Category: Life Is A Spell

The sky is impossibly blue in LA and the sun is so intense it is oppressive. You can’t walk for long without protection and protection is hot and uncomfortable. Walking up Bel Air Road the difference you see, in color and type, between the planted and tended vegetation and the native landscape tells that whole story.

But the stainless steel houses with the flat roofs and big picture windows are seriously dreamy and imagining the lives of the people who live behind the gated entries can occupy some mind space. Because the climate is so different the art is different. “Made In LA,” the first Los Angeles biennial, organized by the Hammer Museum was being disassembled when we arrived. Admission was free and all but four installations were gone. A minimal music piece with musicians scattered about the courtyard was underway when we got there and still going when left about two hours later. It was beautiful and spacious and perfectly LA, like something that had been out in the sun just long enough.

One of the strangest things about death is the finality. The things you take for granted are just gone. Its unsettling as it should be.

When we arrived here for my brother-in-laws’ funeral I pulled my laptop out to check email. I couldn’t get online so I asked my nephews for the password. Neither one of them could remember it because it had been so long since they first entered it on their machines. My brother-in-law had taken his password to the grave. My nephew retrieved it from his keychain.

We were renewing the downstairs bedroom, the room that Ken spent his last days in. My east coast internal clock woke me before anyone and I sat in his home office, surrounded by his pictures and books, while the sun came up. Was this whole section of Bel Air Road wiped out in an earthquake in the thirties or was it a brush fire? And where did these antique wooden floors come from again? He was full of life, inquisitive, sharp as tack, so much fun to talk to and joke around with and now he’s gone.

We’ve been digging a small footer in the back yard for the last week. Any day laborer worth his salt would have it dug in a day but we’ve been struggling and the whole street knows it. The earth in this part of our yard has not been disturbed since the ice age so the sand is on its way toward becoming sandstone rock.

One of our neighbors brought us some unsweetened Honest Tea green tea today and our next door neighbor who has been snoopervising all week suggested we rent an electric jack hammer at Home Depot. We took his suggestion and Peggi came back with a 70 pound jack hammer. It worked great, it cut so well it went straight down and I could barely get it out. Peggi took it back and traded it in for a 35 pounder. It cuts almost as well and was much easier to lift over and over. We have to have back by noon tomorrow so we might have to set the alarm.

For years duct tape went hand in hand with playing in a band. With thousands of uses it worked its way into everyday life but today I’m finding that clear plastic packing tape has taken its place. I keep a roll out in the garage, one in my art studio and one in our home office. It makes a nice laminate for pictures, it helps keep the binding together on well worn books and allows me to create custom mailers for cds from old envelopes.

I took this shot before last weekend’s opening at I-Square. The five artists/musicians featured in the show (Jed Curran, Steve Piper, Pete Monacelli, Scott Regan and Paul Dodd) are getting as old as duct tape but I found their art work to be seriously engaging and getting to know these guys was a pleasure. I discovered I went to grade school with Jed at Saint Johns on Humboldt Street we’ve hired Pete to help with an addition. Funny how these circles all intertwine in this town. Let’s hope the packing tape will keep us together.

We didn’t see David Bouley, the world famous chef, at Wegmans on Thursday, but we bought some of his paella to take home. He and Roger Martinez, the Barcelona chef who worked throughout Spain but notably at Ferran Adria’s celebrated elBulli may have been hiding in the back room when we were there. They were demonstrating variations (vegetable, duck, seafood and chanterelle mushrooom) of the classic Spanish dish but the huge paella pans were were already prepared when we visited. Our to-go dishes were still warm and delicious when we got home.

This was the first week at the Public Market for Sam and Jerry Gallo and their home grown garlic. I heard someone ask where they’ve been and the said they don’t show up until their freshly picked garlic has properly dried. I heard someone else ask if they had elephant garlic and one of the brothers said, “We sell garlic. We don’t sell onions. Elephant garlic has no flavor.” We bought a pound of the Italian purple and they gave us a recipe for roasted garlic. It is a bad year for local peaches, apples and even corn but we bought batches of each.

Today’s paper had an article about Rochester’s relatively high ranking as a good city for old people. I’ve noticed that hospitals seem to be the only ones in a building mode these days.

See DUMPSTER show.

I’ve spent so much time at the hospital the last few days I’m getting really confused. I’m pretty good at finding free parking spaces and I don’t mind walking so I dropped my mom and Peggi off at the front door and then wandered around my grandparent’s old neighborhood looking for a free spot. This morning I found one on Mulberry Street. It’s alternate side parking there and at 10:15 AM there was an equal number of cars parked on both sides. So I pulled over under a sign that read “NO PARKING 11AM Wed to 10AM Thur.” I really wanted to know when I COULD park here but I reasoned it out with only one hitch. I wasn’t really sure if it was Tuesday or Wednesday. I got out of the car and considered asking a guy who was working on his house what day this was but I decided to just chance it and walked off. In the hospital I noticed that the nurse asks my father the same question just to keep him on his toes.

The woods felt refreshed today. We had about .7 inches of rain according to our neighbor and we sorely needed it. The gloomy, overcast, humid weather is a welcome relief.

In the summer of 1980 Peggi and I drove down to Steve Hoy’s house in Gulfport Mississippi and got in his pickup truck which was newly outfitted with a camper. It sat three across with the option of crawling through the back window into the camper itself. Peggi practiced her sax back there as we drove through New Orleans, Texas and Arizona where temps were over 100 and there was no AC. We slept in the back, three across in the middle of a heat wave. We stopped in New Mexico where my father was working, on loan from Eastman Kodak, and from there we headed up to the Grand Canyon where Steve Hoy entertained the tourists with his daredevil antics. People standing next to us were wildly exclaiming, “Look at that man down there,” while we acted like we didn’t know him.

We drove into LA and stayed with Peggi’s sister and then got on Highway 1 up to San Francisco where our friends Dave and Kim, Brad, Rich and Andrea lived. We stayed there for a few days and drove back on a more northerly route. We drove through Las Vegas in the middle of the night and limited ourselves to ten bucks in the slot machines. That went fast and we camped in a parking lot near Lake Mead. Eventually we headed south to pick up our car and then back up here.

This summer’s heat has slowed the pace around here and I might be delusional but maybe it’s time to drive across the country again.

We were down at the lake, standing in front of Don’s Original down at Sea Breeze, eating chocolate almond custard when this guy cruised by. I fumbled for my camera and he patiently waited for the shot.