Psychedelia is in the air on the Mill Valley-Sausalito Pathway, our main line between Rich and Andrea’s place and our hotel room, Good Earth Natural Foods and Blithedale Avenue in the other direction. Black-necked stilts, snowy egrets, Pride of Madeira and wildflowers line the low lying waterways. And then under the 101 (above!)
I wore my Trout Mask Replica shirt to the exercise room this morning. I’ve found CNBC to be a good workout partner, equal parts interesting and annoying enough to move the routine along. Rich, Andrea, Peggi and I all bought t-shirts at Ameba. Rich’s Motörhead shirt looked so good on him and Andrea looked perfectly at home in Lou Reed’s Transformer motif. Peggi found a “Love Will Tear Us Apart” shirt that makes her look like she’s in the clouds.
Just putting my shirt on brought most of “When Big Joan Sets Up” to mind.
”I’ll sit up with you Big Joan I’m too fat to go out in the daytime I’ll stay up all night If you promise not to talk about your hands bein’ too small”
Rich has a new band, a three piece, and the drummer left her kit at Rich’s so I had a chance to check it out. Made by Alesis, each piece is a black plastic disc wired to a module and a small amp. I couldn’t get much out of the hi-hat and ride but the crash sounded great and the drums sounded so melodic it was scary. It made me want to play like Sly Dunbar. Rich played a variety of instruments and with his e-sax we got into a snake-charm thing that I could see working as a subway act. That ambience when the car doors open and you hear music but you don’t know where it’s coming from.
It felt like the Waymo car saw the four of us standing there. No need to flag it down. There was no one behind the wheel when we unlocked the doors with our app. It was exhilarating watching it stop at red lights, turn ever so carefully, even slow appropriately for the speed bumps. And when the thrill wears off you are free to play with your iPad, stare out the window, even space out if you like. I am so ready for self driving cars.
Rooftop of Antoni Gaudi’s “La Pedera” apartment building with Gaudi’s “Segrada de Familia” in the distance 2012
Just yesterday we read that Pope Francis signed a decree recognizing Antoni Gaudí’s “heroic virtues,” putting him on the path to sainthood. Should two people pray to him and have their wishes granted he will be confirmed. Since I don’t believe in miracles (not even yesterday’s big one with the Easter bunny) Gaudi is already a saint in my book. Today we read Max Romeo’s and Pope Francis’s obituaries. First we listened to “Chase The Devil” from “War ina Babylon” and then we looked at the photos we took in Barcelona of Gaudi’s Catalan Modernisme masterpieces.
I gave up on religion a long time ago but I am still drawn to the rituals and I had a soft spot for the Latin American Jesuit, Pope Francis. We loved Wim Wenders Pope Francis movie, “A Man of His Word.” Francis never came clean on sexual abuse in the ranks but he pushed the world toward old school, progressive change. His defense of migrants was a cardinal principle. He called Trump’s bashing of immigrants a “shipwreck of civilization.”
It is fitting that the Pope’s last visitor was J.D. Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism. J.D. has a lot to learn. His interpretation of “Ordo Amoris” (order of love) misses the whole ball of wax. Using the medieval concept to defend deportations J.D. says “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
In response Francis sent a letter to US bishops that read, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris is open to all, without exception.” Francis for sainthood.
Joe Ziolkowski at his photo show at Colleen Buzzard’s Studio
I remember Peggi’s father wore a bright orange hat in retirement. We have friend who wears an orange hat in NYC so we can keep track of him. Joe Ziolkowski’s hat looked particularly striking against his cyanotype cloud photos (we bought one, out of view) in Colleen Buzzard’s Studio.
It is warm and sunny today with clear blue skies. The beach looks nothing like this. This photo was taken yesterday. This creek on the beach is the overflow from Durand Lake (across the road to the right.) It flows into Lake Ontario on the left. Depending on the rainfall, the wind and the roughness of the big lake, this creek is always different. It is constantly rearranging itself and then sometime in the summer it just disappears. When it gets warmer we take ours shoes off but often we just turn around. I was able to get across on the log this time. Peggi decided not to try today.
Ron Giel defending goal for RL Thomas, Webster 1967
I wish I had finished my soccer deep dive a little sooner. Ron would have loved it. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since one of the early reunions. I sent a link to a few of my former teammates and just a week later one of them let me know of Ron’s passing. Ron was a sensational goalie. His family held a celebration of his life at place in Webster called “The Filling Station.” I imagined the place might be where Finn’s Garage was, the Texaco station operated by Andy Finn’s father that I remember for their nickel Coke machine and bicycle pump. It turned out the sports bar was right next door, across the street from Barrett Law Offices where Joe’s father and two of his brother’s worked. Ron apparently spent a lot of time in here.
I rode out to Webster with Jeff and he turned out to be the only other member of our team that was there. We met Ron’s son and gave him our condolences. Three other member of our class were there and we all stood near the back of the bar and talked about the old days. We never did get a drink or partake of the chicken wings.
I had not seen Jim since high school. He was easily the best athlete in our class, center on the basketball team and quarterback on the football team. He had told us about a crazy motorcycle accident he was involved in where a kid pulled out in front of him. Jim was scooped up and flown via helicopter to the hospital where he got two new hips and a long metal rod in his leg. Still bowls he told us.
We all lost a mutual friend by “friendly fire” so Viet Nam came up. Jeff had driven Rex to the physical while unsuccessfully trying to talk him out of going. Bob had a sports injury where his shoulder would go in and out of its socket. He was able to disengage it while in line for his physical. I was classified 1A at the time, having dropped out when college when it provided you a deferment. I was saved buy a high lottery number.
Jim had the best story. His birthday was number one in the lottery. His brother was already serving and Jim didn’t want to go so he called the Selective Services office to see how close he was to being called up. The woman who answered kept trying to get his name and Jim didn’t want to identify himself but he finally he gave in. She looked up his name and told him he was 4F and he could forget about getting drafted. No further explanation.
I was really enjoying “Severance” for the first season. I loved that there was snow on the ground when the characters were in their “outie” stage. The two episodes we watched each night felt like a disorienting but pleasant drug experience. More surreal than sci-fi. I loved the four primary actors and the sets were fantastic. The color choices were sensational. The plots were good enough to keep me awake but relaxing. Then came the season finale where my confusion felt frustrating. Peggi had a Severence dream that night where she was trapped in a B&B in our neighbor’s house.
Pete and Gloria came over with their brand new car, a Honda. We got in the back seat and they took us for a ride in our neighborhood. In fact we drove the same route that Peggi and I had walked earlier. We pointed out where we picked the pussy willows, the flowering Red Bud tree, the eagle’s nest and the marsh which is coming alive with irises and red winged blackbirds. In the back seat it was like we were in our “innie” stage but getting glimpses of our “outie” lives.
Tom Orsini painting at estate sale on Turk Hill Road
I like this bird’s eye view of a house on Turk Hill Road. Us humans get to look up at it on a hill. Peggi was alerted to the sale by our friend, Kathy. She saw the listing described as a Don Hershey house. Peggi has been cataloguing the homes that Don Hershey built in this area on her website, DonHershey.com, and she did not have this one. The previous owner did this painting of his house. An $800 item, it was my favorite piece. This arrangement below was the only place in the house where I could rest my eyes.
Items at Turk Hill Road estate sale
Practical things were pretty expensive here and the unpractical items were as loud you can imagine. Lime green and purple walls, lots of glassware, a tabletop display of sun glasses you could imagine Elton John wearing, extra large tropical style shirts, dozens of unopened packages of cute cocktail napkins.
When Peggi’s mom was living up here we used to go down to Silk O’Loughlin’s on Kentucky Derby Day. We would sit outside and watch the boats go down the river and there was always someone selling tickets for a chance to win on a horse. There was some serious green in there today when Peggi and I walked in. The owner was holding court, of course (in the wool sweater. ) We ordered a sandwich and a beer and sat in the back. Peggi found a green sweater to wear but the best I could do was an olive green Bug Jar t-shirt.
We had parked at the last lot along the beach and walked down Lakeshore to the river. We caught one of the eagles sitting on top of the big nest and watched him (or her) for a while before walking down Rock Beach past the Edic’s home. We looked at a few homes down here back in the day. Summerville is such a dreamy, funky neighborhood with easy access to the beach.
We looked in the new Fifth Frame Brewing on the way back. Surprised it didn’t open til four when all the other bars were full. We ran into Diane White walking her Basset hound. When we lived in the city we would go down to Carroll’s on St. Patty’s. Once we moved we did Shamrock Jack’s for years. Then that got crazy. The monster tent in the parking lot and bus loads of partiers and then the five and then ten dollar cover charge. We moved on to the Bayside. It was a nice walk across the outlet bridge. But then Webster decided to improve that area by tearing the place down.
We walked up Biscayne, across the bridge over the inlet, and then turned directly to the bay. We could only glimpse the water before the road turned into a bridge to North Beach. We turned around there and hugged the streets along the inlet. Every third home or so was for sale. A narrow empty lot had been turned into a park (we could tell because there was a small sign that read “Park.”) We watched a motorboat come slowly up the channel and still manage to create a wake large enough to come over the banks. The low-slung, grade-level-entry houses were barely above water.
Back at the motel we researched “art galleries.” Where were they? Doesn’t Miami have a big art fair every year? We took an Uber up to the “Design District.” Every big designer brand you can think of has an outlet here. But no galleries. We got a cup of coffee at Pura Vida, a really good “cortadito,” and walked out of that area into Buena Vista, a comfortable old school residential neighborhood.
We crossed the tracks and decided to walk by the two restaurants our nephew owns. We had not hooked up with him yet. We were on the wrong side of the street when we realized we had walked right by both of them. I had taken note of the graphic on the side of one building, line drawings of young people dancing. I took it for an old fashioned teen center. It was Walrus Rodeo. Boia De, in the same strip mall, has such a low profile it took us a few minutes to realize we were standing right in front of it. At night, when their brilliant explanation mark of a logo is lit up it looks like my photo above. Our nephew was there attending to a plumbing issue. With a Michelin star Boia De is booked months in advance but somehow he arranged for us to get a table that night.
Our server, Tamar, told us they usually recommend six dishes to share per table. We decided on two, “Confit Octopus” and “Ricotta Gnocchi Alla Norcina”and two half orders, “Luci’s Chopped Salad” and “Lamb Ribs Fra Diavola.” All four were phenomenal but the salad was the best. We couldn’t finish the Gnocchi and brought it back to our motel room. Classic R&B music set the perfect vibe. In the bathroom, Curtis Mayfield’s “Future Shock” sounded as timeless as ever.
We hated to leave Rochester when the winter was so beautiful but the the three days of full sun in Manhattan was a suitable consolation. It turned grey on our return and winter had turned ugly, in that the ice made it tough to walk. We tackled Hoffman Road to the park and back and then out Center to the park but we had to turn around there because of the ice. Even yesterday, while we were downtown, the sidewalks were treacherous. We kept thinking of a friend who fell and broke his hip. I saved the mp3s from our last Margaret Explosion gig and put then in a playlist for our next outing.
It was a 60 minute flight to DC and we had just spotted the Lincoln Memorial when the flight attendant announced we were in a holding pattern due to “VIP movement in DC.” I can only imagine but would rather not.
The new snow was sticky yesterday but the same snow, in today’s colder temperatures, was perfect. Peggi reminded me that it was Martin Luther King Day when we got our first ski of the year in and we have skied every day since. The blue skies today were stunning.
When I cross-posted the image in my last post to IG Joe Barrett commented, “Oh man, I miss real winter.” That’s what he gets for moving away. I miss real winter too but this one works. Peggi and I were part of a group text with our neighbors that turned from the Grammys to “how are you holding up in this deep, dark winter.” We let it go back and forth and then piped in with a note that announced “we are loving the season.” That reminds me, we should check in with Brad.
My brother, Fran was loving this winter too until he got his snowmobile stuck and compressed a disc in his back trying to get the machine out of a drift. He had driven up to Old Forge in the Adirondacks where he rented a room and then drove his sled over to Tug Hill at the eastern end of Lake Ontario where they had had 260 inches of snow this season, the most in the lower 48. He spent the night in the Utica hospital. My brother, Tim, drove up and brought him home.
When I stopped out to see Fran a compressor was making a racket in his garage but I couldn’t find Fran. He was down in his basement with car parts from his Camaro covering every surface of the room. He has taken the car completely apart in order to restore it. I expected to find him in bed but this is how he rolls.
I remember my father driving along Horseshoe Road on in our family car. It was magical then and has lost none of its charm. It is closed to car traffic now but you will still find pieces of metal hard rails on some of the curves. We walk it in the summer and we skied it today. The road really goes nowhere. It starts on Lakeshore Boulevard along Lake Ontario and it comes back out pretty much where it started. It exists for the ride.
Kids still play hockey on frozen lakes. The world is not completely upside down yet. We skied up to the lake, the big lake, the one they used to call Lake Ontario but in the spirit of Manifest Destiny we have renamed “Lake New York.” We have just a few more days of below freezing temperatures and we’re going to enjoy every bit of it.
We were just getting so we could remember our new neighbors’ names. Alliteration like ours and Dan and Diana across the street. They had only been here a year. We learned Chris had passed suddenly at 71 so we stopped down to give our condolences to his wife. As we walked up to their house we saw this hawk perched on a branch above. It looked right at us, posed for a photo and then took flight. Carol was still in shock and we felt so sorry for her.
Eduardo Chillida’s “El Peine Del Viento” in San Sebastián Spain
We sent out holiday cards this year, first time in years, and when we saw Kathy at the Margaret Explosion gig on Friday she told us our card looked just like one of the photos we had taken in Spain. Kathy is a craftswoman, a hands-on sort and creative. I said, “it is one of my photos.” I didn’t want to read too much into it but it was clear Kathy didn’t know we had the cards made. That fact would have been obvious if we hadn’t cut the cards in half before mailing them out.
I did commercial art my whole working life and I remember how much pressure was relieved when websites came along. If you made a mistake on a project you could just hop online and fix it unlike a print job where you had to eat 10,000 catalogs with the wrong phone number printed on it. Well, we did the mechanical files for our Christmas card, a 7″w x 10″h piece that folds horizontally to 7″w x 5″h, and uploaded it in a flash. Only when the box of cards arrived did I discover we had backed the card up wrong. When we opened the card Eduardo Chillida’s quote, (“Isn’t planning a way to steal the present’s greatest mission?”) was upside down. Considering that quote was so fitting to our lack of planning we debated whether to send them out that way and hope someone got the joke or, as we decided, to cut the cards in half so the image was on the front and quote on the back.
We did receive another comment on the card. John Gilmore emailed us. “Thanks for the card. Perplexing I must say.”
If you can’t make it to the Nam June Paik show at the Memorial Art Gallery you owe it to yourself to watch “Edited for Television,” a 1975 glimpse into the artist’s life at the height of his creative output. But then you would miss his works on paper dedicated to John Cage. You have until May 4, 2025 to see the show. The video looks a lot better over there too.
Leo Dodd “Brighton Brick Yard” watercolor by Leo Dodd
You know how a retiree’s calendar can have big blocks of emptiness and then everything at once? Thursday was one of those days. It’s a First Friday now and we are staying in. We have the red lights on for an Atletico Madrid Copa del Rey match.
Years ago my father spearheaded a movement to save an old farmhouse in Brighton. He and a small group of residents formed an organization called Historic Brighton and Leo Dodd was elected as their first president. Peggi and I did the logo and the website in the early years. My sister, Amy, is now the president of the ever-growing group and they held a special event on Thursday in the now restored Buckland House where eight of Leo’s paintings of old Brighton will be on permanent display. Of course nothing is permanent as my father discovered.
Ray Tierney found donors to pay for the framing and I hung the eight paintings before the unveiling. It was fun to spend some time with them again. All were painted during a twenty year period when my father and I were in Fred Lipp’s class at the MAG. We students all worked on paintings at home and met once a week for feedback. No painting was done before Fred said it was “Done.” And it was often before you wanted it to be done. “Painting is not the execution of a plan” Fred would say.
The mayor, other Brighton dignitaries and members of Leo’s family were there for the opening of “Leo Dodd Paintings at the Buckland Farmhouse.” Leo would have been so proud.
When Steve Hoy was in town he would sit in the front seat while Peggi drove and I rode in the back. Not that we did that much driving. We took him out to the airport for his trip back and he learned his flight was delayed because of fog. We didn’t see any fog so he suspected some sort of ruse. It was trash day in the city so the streets were aligned with garbage totes and boxes. Steve said, “Americans need to learn how to break down cardboard.” I jotted it down.
Peggi and I were scheduled for physicals this week and made the appointments back to back. Peggi went first and I sat in the waiting room. I was reading the paper but I was also enjoying the banter between the two receptionists and the calls they were fielding. At one point one of them said, “Alexa, play instrumental music” and that ruined the mood in a hurry.
I was reading how Aaron Rogers, the conspiracist/quarterback for the NY Jets, threw a Hail Mary pass to rattle the Bills at the end of the first half in their game last week. They make a big deal about him being 40 years old. Luka Modric, the Croatian midfielder for Real Madrid, is nearing forty and he is clearly at the top of game. His position as the midfield playmaker is very similar to the quarterback’s role and it is very nice thinking about aspects of your game that can get better with age.
I had a little trouble getting to sleep last night, a lot of things on my mind, and I tried counting to four as I inhaled and then to five as I exhaled. I spent some time thinking about why the one number would be lower than the other. And I thought of the Hail Mary, something I used to be able to say in seconds in grammar school. I struggled to get the verses and had to check online this morning to see if I still had it. It is really a beautiful prayer.
