bernie was an odd one in that the crowd, mostly regulars, was especially intent on listening. Bernie had sat in with us before but not on the Little’s new stage. He set up in a way that we couldn’t hear what was coming out of his amp for the first set. So Peggi and I were playing sparsely as we strained to hear Bernie, afraid to run over whatever it was he was playing. It was especially nerve-wracking. We talked during the break and the second set worked.

We left after breakfast and stopped at the Fastrac in Walworth to go to the bathroom. The only newspaper on their stand was the Epoch Times, and they had a whole pile of them. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found it described as right-wing or far-right, known for its strong support of Donald Trump and the promotion of conspiracy theories. We made plans to stop at the nearby Mi Hacienda Jalisciense on our way back.

Driving up to the mountains at this time of year is like traveling into the future. Here, by the lake, our fall colors are just rolling in, but as we drove north the colors grew more and then less intense until we arrived post-peak. Our hosts live off the grid, so in one sense we arrived in the past, no internet or running water, but in a very real sense we were far more grounded in the present.

It is always tempting to take detail photos of their minimal but artfully constructed home in the woods, the perfectly stacked woodpiles, the burnt pots on the outdoor grill, the titles on the bookshelf and the glass tabletop on the hemlock stump.

Shelley took us down to the beaver dam on the marsh, where she pointed to the vertical supports the engineers used to support their thatched wall. The dam had raised the level of the marsh by three and a half feet, and the creek, where I was standing when I took this shot, had slowed to a trickle. So Shelley suggested I remove a few pieces to refresh the creek.

After a few days in the woods, we pulled up in front of the Mexican restaurant in Alton. It sounded like they were having a party inside. At four in the afternoon, some farm workers were just getting off work, and there were twenty or so, all men in their early twenties, eating at tables. Mexican music was cranked in the kitchen, and the subwoofer was rattling the building. Peggi went back out to the car to get our earplugs. Another couple showed up and sat next to us. They ordered margaritas. Peggi and I were having Negra Modelos with guacamole and enchiladas. We came home, made a batch of pimientos de Padrón and watched Atlético defeat Alavés 2–1.

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Our friend, David Greenberger, has a fine arts degree in painting. After graduating he took a job as activities director at the Duplex Nursing Home. He met the residents of the nursing home and abandoned painting in favor of conversation. “This is my art,” he said. David created the Duplex Planet, his life’s work.

For the next four days he has an auction on eBay where he is selling his collages on postcards at insanely low prices! 

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I couldn’t remember if we had ever taken Steve to the Genesee Brewery. He’s been to Rochester many times, and we usually just carry on like no time has elapsed instead of running around town.

But Steve got fascinated by a story in our local paper about two women who had tried to rescue a dog—I didn’t read the article, but as I understand it, the dog was dead and it had been stuffed into a bag. One of those grisly stories I don’t pay any attention to. They saw someone throw the bag into the river gorge from Maplewood Park, and they climbed down the gorge and had to be rescued by helicopter. Steve wanted to see the site, so we had an outing.

We started by orienting Steve as to how the Genesee River runs through the city, indeed formed the city as one of America’s early boom towns. The Genesee Brewery is a comfortable vantage point.

We ordered three Twelve Horse Ales and sat outside on the third-floor deck of the brewery with this view. A guy sitting next to us had a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt on with Hendrix’s 1969 tour stops listed on the back. I saw Hendrix in 1969 with Kim in Indianapolis, so I had to ask him to lean forward so I could study his shirt.

The dog incident happened at Maplewood Park, another of Frederick Law Olmsted’s, near the Lower Falls, north of the High Falls (pictured above) and closer to where the river flows into Lake Ontario. The last time we were here was with Peggi’s mom when we toured the rose garden.

The park is a little seedy and was the scene of a shooting a few years back. We parked next to a car in which the occupants were enjoying some skunky weed. And before we walked down the steps to the gorge, we had to wait for a bicyclist to finish taking a piss. There was a couple making out down there, and the guard rails along the gorge had long ago crumbled into it.

When we got back, we heard Steve talking to Brad on the phone and telling him where we had gone. In his telling, people were shooting up down there and the couple was fucking out in the open.

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We ran into a couple of women from Laos in the park. We knew what they were up to because they were sort of walking in circles at a short distance from one another, each carrying a bag and looking down. We stopped to chat with one of the women and she showed us what she had found. We were surprised at the incredible variety. Our friend, Shelley, knows her mushrooms but we would be scared to death to eat something we found in the park. I take that back. We have brought home some pawpaw fruit and eaten that.

I would guess this has been an especially good year for mushrooms. We have hardly watered our garden all summer and Lake Ontario is still more than a foot and a half above its long-term average. Our neighbor showed us a puffball he found by his firewood, firewood he had had neglected to cover. It too was covered with mushrooms.

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We had dinner over at my sister’s house last week and she gave us a few things. This clipping from high school (above), two beautiful, bright red “We Are FIFA” T-shirts that had been marked down after the World Cup, and this “Glory of Christmas” card that I vaguely recall drawing. The inside has something called a “Spiritual Boquet” (I spelled bouquet wrong), with a list: Masses – 12, Communions – 12, Rosaries – 12, Aspirations – 2000 (I don’t even remember what Catholic aspirations were, but they must have been easy), Sacrifices – 9, and Acts of Obedience – 20.

Lastly, my sister gave me a mystery Guest Log from an event at our grandfather’s tavern in 1957. The list of guests is followed by this entry:

“I would say that the horning was a huge success. They landed on us about 11:45 PM. We hadn’t been in bed only about 20 minutes when the bells were a ringing, fire crackers, guns going off and 40 some noisy guests walked in.

The last one parted about 4 AM. Mom Sullivan brought cold, cuts and cheese. We heated a ham, had lots of beer, wine and Pepsi. I think they devoured about 3 pounds of coffee.

Our bedroom looked as if a cyclone had struck. Our bed was apart, sheets, and blankets, rolled up and one electric blanket cut, PJs in knots.

Our drawers were full of confetti, and the contents of the drawers were strewn all over. We finally got to bed about 5:30 AM, up again about 9:15. We spent Saturday cleaning up the place by Saturday night. We were beat, retired early.”

My father’s youngest sister, Helen, was married on October 29 1955 to a Sullivan, an event I do remember, and I’m guessing this had something to do with their wedding.

It seems the World Cup just ended and following so close on heels of the regular season we decided to take a little break. I am fully aware that La Liga is about to start it’s fifth of 38 fixtures and I have no idea how our three favorite teams are doing. We thought we would jump in tonight by watching Atletico’s first match in the Champions League.

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Now I’m getting my nimby feathers up. This is getting too close to home. We are not going to walk up to “Lake America” most days. Lake Ontario comes from the Iroquoian (Huron-Wendat or Wyandot) word Ontarí’io, which means “great lake” or “lake of shining/beautiful waters”. (from Wikipedia) We are not going to let this bozo rename it!

“Under Pressure” came on the sound system at the CoOp just as the cashier started to ring up our order. They started singing along and I felt like I was in a musical. I said, “Wow. I only know two words from that song.” Peggi told them they had a really nice voice and they told us they sang a lot of karaoke.

It was so good to see Pete behind his drum set again, backing Debbie Kendrick at the Little last night.

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So much of Long Beach Island is relatively new, having been rebuilt after storms or enlarged upward to maximize summer rental space, that it became a hobby of sorts to find vestiges of its past, the shack-like cottages that old-timers talk about. I noticed three or four of these metal reflectors before photographing this one. I’m guessing it is a reflector made with the least amount of material possible, something that certainly be made out of plastic today. But one can only speculate for so long these days when “search by image” as at your fingertips..

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have no idea what goes on farther down Lakeshore Boulevard at the official Durand-Eastman beach. We never make it that far. I trust they still have lifeguards, the ropes that keep you from swimming out too far, and the Port-o-Johns. I’ve always liked this “no rules,” wilder end. I mean, there is a “No Swimming” sign in this photo, but no one pays any attention to it.

The sun is out now, but we just had a half inch of rain and the lake is about a foot and a half above its long-term average for August. Because the lake gets deep so gradually, there is very little sandy beach above water. Right along this strip is where the old Durand Beach House stood, with its dramatic, tunnel-like entrance to the beach, right through the long brick building.

My mother would bring us down to the lake on hot summer days, alternating between here and Charlotte. Both places had somewhere you could buy suckers. On our way back today we tried our best to recall Steve Hoy’s lyrics to MX-80’s “Summer 77.”

You know, this has been a really very bitter cold for many of us.
And recently a friend of mine put down the words
the way some of us may feel about these approaching summer months.
I’d like to sing.
“I’ve seen all you girls in your heavy coats
walking in the snow with you hats and gloves and scarves
and your hearts all covered with scars
All winter you stayed inside
read books, watched TV, looked at magazines
But underneath your hearts were all waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting
for Summer 77″

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Someone we don’t really know recently asked, “Whatever happened to that guy that used to come out to Margaret Explosion shows and sit up front in a lounge chair.” I told John that someone had asked us that and he laughed, happy to have been remembered. He said he was feeling stronger and hoped to make it out to a show again.

Bob Mahoney called this morning to tell us that John had passed, at home, maybe three days ago. That didn’t add up because we had received a text from him on Thursday afternoon, a picture of his son, Pat, graduating. We congratulated John, our last brief connection.

John brought this photo over a while ago. He was pretty sure the other guy was Rex Daniels, a classmate of ours who was killed by friendly fire in Viet Nam. I told him it was Bill Hill, not Rex but it is still a fabulous photo.

John moved up here from Long Island. I first heard about him as one of the guys from our high school class that drove a car straight through the T intersection of Holt and Ridge Roads. They crashed well into the cemetery. Dave Mahoney and I went up to look at the wreckage. That was my introduction to John. A high school wrestler, he was bursting at the seams with life.

John came out visit a few times while I was in Indiana and it was always somewhat of a clash. John was just a little rough for mellow Bloomington. I drove out there with John one time. He had a cooler between the two front seats of his VW van, loaded with Genny Beer. He drove, drank and talked the whole way.

John had a Jeep when I returned to Rochester with Peggi. We will never forget screeching through downtown on 490 or missing a turn in Mendon and running off the road. John was entertaining us.

He already had a son by the time we were married and went on to have three more along with two daughters. A family man, but the one time we met him to play golf he was tripping on acid. John lived life to the fullest.

We went to a play with John and his wife, Kathe, a musical about Janis Joplin. He was carrying around cushions at the time and this one is familiar. John made the reservations and he posed with the sign on our table.

He and his friends built a house in Geneseo. It seemed to me the middle of nowhere. Once he was in he threw a big party for all those that helped. When we got there John was sitting on top of the hood of a car that was driving in circles around his house. He was belting out the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “Crown of Creation.”

John was the only one who called me Paulie. Bob was Bobby and John’s mid-career, drink-of-choice, vodka and ginger ale, was a “Johnny.” He lived life to the fullest.

John was like a character out of Kerouac book. He could recite Lord Buckley verse. We went to a Ken Kesey talk with John — the premier of the Wavy Gravy movie at the Little and a Grateful Dead show in Boston.

We bonded over a Traffic album we were listening to in my bedroom at my parents home. John was always there for the music. Pete, shown here with John, plays piano on the “Ballad of John Gilmore” (below.)

His career as an electrician at Kodak came to an abrupt end and he wore a suit for a few days while he tried to find a new job. He asked me to take this photo of him in a suit. We are going to miss John.

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Pete Monacelli has an art opening in Geneva tomorrow night. We stopped by his place after shopping at the Co-op and he gave me a new book he had just finished, Duchamp Takes New York, by John Strausbaugh. Pete said an artist friend had given it to him with instructions to pass it on to another artist. A review in the front of the book referred to Duchamp as having moved art “beyond the tyranny of good taste.” I’m thinking I’ll send it Duane’s way when I finish because I know no bigger Duchamp fan.

Pete and Emily packed up everything, sold their house, their cars—everything—and took the kids to Italy, where they have already bought a house. They rented a car, loaded it with their essentials, and drove to JFK. We’re gonna miss them.

We had been over there a few times during their sale, and on their last day here they texted to say they were getting ready to throw the rest away. We stopped by again and brought home a long 2×10, a pile of art paper and mat board, and a big fan. They didn’t have air conditioning either. Pete pointed to some drumsticks, but I forgot to pick them up.

The next morning, as we walked by their empty house, I poked through their trash—years’ worth of family photos on top—looking for the sticks. Larry walked by with Ernie and we got talking. Peggi told him we had tried to buy some ligularia like his (they do well in the shade), and he suggested we just stop by and dig up the ones that had spread in his yard.

Of course, any visit to Larry’s mandates time talking about and looking at art. Larry had just finished Life with P. Journals, 1966–1976 and offered to let me borrow it. I’m bad with real books because I can’t help circling passages I love and putting asterisks at the top of a page—or worse—so I might just buy the book. We told Larry we had seen the show in New York. We actually spent half a day at the small 18th Street Hauser & Wirth. I told him I would send him some pictures from the show.

It was a beautiful day on Friday, so the downtown library had us perform outside in the courtyard. Garry Geer took some photos.

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Someday I thought I might design a T-shirt with the slogan “I Can’t Believe It” on it. I would wear it.

I’ve had that idea in a text document of notes that I carry around, a nearly random collection of things that seemed too important to just slip by. I weed the list out from time to time and save the document with a different name. I was using the Pages app for this, but not anymore. I had the document open on two devices, had a problem with one, and got a message that read, “This document was deleted in another location.” I was given the opportunity to click “OK.” I’m switching to the Notes app and reconstructing the list from past documents.

The idea that 1950 is considered the start date for the Anthropocene era. The concept, first proposed by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, defines a new geologic epoch in which human activity has profoundly impacted the Earth’s ecosystems and geology. Peggi and I were born that year, so it got my attention.

This news item seemed worth rereading: “Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.”

I have a friend who has been creating music with AI, and I was going to pass this note on to him: “The AI-generated song ‘Walk My Walk’ by the artist ‘Breaking Rust’ recently hit number one on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, sparking debate about the future of music. The track, created using the AI music platform Suno, features a gravelly vocal performance and has garnered millions of streams, raising questions about authenticity and the impact of AI on the music industry.”

We saw a Ribera painting in Bilbao where he depicted three saints in one painting. St. Sebastián lies naked, his arm still suspended from the tree on which he has been tormented, while St. Lucia extracts the arrows and St. Irene prepares to apply healing ointment to the wounds.

I kept this social media post from the president: “So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country. NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST.”

I wanted to remember how much I love the drums at the tail end of Miles’ “He Loved Him Madly.”

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There is a good argument to be made for club soccer being better than national team matches. But then the World Cup comes around again and we get swept up anew. For now we are enjoying every minute of the end of La Liga’s season.

We follow three teams in Spain’s top division, and they all finished in the top four. As I have mentioned before, we have taken to perversely rooting against one of them, Real Madrid. With the world’s top talent they were unable to play as a team. They fired their relatively new coach and will likely dump the next one when the season is over. And when you root against them you inevitably grow to like their scrappier opponents. Celta Vigo is one of our favorites now.

Barcelona had already won the title, but they weren’t holding back against Alavés, from the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Rioja region. Alavés needed points because in Spain the bottom three clubs get relegated. They are kicked out of the league, and the top three teams from the Segunda División move up to the Primera División. Alavés outplayed Barça, and we loved watching them defeat the champs 1–0 and move out of the relegation zone.

None of our teams played yesterday, so we tuned into Girona vs. Real Sociedad in the beautiful Catalan city just an hour north of Barcelona. We were already fond of Real Sociedad, from one of our favorite Spanish cities, San Sebastián, but Girona was in the bottom three with only three matches left. We went with Girona, and they outplayed La Real, tied them 1–1, and with that one point moved out of the relegation zone. It was one of the best matches we’ve watched in weeks.

When the division title has already been decided, La Liga still provides an exciting race at the bottom—no position more important than seventeenth.

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The good thing about psychedelics is that you don’t have to do them over and over again? I tied most of them when I was nineteen and I feel like I am experienced. A tune up would be nice but not necessary. My last trip was an overload, a wildly strong LSD capsule, but back then you could never be certain what it was you were taking. I wound up in the college Health Center and woke up in a hospital gown after a shot of Thorazine. I had no idea where I was and I walked to the window to try to figure it out. The parking lot below was full of cars and they were all bending and moving in slow swirls.

I was reminded of that experience when I put these two photos together. Both were taken on recent trips, the first from our hotel room in Toronto and the second from our hotel room in lower Manhattan. The building across from us in the Toronto picture was all mirrors so all those wrinkled buildings you see in that photo are not really there, they were behind us.

The building in the Manhattan photo was as plain as could be, an industrial building of some sort with only four small windows. The pattern you see on that building is all reflections from the glass windows of our hotel. The pattern went away when the sun went behind a cloud.

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A few erratic warm days and spring goes into high gear. The yellow comes first—witch hazel, winter aconite, forsythia, daffodils, cornus mas—then the cherry blossoms and magnolias, all of it already waning. It is all the more glorious after a long winter. But the winters aren’t long anymore. They fly by. When someone—anyone—starts going on about the winter, I cut them off. I don’t want to hear it anymore.

We have a patch of mâche in our garden that wintered over. We’ve been eating it for a month or so, but after that 80-degree day it just shot up—grew all stalky, with almost an inch between leaves. We’ll let it go to seed and sow some new seeds right on top. It is our favorite of all greens.

We walked through the arboretum and then the fruticetum in the park and down one of those paths to Durand Lake. We turned toward Trott Lake and saw trees newly stripped by beavers. We heard a splash and thought surely it was a beaver, but it turned out to be turtles sunning themselves.

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While Peggi and I were cleaning up a fifty-foot fallen oak tree out back, Steve Black was putting my Stations of the Cross in AR space with Tony Smith’s 1968 sculpture, Moses. Just in time for Holy Week. This is so exciting. Steve says, “spatial computing is about using the space in a way that acknowledges the absence of gravity….”

Here, in old-fashioned reality, gravity brought the dead oak down. It fell in the upward direction of the hill behind our house, and some of its roots were still embedded in the earth. I started at the top and cut log-length chunks that rolled down the hill, crashing into other trees and either ricocheting off or becoming lodged.

Peggi stood at the bottom of the hill, as crazy as that sounds, in case any of them rolled into the road. I looked both ways before rolling, and Peggi hid behind the big oak. Peggi rolled five or six out of the road. Three went zipping right across the road and landed in the creek across the street, and the others were scattered. We rounded them up and will roll them into the car tomorrow and drive them up to our woodpile.

If you are in Toledo in the next month, scan the bar code below, point your camera at Tony Smith’s sculpture and look around.

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Is this the best winter ever? It is too early to tell but we certainly have one in the making. Up near the lake it seems we get a just enough white stuff every evening to freshen things up for the next day’s ski. The big storm ten days ago came with all sorts of bitter cold warnings and I think it has kept people inside. Peggi and I were the only ones skiing in Durand for five of six days after. And I mean the only ones.

Now that the temperature has climbed above twenty we are seeing more people out but there seems to be almost as many snowshoers as skiers. Cross-country has always attracted an older set and the showshoers all seem younger so maybe it is just a demographic shift.

I prefer it in the teens. The snow is lighter and the crisp temperature spaces you out. Peggi calls it, “the rapture of the white.”

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Kodak Park was so big they had their own railroad and highway that ran through the property. They have torn down many of the buildings but these smoke stacks were still spewing something. And a sign on a building at at Ridge and Lake read, “Now Hiring.” My father worked at Hawk Eye and Elmgrove and Lee Road, all local Kodak sites, but I don’t think he ever worked at the Park. And only the execs worked at Kodak Office on Saint Paul. This was a company town at one point.

Our friend, John, worked at the Park for forty years. We took him out to Unity Hospital for an operation on his hand. Peggi drove and I was sitting in the back seat, listening to John’s stories about Grateful Dead shows when I took this shot. I wanted to get some of those classic 60’s buildings with the blue aluminum panels on the side but I couldn’t get my camera out of my pocket fast enough.

John had broken his finger and it wasn’t healing properly so his doctor wanted to reset it. Per instructions we helped him wrap his hand in clean cohesive tape before he got in the car. When we checked in at the hospital I was taken by how much the woman behind the desk reminded me of our friend, Kim. She started making sly jokes about what John had done with his middle finger but John was filling out the paperwork and wasn’t aware of her comments. I looked down at his hand and it did look like it was permanently in the “bird” position. I was laughing so hard I could barely tell John what I was laughing at. When I got it out we all laughed and John said, “It’s not my middle finger, it’s my ring finger. Says a lot about how my marriage worked out.”

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It seemed like Christmas started way too early but now it’s already gone. The day itself was dreamy. We zoomed with friends in Hawaii while we looked out at the snow. My brother and his wife came up from New Jersey a few days early and the four us went out to Holy Sepulchre and found my parents. It was near dark when we got there. Peggi and I were in the back seat, it was snowing and the roads had not been plowed. I jumped out at one point and ran up a hill just to determine where we were. We parked near the pond and all four of us got out. I started feeling around with my feet and found a stone, “Fred somebody.” I moved to my left and struck gold on the fourth stone. My parents would have gotten a kick out of our adventure. It wasn’t til we got back home that I realized it had been ten years since my father passed.

Amy, my brother’s wife, reminded me that it was the same four of us who rented a boat in Maine and got lost near dark. We had a paper map with us and thought we might be offshore of one of the islands. We spotted someone on shore and yelled, “What island is this.” They couldn’t make out what we were shouting so we kept trying. Finally, the person on shore yelled back, “This is not an island.”

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When Peggi’s parents retired they took a lot of trips, some by car, some by train and some by sea. In 2003, as the US was starting the disastorous war in Iraq, they invited us on a cruise through the Panama Canal. I brought our cassette recorder along and came back with some great tapes of manic Panamanian music and djs. The ship left from Miami. We ran into Norm and Pam in the airport.

The cruise ship made stops in Playa del Carmen (Peggi and I went snorkeling while the other passengers went shopping) and Honduras where we took a long bus ride to the Mayan ruins of Copán, the highlight of the whole trip. The canal was sort of dingy, my favorite photos from the trip were the ones I took from the bus on the way to Copán. They made a good spread in my homemade scrapbook.

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