Category: Life Is A Spell

You can’t expect to walk away from your house for a month and not be overloaded when you return. The mundane stuff piles up. Cleaning the gutters, raking the leaves and getting the garlic in. We are about a month late on that last one. We put 140 cloves in this afternoon. Nowhere near the one thousand cloves our neighbor, Emily, put in. We picked the last batch of Pimientos de Padrón and had them with dinner. The plants just look exhausted but our greens – the lettuces and arugula are loving this 60 degree weather. We have a neighborhood get together this weekend and we should have no problem supplying a big bowl of salad.

I received an email from the photographer Fred Chance in Gloucestershire about the photo I took of Robert Frank’s shoes. I posted it along with a review of a Scott McCarney show at Writers & Books back in 2012. Fred wanted to know if he could use my photo in connection with a written project he is working on. He is hoping the use the shoes as a focus. I found the original photo and was able to improve it in PS Elements’ “Haze Removal.” The shoes were in a glass case when I photographed them. Of course I am letting him use the photo and I’m excited to see what he comes up with.

Interestingly, we kept seeing Robert Frank’s “The Americans” book in Spain and it was often displayed next to a book of vintage black and white photos call “The Italians.” Like Fred, I like the late Robert Frank work as much as or more than “The Americans.” We have five or six of those Steidl books, some given to us by Duane, and they are treasures. Funny thinking about Robert Frank in these shoes (if they indeed were his). Frank is a bit of a prankster but these look like bowling shoes. Maybe he went bowling while in Rochester and wore the shoes right out of the alley.

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A sign on the Diputación de Sevilla building advertised a sculpture show. Admission was free so we checked it out. The sculpture was a little too cute for us so we moved to the other rooms. An artist had about dozen photos in a line and I really liked the one above, the composition, the minimal elements perfectly arranged, the surprise element of the rocks, the cropping just right. Everything I like in a photo.

This was a government building of sorts. We weren’t quite sure what is was but it was casual enough for Peggi to stand behind this desk with the picture of Juan Carlos, the once hero because he steered Spain toward a demcracy after Franco but now scandle-ridden former King of Spain.

And now we are back in Rochester. To our surprise we have not had a frost so our Pimientos de Padrón plants had a double batch waiting for us. Our last lettuce plantings were ready for the picking. We even found a few tomatoes. A welcome back.

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The night before leaving Sevilla we booked this hotel room in Chueca on the other side of the old city from where we stayed when we started this trip. It has proven to be a perfect spot for us. After stopping at Rocafria (Cold Rock) for café con leche and a pincho de tortilla we head off in a different direction each day. Today we started with a show of paintings by Luis Gordillo at La Sala Alcalá 31. He is 89 years but paints like a child, with abandon. We didn’t like what saw online so we walked right by this Exposición a few times without going in. Sometimes you just have to give an artist some time. We have often been turned around but we gave it our best shot and came up empty.

We had not been to the new location of Sin Tarima yet so we walked into La Latina neighborhood and got swallowed up by the crowd at the Sunday open air flea market, El Rastro. It was so crowded for so many blocks that we got turned around twice. Even the book store, blocks away was crowded. We wandered further and the streets quieted down.

We found a sweet little restaurant, Viuda de Vacas, (widow of cows), where the owners seemed to know everyone who came in. We ordered spinach and garbanzo beans and grilled asparagus with carrots. We we’re going to order the Cod, Portuguese style, but the waitress somehow talked us out of it. And then they showed us the dish (potatoes and pieces of cod with egg, sort of scrambled) when others ordered it and it looked great. It probably would have been too much. So we ordered a cheese plate.

Just a few blocks from the restaurant we walked by these people dancing in a small plaza, something they must do often as no one was making a fuss. Real Madrid plays at home tonight against Rayo Vallecano and we to plan to watch it at the hotel bar.

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It can only be our good luck that brought us back to this café this morning. We had stopped in here two days ago for a beer. We were the only ones in the bar and the owner was busy carving jamon so we got to study all the pictures on the walls, pictures of Semana Santa celebrations over the years. Each of the picture frames had holy cards stuffed in the bottom of the frames. We surmised the owner carried one of the floats, either the Virgin or Christ in a scene from the Passion, for his parish, the Virgin of Candelaria. Amid the pomp she is depicted with an anchor as she protects the men on the ships that work out of Sevilla.

The owner gave us two holy cards of the Virgin and we asked him where we could go to buy some more “estampas” (the word they use for what we used to call holy cards). He thought for a while and then suggested a shop about fifteen minutes away. We found it and waited to talk to the clerk while he helped some teenagers who appeared to be buying school uniforms. The store was filled with religious items but also hernia belts and trusses. We put it together that this is where the guys who carry the floats in the annual Semana Santa processions get their gear. A costalero shop!

This morning we headed out in what we thought was a new area of the city. We had café y tostada con tomate y aciete in a place that was completely obsessed with bullfighting. And as is our usual pattern, we wandered some more and stopped for a second cup. We look for tipico places, the ones that are popular with locals, not tourists. They serve their coffee in small glasses rather than cups and you often stand at the bar. We were coming from a new direction when we spotted this crowded café. We had already ordered dos con leche when we put it together that we were in the same café, Bar La Candelaria.

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We tried to stay up as late possible last night (only made it to midnight) because today is an hour longer (daylight savings ends here) and the Atlético match we have tickets to doesn’t start til 9pm. The streets were unusually quiet when we got up. We walked a few blocks before we found a bakery for coffee and tostada. We walked across the street from that place and had anther coffee with a cookie dipped in chocolate.

We found two Fundaciones in the neighborhood with art exhibitions. Not exactly art but big, free exhibitions, sponsored by corporations, one on the Indian architect, Balkrishna Doshi, and the other called “Fake News. La fábrica de mentiras.” Both held our interest for hours. We had a leisurely meal and talked to the restaurant owners about the logistics of getting to the Atlético match tonight with 60,000 others. A couple of Metro lines and a short walk should do the trick.

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We are in a bar across the street from Santa Barbara Church in Madrid watching El Classico, the twice yearly matchup of the two biggest teams in La Liga, Barcelona and Real Madrid. We love both these teams but when face each other we side with Barca. We are the only people in the bar rooting for Barca.

They scored early, just seven minutes in and we were elated. I screamed but quickly tried to disguise it as a shriek of horror. Barca held on and looked the better side until Modric and Camavinga were subbed on for Madrid. Bellingham scored in the 68th minute and then again in the second minute of stoppage. That bar erupted.

The match was being played in Barcelona. Barca’s main sponsor is Spotify and for this match they did a tie-in with The Rolling Stones in conjunction with their new album. Mick and Ronnie were in the stands. The tongue logo was on the front of the Barca jerseys for the day. It didn’t work out for the boys.

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I took three shots of this wall in the fishing village of San Pedro before getting my in-camera cropping right.

We walked out near San Sebastian’s stadium, Reale Arena, this afternoon as their La Liga Primera Division team Real Sociedad was about to kick off for a home match against Mallorca. Blue and whites stripes were everywhere on young and old. The bars were packed all over the city since the match is not broadcast locally. We stopped to eat at a sidewalk restaurant and could tell immediately when The home team finally scored in the 84th minute. Back in the hotel we heard all these people chanting in Basque just a few blocks from our room. We assumed it was a victory parade of sorts but it was a huge, twenty or thirty blocks long demonstration in support of Palestine.

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We drained the street pool, not for the season, we need to keep water in there in the winter. We drained it so someone could paint it. Only the second time since it was put in in 1960. Our neighbors on the street usually split the pool maintenance but no one wanted to go down there and breathe the epoxy fumes. It is blindingly white now and no where near as photogenic as it was.

My “Portals & Planes” show comes down tomorrow afternoon after a one month run. We plan to stay home tonight and watch yesterday’s Madrid derby. Two of our three favorite teams face each other and we must decide between the Madrid teams. We’re going Atletico over Real Madrid.

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This morning’s NYT devoted most of a page to Rochester’s Fringe Fest. One of the photos in the article featured Craig Walsh’s “Monuments” project which we had just seen last night. I took this photo by steadying my camera on a street light pool near Meigs and East Avenue. The images, Warhol like movie portraits of three local unsung heroes. There is a short bio of the three here. The silent video clips are projected from the back of UHaul truck across a parking lot and onto three trees near the corner of Meigs and East Avenue. Walsh’s project is sensational. I cannot describe it any better than the Washington Post. “

“By calling these works monuments, Walsh positions the luminescent faces in the fraught, timely debate over whom we should honor in public space — and how. Physically, the works resist what we think of when we think of monuments. Made of light, the diaphanous compositions are practically immaterial and as fleeting as the autumn foliage that holds them. Captured on video, the subjects are in constant motion. Even the smallest shifts in expression, rippling over hundreds of leaves, feel weighty.”

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The swimming season came to an abrupt end this year when we emptied the pool in order to paint it. This is only the second time the street pool has been painted since it was put in in 1960. I took the opportunity to try to get the underwater light out so I could repair the short. It worked when we first moved here and it is especially nice on warm summer nights when we bring friends down.

Peggi and I sent out a bunch of emails yesterday, inviting people to the opening of my photo show at the Little Theatre on Sunday. We setup a shared email list some time ago and then recently got one of those really confusing messages from Apple asking if we wanted to merge or discard conflicting contacts lists. We clicked merge and wound up with duplicates and old discarded email addresses in one big mess. Consequently we inadvertently spammed our friends with duplicates.

So we buckled down and whittled our contacts down to only people whose names we recognize, who we wouldn’t mind hearing from, and those who are still living. The people at companies we used to do business with all were eliminated. Peggi and l laughed as I read the names before selecting “delete.” henri@snippetmaster.com! bill@visibleware.com! All the DuPont addresses. Our original email address – sunra@aol.com! “AOL hell” we used to call it. MortimerShy@rochester.rr.com and all those who left us. Sparky, our next door neighbor, never had an email address but his street address was in there. Our list has dropped from 2500 to 400 and I’m still working it.

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Our living room is still in World Cup mode. Olga Carmona, shown hanging from our candelabra and who looks like she stepped out of a Francisco Goya painting, came out of the back to score the winning goal in both the semifinal and the final. Aitana Bonmatí ruled the midfield like the great Iniesta. Jenni Hermoso engineered the attack up front. We feel in love with the entire team and it was a fairy tale to see them go all the way.

So we’re basking in Spain’s glorious crowning. Our kitchen LEDs are still red for La Rosa. As Julie Foudy, former US star and now an expert match commentator, said, “We have never moved the ball like Spain does. Their grace on the ball is gorgeous to watch. I can’t say it any better.

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Three nearby streets had a community garage sale today so we headed over that way on our walk. Some people had already thrown in the towel and put all their junk out at curb by the time we got there but we heard the cars were lined up earlier in the day. Peggi bought a sealed package of Kodak inkjet paper at our first stop and she picked up a pizza stone at another. A little girl was selling lemonade for fifty cents a glass on the next street so we bought two of those and chatted with her about business. 

An Amazon truck was delivering more junk to people’s homes as they manned the tables of junk in their front yards. A UPS driver was wheeling a hand truck full of boxes up to a house down the road, stuff for the next generation to put out. One of our favorite houses, a low lying bungalow set way back on its lot, had a bunch tools for sale. I picked up a crow bar for four bucks and a file for two. We bent the crow bar we inherited from Peggi’s father trying to pry an autumn olive tree out of the ground and I had a file on loan from Jared just like the one I bought. Both these items will be in a future sale when someone cleans our place out.

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The only reason I am able to identify these blossoms is the iNaturalist app that Peggi has on her phone. This Mountain Laurel was in the garden of a house on Clover Street, just across the street from a brick Don Hershey house with rounded corners at the entrance. The Landmark Society’s tour started at Mercy High School and included a stop at Bob Martin’s former home, a mid-century marvel.

Cornell’s Merlin bird identification app was made for retirees, especially those who by this age should know how to distinguish between a Yellow Warbler and a Goldfinch. At the push of a button the free app listens as it creates a waveform while spitting out pictures of the birds it hears. We stopped near the marsh on Hoffman Road and gave it a spin.

Robins, Red-Winged Blackbirds, Wrens and Cardinals all popped up in the first few seconds. Sparrows, Warbling Vireos, Morning Doves, Baltimore Orioles, Yellow Warblers, Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Cedar Waxwings, Goldfinches, White Breasted Nuthatchs and even a Rose-breasted Grosbeak were audible in the first minute.

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For whatever twisted reason the first Captain Beefheart song that got under my skin was “The Blimp.” And then “China Pig.” And then every song on “Trout Mask” and any song he touched. I went backward for the whole catalog and picked up every new release in real time. Well, the blimp is in town. Last time we looked, it was the Met Life blimp. It was still the Goodyear blimp when I took this shot of it over Sparky‘s house in 2002. I thought of that song today when we spotted the blimp as we came out of the hospital where we were visiting Pete. The PGA Championship is in town.

Oak Hill, the swanky country club on the east side of Rochester, last held the PGA in 2013. We went to that one. These sporting events keep getting bigger. In 1989 when the US Open was there Peggi and I (4D Advertising) did a brochure that featured all the branded swag. We took a box of sample product to Chris Maggio’s studio on Saint Paul and he photographed the lot. We designed a commemorative book called “The Crown Jewels of Oak Hill” as well. Today the merch tents are as big as a department store and you can bet no two bit local agency was responsible for any of the action.

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We’ve been sleeping with our windows open for the past week or so, falling asleep to the sound of toads singing in the creek down below. I love that sound, so primal, like a native ceremony happening in the next village. In most cases it is many toads singing at once but yesterday we witnessed a solo performance by this guy in our neighbor’s pond.

The female toads, who are usually larger than the males, answer the call. The way Jared explains it the male hops onboard, the females let a string of tiny black eggs loose in the water, the male excretes his milky sperm and in a few weeks the pond is full of tadpoles. His pond was like some kind of sex club. Toads splashing around on the floating plants in twosomes, threesomes and even foursomes. The females, having answered the siren call, seem to be trying get away, to shake the male on their back. We watched this one pair climb out of the pond and up the waterfall where they ran into a frog.

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The Museo de la Cancion Yucateca in Merida was as magical and gentle as the Yucatan people. Peggi started making this video before we had even paid our 50 peso entry donation. The temperature was in the upper nineties but like most places in Merida the huge open doors, high ceilings and open air courtyard drew the warm air out of the building.

This courtyard was surrounded by rooms that featured different chapters in the history of Yucatan’s unique music. The papel picado (perforated paper or pecked paper) was plastic in this case and it made the prettiest sound as it flapped in the breeze. Shadows from the papel danced on the floor of the courtyard.

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My sister-in-law told us she played with AI for suggestions on what she might say when she took the mic the night before her son’s wedding. This was day three of festivities and most of the 150 guests had arrived in town. This event was being held in an old food processing plant, now a complex that included the restaurant, a bar, an art gallery, a dance hall, a movie theater and a lounge. The AI was a bust for her and from what I could hear of her talk it could only have been generated by the groom’s proud mom.

The wedding itself took place at a hacienda outside of Merida. The guests gathered in Parque Santa Lucia and boarded two full size tour buses for the forty minute ride. The setting was gorgeous and the ceremony was wildly perfect. Our neighbor can legally marry people. I’m not sure what the term is for those that can officiate a non religious ceremony, but this one was a friend and he did a great job. Although I couldn’t help thinking about AI during his talk. We’ve known our nephew his whole life and his vows were so sweet and tender. I thought, “take that AI!” It was my favorite part of the four days.

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Now that it has 43k views on YouTube, someone, I forget who, is re-releasing New Math’s “Die Trying” on an lp. This will be the fourth time. It has already been released on Reliable, CBS and Archive Records. Since I was only in the band long enough to record it and the B side, “Angela,” they asked if I could write a few sentences for the liner notes.

So it’s 95 degrees here, I’m sitting in an open air courtyard with a Negra Modelo and I came up with this. “I loved how Gary and Kevin arranged Die Trying. I can still see Kevin air drumming my parts.” I don’t think I ever really got what he heard.

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I don’t think it is my imagination. I am getting better at going down rabbit holes. Our devices facilitate the ease, of course, but I have always preferred daydreaming to, well, just about anything. I installed the Bing app on my iPad this morning to check out its AI assisted super-powers.

I had seen the headlines about LaBron James toppling Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record earlier and that prodded a few memories loose. Brother Tracey, my homeroom (and math teacher) at Bishop Kearney was always going on about his one of his former students, how when he was teaching at Power Memorial in NYC he suspended Lew Alcinder and that cost the basketball team their only loss in four years. Tracey was a short, wiry, little guy but mean disciplinarian. I remember him throwing a fellow student out of class for wearing cologne and I’m quite sure he was one of the Brothers who dished out the spanking that took place in the coatroom by the doors to the gym. So my first Bing search was for “Brother Tracey.”

I found an obit from 2010 and learned he left the Irish Christian Brothers order and moved to Geneva where he taught at DeSales High School. He married a woman named, Beryl, and had three children. His brothers-in-law were listed as Blaine, Bruce and Armand, the legendary House of Guitars brothers.

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