Category: Life Is A Spell

When we walked by this house a few days ago, before they swung the bridge open, the owners were out back overlooking the bay. They were talking to their neighbors in the next yard, laughing in the midst of a pandemic.

Our friend Steve, who lives down South and is still working, said he drove a car to a dealership in Savannah and passed Cracker Barrels still open for business.. He told us his former son-in-law was driving for Uber and then dropping his kids of at Steve’s.

I wear the same clothes everyday. I guess I always do that but at least I change it up when we go out. Our car is in the driveway right where we left it a week ago when we picked up our InstaCart groceries. We don’t go anywhere other than out for walks and people are wearing masks on the beach. There is yellow tape around the swing sets in the park. Our young neighbors are going stir crazy. Maybe its easier when you’re retired. I think about our friend in Brooklyn who has at least one other person in his apartment building with the virus. And what would life during a pandemic be like for our friends in the woods?

We still have the extra leaf in our table from our dinner party three weeks ago. The spare mattress is still out in the basement from when Steve Black was here. He told us he was pretty sure he had Sars while living in Singapore and it took him forever to shake it.

We have two friends who were planning to move to Spain. Something we have only dreamt about. That timing could not have been worse. But Spain will still be there when this over.

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Peggi is slowly regaining the use of her left arm. She helped me stack wood this afternoon when I filled a row in the middle of our wood pile. Something like painting yourself into a corner but unavoidable when you burn the oldest stack first. She has been squeezing a little lime green figure until its eyes bug out, something our yoga teacher gave her, and following online advice that suggests just letting your injured hand “join in” after the cast comes off.

The weather has no idea there is a pandemic going on. It has been gorgeous. Perfect for bird watching. The Red Wing Backbirds are back in the marsh. Pregnant Robins waddle across our yard. Blue Jays are pecking at our compost pile and the woodpeckers sounds ring clearly through the bare trees.

Cardinals are my favorite bird and that’s because I put together a plastic model of one when I was a kid. I think my brother did an Oriole. And there was a flock of chickadees in the tree above our wood pile while I was working. I’m not really a birdwatcher. I only know the common ones. I just looked up chickadees to make sure I didn’t misidentify them.

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I enjoyed reading a column in the business section of today’s paper by an old timer who had learned the hard way that you don’t sell your stocks when the market goes down. After four recessions he determined that rather than trying to buy when the market turns around he should be buying each time the market goes down ten per cent from the high. Then again at 20% and 30%. I liked how he wondered aloud if this time might be different before he pulled the plug. “Nothing relieves anxiety more than taking action.”

“Eggplant is overrated. ” This was all we caught of a woman’s cell phone conversation as we passed her on way down to the Sea Breeze. It was seventy degrees and we wanted to walk into Webster one more time before they swing the bridge open on April 1. We were surprised to see people heading in to Don’s Original. One person after the other pushing the door open. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more discussion about getting this quarantine over with. We’ve been out of circulation (other than walks) for over two weeks and some people haven’t even started. Cuomo says our apex is still three weeks away.

A shiny red pickup cut right in front of us as we walked by the boat launch. The guy, wearing his baseball cap backwards, had his window down so I said “Geez. Go right ahead.” His jacked up truck was just a few feet away. He said, “Thanks” and revved the engine. I looked back and saw his “Proud Veteran” bumper sticker.

Heading back in to our neighborhood we saw a young father guiding his daughter along on a small pink bicycle. We said hi and she looked up with a big smile and said “First day without training wheels!”

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I watched some crazy YouTube videos before trying to cut Peggi’s cast off her wrist. She didn’t really want to go to the doctor’s office and risk getting exposed. Cuomo says we won’t reach our apex in New York for three more weeks and we are just coming to the end of a 14 day near isolation streak. We had four people over for dinner on Friday two weeks ago and we toasted to this thing before hunkering down.

This one guy took his son’s cast off while they were camping somewhere in a trailer. He was wearing a Superman t-shirt and it looked like his sone was terrified of him. The video had thousands of views but he had turned comments off and was selling real estate ads in the about section. Doctors would use a Dremel and vibrate a score line down both sides. I borrowed this Makita oscillator from my neighbor and tried to score the cast with it but the wire cutters did the job.

A few weeks back I replaced the florescent lights in our garage with led bulbs and it made the perfect operating room.

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It wasn’t even two years ago when we learned of Janet Williams‘ passing. And now, Ted Williams, who I didn’t know was even sick. I posted the same picture then, one I took at a Margaret Explosion gig in the Bug Jar.

We first met Ted in 1988. His parents were members of Oak Hill Country Club and friends with Jeanne Westerfeld, another member who we were doing a lot of commercial art work for. Ted’s parents were trying to find a job for Ted and they told him he should meet us.

He came up to our attic office at 55 Hall Street and introduced himself as a poet. We made it clear we were lucky to have work ourselves but we hit it off. We were deep into shooting products for the 1989 US Open merchandise brochure and we had them all spread out in the attic. Ted told us he had an idea for a product that would sit inside a golf hole and and make a noise if a ball landed in it, something you could hear from a long distance, in case you got a hole-in-one for example. He probably left us a copy of his book and we probably bummed a Winston off him before he left

The next significant meeting was in our dining room where we hatched plans for an alternative broadsheet, something we decided to call the Refrigerator. Martin Edic, Peggi Fournier, Robert Meyerowitz and Chuck Cuminale were all involved but we decided to publish anonymously, something Ted was never on board with. He was a real writer. We were not. He left after issue 14 and started the Freezer.

Peggi and I played music with Ted as members of his Stage Poetry Group, later renamed the Media Assassins. We’d hang out in Ted’s attic until morning, talking or looking at his slides. He was a poetic photographer. I will miss him.

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They will be closing the swing bridge in another two weeks so time is running short if you want walk into Webster. In the past we’d meet friends for lunch on St. Patty’s, at Shamrock Jack’s for many years but then they got so busy they started charging admission. We moved on to the Bayside and tried to get there before noon to grab a table overlooking the bay. It’s not an Irish joint but their food is better and every place has a good beer selection these days.

Today it was just Peggi and me. We made peanut butter sandwiches and we put those and two cans of beer into my backpack. We walked through the park, down Culver to the lake and across the bridge into Webster where we found a picnic table between the lake and the bay.

There are more people than ever out in the park. We ran into Bri from the Little and Brenda from Atlas Eats. But it was so sad to see all the Sea Breeze hot spots closed or doing take out only. Shamrock Jack’s had a tent out front strewn with Guinness banners but the park lot was completely empty.

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The photo above, taken this afternoon as we walked along the lake, goes well with Todd Beer’s painting from yesterday’s post. These days I spend quite a bit of time thinking about painting. I’ve been getting my digital house in order, scanning old photographs, tucking things away on PopWars and keeping the Margaret Explosion site up to date. And I’ve become addicted to walking. I’m wearing out my third pair of Merrill hiking shoes since we walked the Camino. Those activities, along with reading the paper, can fill up a day. I’m hanging on to the idea that you can become a better painter just by thinking about it.

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I’ve been scanning photos I want to hang on to knowing someday I’ll want to downsize further. Old photos take up very little space in the cloud and they are so much easier to find.

I’m guessing my mom took the photo on the left and Peggi’s mom probably took the one on the right. Both of us in our father’s arms, both photos taken the same summer twenty two years before we met.

Peggi’s father’s birthday was on March 3rd and my father’s is today, the 5th. They both had a huge impact of our lives. We continue to be influenced the experience.

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That’s Catalan for “More than a club.” And indeed FC Barcelona is more than a futbol club. It is Lionel Messi! We watched him score four goals against Eibar this weekend. And then watched Real Madrid lose to Levante 0-1.

We love both these teams and will be hard pressed to root for one over the other in the upcoming “El Clasico.. “Because Barcelona just regained the top position in La Liga, dethroning Madrid, we will probably start out cheering loudest for Los Blancos, the underdogs. Since Renaldo left they are only a club.

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It was a perfect night for gallery openings. A real Rochester winter night. A fair amount of fresh snow and cold enough to not be sloppy. Peggi and I both have pieces in a show at Studio 402 in Anderson Arts Building but we saved 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 of those here. These were large, gorgeous, 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 was 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 we 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 a day when the sidewalks were clear again to walk to the 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 to Starbucks and once there we pushed it, continuing on 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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